Page 49 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
He stayed on his side, his cheek pressed into the pillow, watching. Counting the details like someone counting stolen coins. The dark circles under his closed eyes. The shadow of stubble darkening his jawline. His mouth was slightly parted. The black eyelashes, longer than they had any right to be on a man of that stature.
Beautiful. The word crossed his mind without asking permission.
Brody Kovac was beautiful in the way a well-forged knife was. Functional, dangerous, and with an appearance that didn’t ask for contemplation but demanded it anyway.
And there he was. Asleep in an armchair that was too small for his body, his neck at an angle that would hurt when he woke up, because Ren had screamed in the middle of the night and he had come. Without touching him. Demanding nothing. He had only given him his presence and that deep voice cutting through the darkness to tell him truths that Ren hadn’t asked to hear.
Everything I am is telling me to walk out that door and destroy the person responsible.
Ren breathed. Slowly. Deeply. He felt the air fill his lungs and press against his ribs as if his chest had shrunk overnight.
Brody had saidmine, referring to him. Not with empty possessiveness. Not with the blind lust of the alphas his father used to set him up with, who looked at him as one looks at a cut of meat. Brody had said it like someone stating a reality that weighed heavily on him. Like someone accepting a responsibility he hadn’t chosen but didn’t intend to shirk.
There was no deliberation. There was no decision. It was a fact.
Ren remembered every word. He had absorbed them in the dim light, believing the darkness would make them less real, but the morning light did not dissolve them. On the contrary. It solidified them.
Brody had surrendered to the bond. Completely. Unconditionally. And he did so while promising him he wouldn’t touch him without permission. He did so while sitting in an uncomfortable armchair in the early hours of the morning instead of getting into bed with him, which would have been the natural thing, the biological thing, what Ren’s body would have thanked him for even though his mind hated it.
Discipline. That was what Ren saw in the sleeping body. Not weakness. No submission. The discipline of an alpha who felt the pull of the bond just as strongly as Ren but chose not to act. Chose to respect. Chose the armchair.
How much was it costing him? Ren thought of the books. Of the passages about bonded alphas who couldn’t complete the bond. The physical deterioration. The insomnia. The growing irritability. The need for contact that turned into real, measurable, documented pain.
He looked again at Brody’s dark circles. The exaggerated pallor. How even in sleep his brow didn’t fully relax, as if something were pulling at him from within.
Ren sat up in bed. Slowly. The sheets slid down his torso and piled up in his lap. He leaned his back against the headboard and hugged his knees.
He didn’t want to feel compassion. Compassion was dangerous because it led to contact, and contact led to surrender, and surrender led to losing everything Ren was. But it wasn’t compassion he felt as he watched Brody sleep in that armchair with his neck twisted and his knuckles white.
It was something worse.
It was recognition.
Brody was suffering. For him. Because of him. And he did it in silence, without demanding reciprocity, without using his pain as a bargaining chip. He did it because, for him, the bond wasn’t a chain but a fact, like breathing, and fighting it was pointless.
Ren tightened his arms around his knees.
What if he were right? What if fighting this was like fighting gravity—pointless, exhausting, and doomed to failure?
Brody shifted. A slight change in posture, a deeper breath. The line of his jaw tightened. His eyelids fluttered.
Ren looked away. Quickly. As if someone had caught him doing something he shouldn’t have.
He focused on the window, on the strip of sky peeking through the curtains, on anything but Brody Kovac’s shiny black hair, or the way the light turned him into something Ren could no longer ignore.
Chapter 12
Ren dug his fingers into the flour and spread it over the pan in circular, methodical, almost hypnotic motions. The cold metal beneath his palms gave him something to focus on. Something tangible. Something that didn’t smell like raisins or nuts or anything else that would make him lose his mind.
“You’re putting in too much,” Marta said from the other side of the counter, pointing to the excess flour piling up at the edges of the pan.
Ren shook off the excess with a sharp tap against the marble surface.
“Better?”
“Better.”
The beta cook was a woman with broad hands and a voice without inflection, the person who occupied a space without disturbing the surrounding air, and Ren was grateful for that. For the past two mornings, he’d been coming to the kitchen after his training with Jax to help her, not because he was interested in baking but because Marta didn’t give off pheromones that would throw him off balance, and the mechanical rhythm of measuring, mixing, and beating anchored him to the here and now.
