Chapter 19 Theo
The first three days are the worst.
Not because of the fear. Fear is immediate and it burns off. The adrenaline spikes, crests, recedes, and what's left is a flat, gray alertness that I know from years of sleeping rough. Your body adapts. It has to.
The worst part is the nothing. Four walls.
One bulb. One mattress. The water and the energy bars and the bucket in the corner and the silence.
No clock. No window. No way to track the passage of time except the drip of the pipe in the corner and my own breathing and the meals that arrive without schedule or pattern.
They come once a day. Sometimes three times. Two men, always the same ones, always silent. The door opens and one of them puts a paper bag inside while the other stands behind him. The bag contains food. It turns out that the energy bars are in case they don’t come which happens twice.
The food varies. Fast food sometimes, a burger in a foil wrapper still warm.
Other times sandwiches, gas station quality, the bread damp against the plastic.
Once, a container of pasta in red sauce that was actually good and I ate all of it and then sat on the mattress feeling stupidly grateful for penne.
They don't speak to me. I've tried. The first time the door opened I said, "How long am I going to be here?" and got nothing.
The second time I said, "I need to see a doctor. I'm pregnant." The one holding the bag paused. His eyes went to my stomach, then back to my face. He put the bag down and left.
The next delivery included three bottles of prenatal vitamins. Three bottles, sealed, pharmacy brand
I take the vitamins. I eat what they bring. I drink the water slowly, two bottles a day, and when the case runs low, they replace it.
The energy bars I save for the gaps between deliveries, when the hours stretch and my blood sugar drops and the nausea rolls through me in slow, heavy waves.
The nausea is constant now. Mornings are the worst but it doesn't confine itself to mornings.
It comes when it wants, sometimes in the middle of the night when I'm lying on the mattress staring at the ceiling, sometimes when I'm pacing the ten feet between the door and the far wall, which I do for hours because movement is the only thing that keeps my mind from eating itself.
Ten feet there. Ten feet back. Twelve hundred steps to a mile. I walk miles in this room.
I count them.
I count everything. The drips. The steps. The meals. The energy bars consumed and remaining.
The seconds between the bolt sliding on the other side of the door and the door opening, which is always between two and four seconds, depending on which of the two men is doing it. The left-hand man is faster. The right-hand man is careful.
I count the days by the deliveries. I scratch a line on the wall behind the mattress with the edge of a zip tie.
One line per sleep cycle. It's imprecise. I don't always know if I've slept for three hours or ten. The bulb is always on. There's no darkness, which I think is deliberate.
After seven lines I stop feeling certain that Dom is going to walk through that door today.
After fourteen, I stop expecting it this week.
After twenty-two, the shape of the fear changes.
I'm not afraid for myself. That's the strange thing. Or maybe it isn't strange.
Maybe it's just that I've been afraid for myself for so long that the muscle is exhausted and can't contract any more.
I've been afraid since I was seven years old, watching my mother shrink every time a key turned in a lock. Fear is the background hum of my existence and it doesn't spike the way it used to.
What spikes is the thought of Dom.
If Dom were dead, I'd be dead. That's the math. I'm leverage. Leverage requires a target. If the target is gone, the leverage has no value and the people holding it have no reason to keep feeding it prenatal vitamins and gas station sandwiches.
So, he's alive. He has to be alive because I'm alive and that's the only equation that works.
But alive doesn't mean safe and alive doesn't mean looking. Alive could mean injured. Alive could mean making a deal that doesn't include me.
That last thought arrives on day twenty-five, or what I think is day twenty-five, and it sits in my chest and won't move.
He wouldn't. I know he wouldn't. He is not going to trade me away. I'm his. He told me that enough times. The one thing I am certain of is that he will tear down the world to find me.
The thought should make me angry. It does make me angry. But underneath the anger, I find something else.
Nobody has ever wanted me before.
The thought arrives without drama. Just a fact, sitting there, the way facts do.
My mother wanted to protect me but she couldn't. My father didn't want me at all. The foster homes wanted the check. The motel clerks wanted cash and the dealers wanted chips and the casinos wanted the money in my pocket and nobody, in twenty-six years, has ever looked at me and wanted me.
