Page 72 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
“Ren…”
“No.” He took a step back. Then another. The scent of raisins and walnuts flooded his nostrils, and now it felt like poison, like an invisible chain binding him to a man who shared blood with his executioner. “Don’t calm me down. Don’t use my name like that. Don’t look at me as if this is something you can fix with pheromones and pretty words.”
Brody dropped his arms. He let his hands fall to his sides, open, palms facing Ren. Surrender. Or a perfect imitation of it.
“I will not calm you down. You have every right to be furious.”
“I don’t need your permission to be furious!”
The shout echoed off the book-lined walls. Ren brought his hands to his face. His fingers trembled against his hot skin.
His father wanted him dead. His brother signed the death warrant. And the man whose body screamed he belonged to shared a last name, blood, and past with the monster who orchestrated it all from the start.
He’d come to apologize. To tell Brody he was sorry, that it wasn’t rejection but fear, that he needed time to understand who he was before he could be anything to anyone.
And now he was standing in the middle of an office that smelled of him, surrounded by truths they’d hidden from him, feelinglonelier than the night he fled barefoot through unfamiliar streets.
“I need to get out of here,” he murmured into his palms.
“Out of this room, yes.” Brody’s voice, low and controlled. “Out of this house, no.”
Ren pulled his hands away from his face. He looked at him. And he hated him with every fiber of his being. He hated him because even now, even knowing everything, his body leaned toward him like a sick sunflower seeking a poisoned sun.
He turned and walked out of the office without closing the door.
From the upper left corner, a faint crack snaked across the ceiling like a dry river toward the center of the molding. Ren had memorized it over the last two hours. Every fork, every tiny imperfection. He knew it better than the map of his own life.
He was lying on his back on the bed with his arms crossed over his chest, still dressed, still wearing his shoes. He hadn’t cried. Not because he didn’t want to, but because his body had run out of fuel for that. What remained inside him was something colder, stiller. A dark sediment settling at the bottom of his stomach.
His father wanted him dead.
That phrase echoed in his head like the rhythm of a constant drip. Not that he didn’t already know it, not that Julian Valois had ever been a father in the genuine sense of the word. But it was one thing to know that your father sold you off by the night to wealthy alphas, and quite another to know that he preferred your corpse to your freedom.
And his brother.
Ren closed his eyes. The older brother, who had once taught him to ride a bike in the family’s backyard before the family home had become a shell filled with debt and empty bottles. That brother had signed as well.
Three knocks on the door. Sharp, spaced out, as if the hand delivering them were measuring each one.
Ren didn’t answer.
“It’s me.”
As if it could be anyone else. As if the scent of raisins and walnuts hadn’t already seeped under the door and wasn’t climbing up his throat.
“I don’t want to see you.”
Silence on the other side. Long. So long that Ren thought Brody had left.
“Then don’t look at me. But I need you to listen.”
Ren sat up in bed. He rubbed his face with both hands, running his fingers through his blond hair that was already needing a trim. He looked at his palms as if he expected to find answers written in the lines of his hands. There were none.
He stood up and opened the door.
Brody filled the entire doorway. The black shirt from before had its sleeves rolled up further, with the top button undone. His gray eyes, with that perpetual red rim, looked at him with something that wasn’t an apology. It was patience. The patience you exercise when you know you’re going to earn it with blood.
“Five minutes,” Ren said.
