Chapter 5 Theo
The suite has one door with an electronic lock with a red light that blinks every few seconds. The windows don't open.
I’m on the twenty-second floor, no balcony, no ledge. The glass is thick enough that I could throw every piece of furniture in this room at it and achieve nothing except noise.
I checked the bathroom. Small window, frosted, sealed. The phone has an internal line only. I picked it up, dialed nine for an outside line, got silence. It doesn’t matter. Who am I going to call?
There’s no way out.
The suite itself is ridiculous: king-sized bed, a sunken living area with massive flat screen TV, a bathroom with a walk-in shower and a separate bath.
There’s a minibar stocked with bottles of water, wine, spirits, juice and an endless array of nuts, chocolate and candy.
I eat four packets of the cashew nuts because why not?
They can charge it to the rest of my bill.
If I’m dead in the morning, it won’t matter.
I sit on the edge of the bed. It's past two in the morning. The only sound in the room is the hum of the air conditioning, which is set too cold. I've already tried adjusting it. The controls don't respond.
There are only three ways this can go:
One. Novikov refuses my offer. He kills me if I’m unlucky and just roughs me up if I’m a little more fortunate.
Two. He accepts the offer. I work for him. Find his cheating ring, stay useful, buy time. Use the time to figure out an exit strategy.
Three. He notifies the Bureau that I’m here. They'll enforce the match, which means compliance protocols, which means he’ll practically own me. At least death would be quick.
I don’t think he’s going to notify the Bureau. Alphas like him don’t volunteer their presence to government departments unless they have no other choice. And he already has me locked up. He doesn’t need the Bureau to enforce that.
I should sleep. I won't, but I should.
I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling. The air conditioning hums. The red light blinks.
I close my eyes and my mother is there.
She's always there, when it's dark and quiet and I can't fill my head with numbers instead.
She shows up the way she was before: not the hospital version, not the last time, but before.
Standing at the kitchen counter in our apartment, slicing an apple.
I'm sitting at the table with a coloring book. I'm six, maybe seven.
She's humming. It's the sound she makes when my father isn't home, this tuneless, wandering melody that has no beginning or end. I don't know what it is. I don't think she knows either. It's just the sound of her being comfortable enough to make noise.
The apple is green. She cuts it into slices, thin and even, and arranges them on a plate in a fan shape. She does this every time. It doesn't matter that I'm going to eat them in thirty seconds and the arrangement is pointless. She does it because she wants to.
"Mom," I say. "Can we go to the park?"
She looks at me and the humming stops. Not immediately. It fades out, the way a radio dies when the battery's going.
"Not today," she says.
"Why?"
"Your dad might come home early."
This is the answer to everything. We can't go to the park because dad might come home.
We can't visit the lady downstairs because dad doesn't like her.
We can't go to the stores because dad will want to know what we spent.
The radius of our life is the apartment and the apartment only, and even inside it, there are rooms that feel smaller when he's been in them.
I don't argue. I know that she’s right. Everything we do has dad in the background of it.
She brings me the apple slices and sits down across from me and watches me eat them. Her hands are on the table, the way mine were in the security room. Flat. Still. Braced.
I eat the apple slices. She watches. After a while, her shoulders drop a fraction and she starts humming again, quietly, as if she's checking whether it's safe.
That's the image I carry. Not the hospital. Not the foster homes or the alley behind the laundromat. My mother, humming in a kitchen, checking whether it's safe to make a sound in her own home.
That's what a bond did to her. I am never going to let that happen to me. I know this with every cell I have. Whatever deal I make, whatever compromises I accept to stay alive, I am never, ever going to belong to someone.
Somewhere in this building, Dominic Novikov is in his office making decisions about my life, and I'm lying on a bed I can't leave. That’s what it is to be an omega.
I roll onto my side and run the odds. He’s not going to let me go. I could see it in his eyes. The only question is whether he keeps me alive. That means I need to be useful.
That means I need to actually deliver on what I offered.
I need to find his cheating ring, which means I need access to data: table records, dealer schedules, loss reports, surveillance footage.
I might need time on the floor. I'll need to watch the play without being watched myself, which is going to be difficult in a building with a camera every fifteen feet.
I can do this. I've spent eight years reading casinos. I know what normal looks like. I'll know what abnormal looks like when I see it.
The question is what happens after. When I've found his ring and he doesn't need me anymore. He could let me go. He could kill me anyway.
Or he could try to keep me. I’m sure that he will. That’s what alphas do.