Dom does. I know he is wrong for me in so many ways. He is possessive, controlling — all of it.
But the want is real. I smelled it on him. I tasted it. I felt it in the way his hands found the scars on my back and moved around them, careful, without being asked.
I have a lot of time to think down here.
I lie on the mattress with my hand on my stomach, which is no longer flat.
The curve is small but definite. I can feel the taut roundness of it under my palm and sometimes, when I'm very still and the building above me is quiet, I think I can feel something else.
A flutter. A shift. Something alive in there, turning.
"It's going to be fine," I say to the ceiling. To the baby. To myself. "He's coming."
The weeks keep passing.
I know they're weeks now because the bump grows. Pregnancy is its own clock and this one is ticking visibly.
My jeans stopped buttoning somewhere around what I estimate is week ten.
I've been wearing them open with the zip down and my T-shirt pulled over and when the next food delivery comes, I ask for larger clothes and the right-hand man glances at my stomach and two days later there's a bag with two pairs of sweatpants and three T-shirts, all too big, all new.
I'm being kept. Someone is investing in me and the investment is long-term.
The isolation works on you in stages. First the fear. Then the boredom. Then something worse: a formless gray fog that rolls in and fills the room and makes everything feel like it's happening at the bottom of a lake.
The pacing helps. Talking to the baby helps, although I'm aware that talking to an unborn child in a concrete cell is not the portrait of a man who's coping well.
I tell it about its father, because I might as well.
"He's big," I say. "He's stubborn and he's possessive and he smells like whiskey and cedar and he thinks he owns everything, including you and me.
" I press my palm flat against the curve.
"He's probably tearing the city apart right now.
That's what he does. He decides what belongs to him and then he refuses to let it go. "
My voice echoes off the concrete and dies.
"I used to think that was the worst thing a person could be," I say. "I'm not sure anymore."
Somewhere past day forty, the door opens at the wrong time.
Then the door swings in and the light from the corridor beyond is brighter than the bulb and I squint against it.
The man who walks in is not one of the two I know.
He's young, early thirties perhaps with dark hair and a good suit, the kind of easy smile that makes you want to trust him.
He smells like expensive cologne and nothing else. No pheromone signature strong enough to place his designation at this distance. Alpha, probably. The suit says money. The two men behind him say power.
He looks at me. He looks at the mattress, the water bottles, the lines scratched on the wall. He looks at my stomach.
"Mr. Holland." His voice is warm. "I'm sorry it's taken me so long to come down here. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t followed. I wouldn’t want this entire situation to become more difficult."
"You’re Luca Castellano," I say.
His eyebrows lift. "You know me."
"I know who you are."
He smiles. It's a good smile. Warm, slightly rueful, the smile of a man who's been caught doing something charming. "I suppose you do. You've been busy in that casino. Or so I hear."
He pulls a folding chair from behind the door — brought with him, planned — and sets it up three feet from the mattress. He sits. He crosses one leg over the other. His pants have a knife crease. His shoes are polished.
"You look well," he says. "Considering."
"Considering I've been locked in a concrete room for six weeks."
"Closer to eight, actually." He says it lightly, as if correcting a small arithmetic error. "Time does funny things without a window. Are they feeding you properly? I told them to feed you properly."
"The pasta was good. The sandwiches need work."
Another smile. He's enjoying this. That's the first thing I file away. He's not here because he has to be. He's here because he wants to be.
"Let me be straightforward," he says. "I know who you are.
I know you're Dominic Novikov's omega. I know he kept you in his building against your will.
Ankle monitor, locked doors, the whole arrangement.
" He uncrosses his legs and leans forward.
"I also know you were the one who dismantled my operation inside his casino.
Which was impressive, by the way. Genuinely.
I had people in that building for months and you unpicked the whole thing in weeks. "
"Is that why I'm here? Payback?"
"God, no. If I wanted payback, Mr. Holland, you'd know about it." He says it pleasantly, the way you'd decline a second helping of dessert. The smile doesn't change. The eyes don't change. There's nothing behind them. It's not that they're cold. Cold is still a temperature. These are empty.
