Chapter 7
Ren kicked the bedroom door shut and stood in the middle of the room, breathing through his mouth because the air still tasted of raisins and walnuts and that damn scent of home that clung to his clothes, his skin, the back of his throat as if he’d swallowed it.
He brought his hands to his face. Pushed them away. Brought them back up. He didn’t know what to do with them, with the lingering tremor running through his fingers, with the muscle memory of having cowered like a beaten animal in front of a man who hadn’t even touched him.
It hadn’t been Brody.
It had been his father.
His father in the kitchen at home at eleven o’clock at night with the belt coiled around his fist and that look of annoyance, as if hitting him were just another household chore, like washing the dishes or taking out the trash.
His father’s view was that an omega failing to comply was worthless.
His father signing papers in an office that smelled of leather and bourbon while Ren stood waiting, unaware that those papers were yet another agreement that would lead him to another alpha’s bed for the forgiveness of yet another debt.
No. It hadn’t been Brody.
But Brody had seen it.
That was the unforgivable part.
Ren walked to the window and pressed his forehead against the glass.
The garden stretched out below, dark green in the morning light, with its trimmed hedges and gravel paths and the security guardhouse in the background like a gentle reminder that this was still a cage.
A pretty one. With clean sheets and clothes that were too big for him and food he didn’t have to beg for. But a cage.
He stepped away from the window. He took three steps toward the bed. He turned. He went back to the window.
What hurt him most wasn’t that he’d cowered.
What hurt him most was the reason he’d cowered, and the reason wasn’t fear of Brody.
It was the bond. That invisible, biological thing that had made him let his guard down to the point of reacting with his bare body, without armor, without the mask he’d spent years building.
In front of any other alpha, he would have held his ground without batting an eye.
He would have kept his jaw clenched, his shoulders straight, his gaze fixed.
He would have turned fear into defiance, because that was what he knew how to do, what he’d been doing since he was fourteen, when he began training his body so that no alpha could subdue him without effort.
But Brody wasn’t just any other alpha.
Brody was the alpha whose scent dismantled his defenses like someone removing screws from a structure, one by one, with mechanical patience, until the structure collapses.
Brody was the alpha who had brought him to his knees without touching him.
The alpha whose presence warmed his blood, softened his muscles, and told his brain he was safe when he wasn’t; that he could surrender when he couldn’t; that Brody’s broad chest was a place to rest his head and find peace.
Lies. All biological lies.
A bond. With a stranger. With an alpha who locked him in a mansion and told him where he could go and who he could talk to, and then dared to call it protection. With an alpha who whispered that he was his as if that were something Ren should be grateful for.
No.
He didn’t want a bond. He didn’t want the invisible chain that tied him to Brody, just as he didn’t want the visible chains Reznov would have put on him.
Different material, same principle. Someone who decided for him.
Someone who controlled his body without asking his permission.
His father had done it with blows. Reznov would have done it with money.
Brody did it with pheromones and grave words that sounded like promises.
And Ren didn’t want promises from anyone.
The room suddenly felt too small, the walls too close, the ceiling too low. Brody’s scent hung in the air like a ghost that refused to leave, and Ren needed to get it out of his body, out of his head, out of his nervous system, which kept responding to him the way a plant responds to light.
He went to the bathroom. He splashed cold water on his face.
He observed his image in the mirror. Blond hair plastered to his forehead.
Blue eyes bloodshot from something other than sleep.
High cheekbones. Lips pressed into a thin white line.
He looked like what he was: someone at the end of his rope.
He could leave.
The idea flashed through his mind like lightning and stayed there, bright, pulsing.
He could leave. The mansion. Brody. Everything.
He went back to the bedroom and sat on the bed with his legs crossed.
He thought. The guardhouse had only one guard.
The side gardens bordered a stone wall that didn’t seem to be over two and a half meters high.
There were trees close enough to the wall to climb.
At night, when it was dark enough, the guard in the guardhouse wouldn’t be able to cover the entire perimeter.
