He didn’t move.
His legs no longer belonged to him. Neither did his hands. The air in the bathroom thickened like honey, and everything stopped for a heartbeat, two, three—a number he actually counted this time because he felt them pounding against his chest from the inside with the force of tiny fists.
Joy came first.
Not as a thought. Not as a word. As heat. A dense wave that arose somewhere below his navel and climbed up his ribs and flooded his chest and rose to his throat where it got stuck because it had no name, no form, and no permission to escape. His left hand went to his belly on its own. Just like the other times, when he didn’t know why he was doing it, and pulled his hand away as if he’d been burned. This time he didn’t pull it away. His fingers spread over the fabric of Brody’s tracksuit, which was way too big for him, and stayed there—five points of gentle pressure on something that didn’t yet feel different but already was.
Inside it was a life.
He didn’t think it in words. He knew it with his body, with the same blind instinct that had made him run the night of the auction, that had made him punch the man who grabbed him in that dark corner, that had made him fall to his knees the first time Brody’s scent reached him. The body knew before the mind. It had always been that way. He had always hated it for that. But now, with his open palm on his belly and two pink lines glowing under the bathroom light, the body didn’t seem like a traitor to him. It seemed like the only one that had been paying attention.
His legs gave way.
He sat down on the floor. The cold tiles pierced through the thin fabric of his tracksuit. His back found the curve of the bathtub and molded itself to it. The test lay in his hands, held carefully, like something fragile that might break if he squeezed too hard.
And then the fear came.
Not the fear of Reznov. Not the fear of his father. Not the fear of being found, of them coming to get him, of being dragged back onto a lit stage. He already knew that fear; he had already slept with it, already punched it and left it lying on a sidewalk.
This fear was new.
This fear was the exact size of a newborn who would need him for everything. To eat. To sleep. To feel safe in a world that wasn’t safe. To learn that there was such a thing as home.
And what did he know about homes?
His own had crumbled room by room, sold piece by piece by the hands of Julian Valois. His father, who pawned paintings and silverware and his youngest son’s dignity with the same ease with which he asked for another glass of cognac. His father, who had looked him in the eyes so many times and named a price, only to sign something and walk away without looking back.
Ren clenched the test between his fingers. What if he carried that inside him? What if the inability to love was hereditary, a genetic defect woven into the same strand that had given him his light eyes and blond hair and omega physique? What if one day he looked at his son and felt nothing?
His throat tightened. He curled up into a ball. He rested his forehead on his knees. His still damp hair wet the fabric of his tracksuit. He breathed. Once. Again. The air tasted of salt and sandalwood and, beneath it all, raisins and walnuts. Brody’s scent permeated the clothes he was wearing, the room on theother side of the door, the sheets where they had slept together, every corner of the life Ren was building without having planned it.
Brody.The image pushed its way through the fear without asking permission. Not as a lifeline. Not as a solution to a problem Ren could solve externally. But as a presence. The weight of his hand seeking Ren’s beneath the sheets. The question whispered in the dim light:“Can I kiss you?”The way he had sat in that armchair by the window the night of the nightmare and stayed there without touching him, without demanding anything, breathing slowly in the darkness until Ren fell asleep.Brody was there. Brody would still be there.
Not because a biological bond compelled him. Not because Ren was an omega and Brody an alpha and their bodies demanded it. But because the night Ren asked him if he slept well, Brody had told him the truth. Because when Ren punched him in the stomach, Brody didn’t punch him back. Because Brody had proposed marriage in an office mid-morning with the same seriousness with which other men signed war contracts.
For the first time, the future didn’t feel like a black hole.
It had a shape. Diffuse, imprecise, full of edges he couldn’t yet define. But it had one. An outline. A volume. Something that occupied actual space in the time to come.
Ren remained on the bathroom floor with his legs stretched out and his back against the bathtub for a long while. He didn’t count the minutes. The cold of the tiles seeped into his bones, and he didn’t care. His left hand was on his stomach and the test in his right, and his heart was beating with a new rhythm, a little faster, a little firmer, as if it were getting used to beating for two.
He stood up.
His knees creaked. The muscles in his legs protested because he held them in that position for too long. He walked over to the sink. Put the test in the pocket of the pants he was wearing. Washed his hands slowly, deliberately, scrubbing between his fingers as if he could clean something more than just his skin. Turned off the faucet. Dried his hands.
The mirror reflected a face he knew and didn’t know. The blond hair, the crystal clear eyes, the sharp cheekbones, the mouth that Brody had kissed the night before until it was swollen. Everything the same. Everything different. This wasn’t the Ren they’d hoisted onto a stage in a black latex jumpsuit with a vacant stare.
He wasn’t the Ren who had run barefoot through unfamiliar streets with a crumpled piece of paper in his fist. He wasn’t the Ren who had thrown Brody’s sweatshirt across the room only to pick it up later and fall asleep wrapped in it.
He was a Ren he didn’t recognize. But this Ren didn’t scare him. He unlocked the latch. Opened the door. Crossed the room without stopping. Stepped out into the hallway, and the scent of raisins and walnuts reached him from somewhere on the ground floor, faint but unmistakable, like a thread pulling him downward. He went in search of Brody.
Brody’s office was at the end of the ground-floor hallway, past the library and before the door leading to the wing Ren was forbidden to explore. He knew this because he’d tried to sneak in there more than once and had always ended up in the same spot: in front of that dark wooden door with the bronze doorknob worn smooth from use. The door was ajar. Ren pushed it open without knocking.
The room smelled of cold coffee and ink and Brody. Mostly Brody. The scent of raisins and walnuts saturated the air with an almost physical density, as if the walls had absorbed it for years and were now releasing it in concentrated form. The bookshelf at the back was filled with unlabeled black folders. The desk, a solid piece of walnut, occupied the center like an altar. Brody had his back to him. He had the phone pressed to his ear and his free hand resting on the edge of the desk. His knuckles were white. His broad back was covered by a gray t-shirt that stretched between his shoulder blades with every breath he took.
“…I don’t care what he says. Tell him the deadline isn’t changing.”
Brody’s voice was unfamiliar when he spoke on the phone. Sharper. Drier. Without the layers of restraint he used with Ren, without the deliberate gentleness he employed when speaking to him at night. It was the voice of an alpha who commanded and expected obedience, and got it.