They own.
My best chance is to get him to trust me enough until there is an opening and I can run.
I don't sleep. At some point the window begins to lighten, a gray wash that turns the room from black to charcoal then to a pale blue.
At eight fifteen, there's a knock on the door. It beeps and opens before I have a chance to answer. It’s a woman in a hotel uniform with a tray. She brings scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice, coffee. She sets it on the desk, then leaves without speaking. The electronic lock engages behind her.
At nine forty, the guard opens the door. He's a different one from last night. Younger, polite. "Mr. Novikov will see you now."
The elevator takes me up one floor. The corridor is wider here, quieter with a better-quality carpet. The guard walks me to a door at the end and opens it and steps aside.
Novikov's office is large and the first thing I notice is that the room smells like him. My body responds to it before I've taken two steps inside.
I breathe through my mouth.
He's standing behind the desk. He looks like he hasn't slept either. He’s wearing the same suit as last night or one identical to it. The brick shithouse that is Viktor is in the chair by the window, watching me come in with a blank expression.
"Sit," Novikov says.
I sit. The chair is leather and deep and positioned slightly lower than his, which I'm sure is deliberate.
"I've thought about your offer," he says. "I'm going to take it. You work for me. You find the ring. In return, you stay alive."
"I have conditions," I say.
Viktor shifts in his chair. I don't look at him.
"Go ahead," Novikov says.
"I need data. Loss reports by table, by shift, by dealer. Historical data going back at least six months. Surveillance footage from the affected areas. And I'll need to see the floor. Watch the tables, the dealers, the patterns in real time."
"You'll get the data. I'll have it sent to you. The footage too." He pauses. "You won't need the floor."
"I can't do this from a screen. I need to see how the dealers move, hear the rhythm of the shuffle, watch the players—"
"You'll have cameras. Every table, every angle. If you need a specific feed, you request it through Viktor."
He's not asking. I look at the office around me, at the locked door I came through, at Viktor by the window.
"I want my phone."
"No."
"I don't have anyone to call." I say this flatly, without self-pity, because it is a fact and I am stating it as one. "Check my call logs. Check my contacts. There's nothing on it."
"No." Okay, that was a long shot, but I had to try.
"And a timeline," I say. "When I find the ring, I leave. That's the deal. I deliver, I walk."
Novikov doesn't answer immediately. He leans against the desk and crosses his arms and the silence stretches.
"Agreed," he says. "When the ring is identified and dealt with, you're free to go."
I’m not sure I believe him. He says agreed the way you'd say sure to a child who asks if they can stay up late. I don't trust it and I don't trust him. But it's the best I'm going to get.
"Then we have a deal," I say.
He extends his hand. His palm is warm and dry and large enough to close around mine completely. The contact sends a jolt through my arm that travels all the way up to my shoulder and then down into my chest, and my breath catches and I can't hide it.
I let go. Too fast. He lets me. "Welcome to the Grand, Mr. Holland."
Viktor stands and moves to the door and holds it open. I walk through it without looking back because looking back would mean meeting Novikov's eyes again, and I cannot afford what that does to me.
The corridor is cool and quiet and Viktor walks ahead of me without speaking.
His stride is long and I have to work to keep up, which might be a power play or might just be the way he walks.
At the elevator, he presses the button and stands with his hands clasped behind his back, staring straight ahead.
"You should know," he says, without looking at me, "that I think this is a mistake."
I don’t answer. I’d already worked that Viktor wasn’t keen on me.
"If I find out you're connected to the people who are stealing from us, what happens next will not involve a suite and scrambled eggs. I want to be clear about that."
"You're clear."
He grunts. The elevator arrives. We step in. The doors close. Viktor presses twenty and we descend one floor in silence.
The doors open. He leads me down a corridor I haven't seen before, past rooms that look like offices, and stops at a door near the end.
"This is yours while I arrange a better set up," he says. "Desktop in there has access to the systems he's approved. The password is on the desk. Change it to something secure."
He starts to walk away.
"Viktor."
He stops. Turns. His face is exactly what it always is.
"I'm not working for anyone," I say. "I know you don't believe me. But I'll prove it."
He looks at me for a moment, then turns and walks away without answering. The door closes behind me and then I hear the key turn in the lock.
I go into the office. It's small. Desk, chair, monitor, keyboard. No window. The password is on a Post-it stuck to the screen: Changeme123!.
I sit down. I change the password. I open the loss reports and start reading.