And then what?
Then the city. The streets. Normal people doing normal things, unaware that less than three miles away, people were being auctioned off like cattle.
Ren had legs and knew how to use them. Less than twenty-four hours ago, he’d run barefoot through streets he didn’t know.
He could do it again. This time with sneakers.
He had no money. No ID. No phone.
But he had hands and knew how to work. He could wash dishes at any restaurant that didn’t ask questions. At dawn, he could load boxes in a warehouse. Maybe even scrub floors. He’d done worse things for less honorable reasons.
He got up and opened the closet. Three T-shirts. Two pairs of pants. A gray hoodie that would be huge on him but would cover his hair and half his face. White sneakers a couple of sizes too big for his feet. It would do.
He’d need to make some changes. His hair, first. Natural platinum blonde was a distinctive feature.
At any 24-hour pharmacy, he could buy dark hair dye if he got some money.
Brown. Black. Whatever. Cut it short, too.
His hair fell below his ears, and that was another identifiable feature.
Shaved or very short. Nothing that drew attention.
The name. Ren Valois would cease to exist. It would be easy.
The Valois weren’t a family that made the news.
His father had kept a low profile, and Ren was an omega with no public history.
He could be anyone. Choose a simple name that wouldn’t raise suspicion.
Something that sounded like a supermarket cashier or a delivery person or a barista. Something invisible.
He could go north. Or east. Or to any city big enough to swallow a person whole. Disappear among millions of bodies and smells and voices. Rent a room without a lease in some damp basement where no one asked for ID. Live small. Live quietly. Live free.
Free from Reznov, who had paid seven hundred thousand dollars for his body.
Free from his father, who had tortured him since he reached adolescence.
Free from Brody Kovac, whose scent made him feel like he had a home when in reality he had nothing.
Ren closed the closet. He sat back down on the bed. He would wait for night to fall.
* * *
The mansion lay in semi-darkness. Ren had waited for the clock on the nightstand to strike twenty past two in the morning before moving.
He dressed in the gray sweatshirt, jeans, and oversized sneakers.
He tucked an extra T-shirt inside the sweatshirt, against his chest, in case he needed to change. He needed nothing more than that.
He walked down the hallway with light feet on the oak floorboards. The mansion creaked like any old structure does when it cools down at night: wooden bones settling in. Ren knew those sounds. His house had them too.
He went down the staircase hugging the wall where the steps didn’t groan.
He had counted the steps during the tour Brody had given him that morning.
Seventeen to the landing. Turn. Fourteen to the foyer.
The front door was at the end, behind a stone archway leading to an entryway with a black-and-white marble floor like a chessboard.
There was no one there.
The silence was heavy. Ren crossed the foyer holding his breath, each step a dull thud inside his skull. The door was solid wood with a wrought-iron handle. No electronic lock. No visible alarm. Too easy.
But Ren would not stop to think about that. Not now. Not with freedom just a twist of the wrist away.
He grabbed the handle. The metal was cold beneath his fingers. He squeezed it.
“You don’t get to leave.”
The voice came from somewhere behind him, deep, without inflection. Like someone stating the time or the name of a street. Ren froze with his fingers clenched around the iron.
He turned slowly.
Brody was at the foot of the stairs. He wasn’t wearing shoes.
Dark sweatpants, a black T-shirt stretched tight over his broad shoulders.
His arms at his sides, his hands open. He didn’t look angry.
He looked like something worse: inevitable.
As if he’d known ever since Ren closed the closet that afternoon that this was going to happen.
Brody’s gray eyes watched him with a stillness that Ren instantly associated with a predator that doesn’t need to run because it has already calculated that the prey won’t get far.
“I don’t want this.”
The words came out of Ren’s mouth before he could think them, rough, with jagged edges. He wasn’t referring to the door or the mansion or the night. Brody knew it. Something in his jaw loosened, a tension giving way like a knot whose string had been cut.
“I know.”
Two words. Nothing more. And then the air changed.