Page 18 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
He stayed still for a moment. Sitting on the edge of the bed, his feet dangling without touching the floor, his fingers gripping the mattress, his breathing still uneven.
He asked himself the ultimate question. The one that scared him the most.
He moved his hips. Slowly. Testing. He tensed his thighs, clenched his glutes, searched his body for evidence of something he didn’t want to find: pain, invasion, the unmistakable sign that someone had taken advantage of his unconsciousness to take what the auction promised.
Nothing.
No pain other than muscle soreness. Aside from exhaustion, there was no discomfort. Nothing but soap, cotton, and clean sheets could be found.
Ren let out the breath he’d been holding since he woke up. It came out in gasps, broken into fragments that sounded dangerously close to a sob. He bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted the metallic flavor. He refused to cry. He hadn’t cried when Andrew had abandoned him to his fate; he hadn’t cried when they ripped his clothes off, and he hadn’t cried when seven hundred thousand dollars decided his future. He would not cry now, in a clean bed, wearing comfortable clothes, with no new marks on his body.
He would not cry.
He swallowed the lump and pushed it down, where he kept everything else.
The soles of his bare feet touched the cold wood of the floor, and though it hurt, the contact brought back some clarity. Hewas going to get up, inspect the room, and look for a window, an exit, an angle that would allow him to understand the layout of the place where he was trapped. Because he was trapped, no matter how soft the sheets were. But then knuckles knocked on the door.
Two knocks. Sharp. Spaced apart.
Ren froze with his hands on the edge of the mattress, his fingers white from the pressure. The visitor didn’t wait for a response. The door opened, and Brody Kovac filled the entire doorway with his shoulders and that absurd height that made the entrance feel cramped.
The scent reached him before the words.
Raisins, walnuts, baked dough, something darker and denser beneath that Ren couldn’t place but that his body instantly identified as a signature, an olfactory imprint that loosened the tendons in his knees and sent a wave of liquid heat to the center of his chest. Ren clenched his teeth. He dug his nails into the mattress.
Brody stood in the doorway. His gray eyes, with reddened lids that made them look feverish, scanned Ren from head to toe, not with the appraising gaze of the men at the auction but with something worse: concern. The alpha’s jaw tensed. A muscle throbbed beneath the pale skin of his temple. Ren watched as Brody took a single, deep breath, the air expanding his chest beneath his black T-shirt before he released it slowly through his mouth, controlled, deliberate, like someone holding back something pushing from within.
He feels it too.
The realization hit him like a bucket of ice water. Brody wasn’t immune. The dilation of his pupils, which had swallowed up almost all the gray of his irises, gave him away. The way hisfingers clenched around the doorknob until his knuckles turned white. The stiffness of his posture, the distance he maintained with such obvious care that it was almost insulting. Brody Kovac was fighting his own body not to come closer.
And to Ren, that was scarier than anything else he’d faced the night before.
“Good morning.”
Brody’s voice was deep and controlled. No inflections. No softness.
Ren didn’t answer. He looked at him from the bed with his back straight, his tousled blond hair falling over his eyes, his fists now clenched on his knees. He held his gaze because if he looked away, he’d have to admit that every cell in his body was begging him to lower his eyes, to bow his head, to expose his neck, to surrender to whatever that treacherous biology demanded of him.
Brody entered the room. One step. Two. He stopped next to the dresser, three meters from the bed, and leaned against it with his arms crossed. The distance seemed calculated. Ren figured it was the maximum the room allowed without looking ridiculous.
“You’re safe here.”
“You already said that last night.”
Ren’s voice came out raspy, worn down by hours of silence and the knot that refused to dissolve. But firm. Cold. He poured into every syllable all the ice he could extract from that well he’d been digging for years to compensate for what nature had given him.
Brody didn’t flinch.
“And I’m going to repeat it as many times as it takes until you believe it.”
“Why?”
The question was direct, unadorned. Ren tilted his head. Beneath the gray T-shirt that was way too big for him, the bones of his collarbones jutted out like a line of defense.
“Rocco is my contact at the casino.” Brody uncrossed his arms, and ran a hand through his straight black hair. A mechanical gesture from someone accustomed to giving explanations he didn’t feel like giving. “He’s been undercover there for months. When he can, when there’s an opening, he offers a way out to the omegas going through the auction.”
“A way out.”
