Page 43 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
The door closed behind him. The scent of raisins and walnuts faded into the hallway like the smoke from an extinguished candle.
Ren took a deep breath for the first time all morning.
The training room occupied the entire basement of the east wing. Black rubber flooring, mirrors on two walls, a heavy punching bag suspended from the ceiling by industrial chains, bars, weights, and in the center an open space covered with dark gray tatami mats that smelled of old sweat and disinfectant.
Ren stopped at the door. His eyes scanned every corner hungrily.
“Not bad, huh?” Jax tossed him some hand wraps from a metal locker. Ren caught them on the fly. “Do you know how to use them, or should I put them on for you?”
Ren was already wrapping them around his knuckles. Quickly, tightly, without a single crease out of place. Jax watched him with his arms crossed, and something shifted in his expression. The mocking smile faded, replaced by something more serious, more attentive.
“Where did you train?”
“At a gym way shabbier than this one.” Ren flexed his fingers inside the wraps. “My instructor was excellent, but the facilities were nothing like these.”
“What discipline?”
“Krav Maga. Some boxing. Whatever my instructor thought would be useful for someone my size.”
Jax nodded. He took off his shirt and tossed it into a corner.
“Let’s see what you remember.”
The first twenty minutes were a disaster. Not for lack of technique, but for lack of use. Ren felt his muscles stiff, his joints rusty, like machinery abandoned in a garage for too long. His legs responded half a second too late. His arms blocked where they should, but the impact of Jax’s blows reverberated right down to his bones. And Jax was huge. Bigger than Brody, whichRen wouldn’t have thought possible. Every time the alpha took a step forward, Ren felt like a brick wall was bearing down on him.
But Ren knew that feeling. He’d spent his whole life being the smallest, the lightest, the one the alphas looked at and dismissed.
He ducked under a hook, spun, and drove an elbow into Jax’s ribs.
The impact was solid. Jax let out a gasp.
“That hurt.”
“Good.”
Jax laughed. A short, genuine laugh that escaped his chest like a bark. And then he changed his stance, lowered his center of gravity, and Ren knew he’d stopped treating him like a kid.
The second hour was different. Ren found his rhythm. His muscles were burning—his quads, his obliques, his forearms where he absorbed every block—but the pain was clean. Honest. It was nothing like the pain of the past few weeks. It wasn’t like the disgust, or the humiliation, or the dull panic of waking up not knowing where he was. It was pain he had chosen, and that difference changed everything.
He dodged. He countered. He missed. He tried again.
Sweat soaked his t-shirt, plastered his blond hair to his forehead, and trickled down his temples. He breathed with his mouth open, his chest rising and flopping. And for the first time since the night of the auction, since his brother had grabbed his arm and handed him over like someone returning a defective item, he felt alive.
Not free. Not yet. But alive.
Jax threw a straight punch. Ren deflected it with his left forearm, spun into Jax’s space—where no sane omega would venture, because there the alpha had all the advantage of his bulk—and hooked his leg behind the knee. Jax lost his balance. He didn’t fall, because Jax seemed incapable of falling, but he stumbled two steps backward and had to put a hand on the tatami.
“Damn,” Jax sat up, wiping his lip with the back of his hand. He looked at him with wide eyes. “How much do you weigh? Sixty-five?”
“Sixty-three.”
“And you almost took me down with sixty-three kilos?”
“Almost.” Ren allowed himself something he hadn’t allowed in days. He smiled. Barely a curve at the left corner of his mouth, small and fleeting, but real. “Next time it won’t be, almost.”
Jax shook his head and got back into guard.
“I like that. Come on, another round.”