I file that away too. It's the most important thing I've learned since the door opened.
"You're here because you're useful," he says. "Not as a hostage. Hostages are blunt instruments. I prefer something more refined."
"Such as?"
"A partnership." He lets the word sit. "You're a smart man, Theo.
Can I call you Theo?" He doesn't wait for an answer.
"You've been living under Novikov's thumb for months.
He tracked you down, locked you up, fitted you with a monitor like a convict, and when you tried to negotiate your freedom, he told you no.
I'm sure the sex was adequate. It usually is with alphas who think they own you. But let's be honest about what it was."
He's watching my face. He's looking for something and I know what it is. He's looking for agreement.
For the flinch, the bitterness, the confirmation that Novikovs's omega hates his guts.
"I'm listening," I say.
"The Novikov operation is in free fall. Dominic fired half his floor staff in a single night.
His quarterly numbers are a disaster. His father is pressuring him.
Our Castellano proposal — a partnership that would have benefited both families — was rejected out of hand.
" He spreads his palms. "And his omega, the one he was so determined to keep, vanished from his building on his watch.
That's not a man in control. That's a man in crisis. "
"And you're the man with the solution."
"I'm the man with the opportunity. For both of us."
He reaches into his jacket and takes out a phone. He sets it on his knee, screen up, not offering it yet.
"I don't need a hostage," he says. "What I need is intelligence. Someone who knows the inside of the Novikov operation."
"You want me to spy for you."
"I want you to have a home. Not to a concrete room. A proper home. Medical care, comfort, safety. You're carrying a child, Theo. You should be in a bed, not on a mattress." He nods at the room, at the stained padding under me. "This was temporary. A precaution. I'm sorry about it. Truly."
He's not sorry. He doesn't experience sorry. I'm looking at the smoothest, most charming psychopath I've ever met and he doesn't know that I can see it because he thinks the charm is working.
"I need to think about it," I say.
"Of course." He picks up the phone from his knee and turns it over in his fingers. "Take your time. I'm not in a rush."
"How do I know you'd actually let me go? If I agreed. How do I know I don't just trade one locked room for another?"
"You don't." He says this simply, as if the honesty is a gift. "Trust is earned. I'd start by improving your conditions. A proper room. A window. Medical appointments for the pregnancy. We'd build from there."
"And if I say no?"
"Then you stay here and we revisit the conversation later. I'm a patient man, Theo." He stands. He folds the chair and leans it against the wall. "I'll leave the chair. You could probably use somewhere to sit that isn't the floor."
He moves to the door. One of his men opens it from outside.
"He won't find you, by the way," Luca says.
He turns back and his face is still pleasant, still open, still the face of a man you'd trust with your wallet at a dinner party.
"Dominic has been looking. I know because I've been watching him look.
He's running out of places to search and he's running out of time and resources.
He's going to come to me eventually. They always do. "
He gives the room a last look. Me on the mattress. The scratched lines on the wall. The bump under my T-shirt.
"Think about which side of that conversation you'd like to be on," he says.
The door closes. I sit on the mattress and I think about what just happened and I take it apart the way I'd take apart a deck.
Luca Castellano knows I'm Dom's omega. He knows about the ankle monitor, the locked doors, the captivity. He's built his pitch around it: the wronged omega, imprisoned by a controlling alpha, offered freedom by a better class of captor.
But he doesn't know it's a prime match.
He thinks Dom kept me because I was useful and convenient. An omega who fell into his lap and who Dom decided to hang onto because that's what alphas do.
He doesn't know that the scent match is so deep it rewired my nervous system the moment Dom walked into that security room.
If he knew, he wouldn't be trying to turn me. You can't turn a prime match. The biology doesn't allow it. The bond is in the blood and it doesn't care about locked rooms or ankle monitors or charming psychopaths with folding chairs.
He thinks I can be bought. I press my hand against my stomach. The baby shifts. A small, rolling movement under my palm, the first one I've felt that was unmistakably a kick and not just digestion or nerves.
"Okay," I say. To the baby. To the room. To the fact that I now know something Luca Castellano doesn't and I'm going to use it.