Chapter 9
Light streamed in through the window at gentle angles that didn’t disturb him.
Ren opened his eyes slowly, without a start, without the rush of adrenaline that had woken him up the last three mornings.
He blinked. The white ceiling. The velvet curtains.
The room that wasn’t his but was feeling familiar.
And the scent.
Raisins and walnuts and something else beneath them, something that had no name but that his body recognized as one recognizes a melody from childhood: effortlessly, without thought, straight to the center of his chest. The sweatshirt covered him down to his thighs.
The sleeves wrapped around his hands. The wide neckline had slipped down during the night, leaving his left shoulder exposed, but the scent was still there, permeating every fiber, and Ren buried his nose in the fabric with his eyes closed again.
Just one more minute.
The mattress was firm; the pillow soft. Everything around him smelled like home.
Not the Valois house. Not the damp Paris apartment where Julian had settled the family after losing the estate.
Not the Monte Carlo penthouse where Ren had spent the worst three months of his life listening to his father lose a hundred thousand euros in a single night of poker.
Not what had come after that in America.
It smelled like home as a concept, as an idea, as that abstract, idyllic place the body wants to return to when everything else falls apart.
Ren rolled onto his side and hugged his knees. The fabric stretched with him. The scent intensified with the movement, released by the friction of the cotton against the sheets.
I hate it.
But he didn’t move.
I hate it makes me feel this way.
But he didn’t take off his sweatshirt.
He took a deep breath. Again. And again.
Each inhalation loosened something else inside him.
One knot after another. Each exhalation loosened his shoulders, his jaws, his toes a little more.
It had been years since he’d woken up like this.
Years without feeling that stillness in his body that didn’t come from resignation or exhaustion but from something that looked dangerously like peace.
Maybe it’s not so bad.
The thought crossed his mind before he could hold it back with his will. And it stayed there, floating among his thoughts of resistance. Ren watched it with caution and curiosity.
Maybe it’s not so bad that someone smells like this.
He rolled onto his back, closed his eyes, and let the thought linger.
Brody Kovac had provided him with an escape route when he thought he had none.
He’d given him a room with clean sheets and a door without a latch.
He’d told him he was safe. He’d left his sweatshirt on the bed like someone who leaves a glass of water on the nightstand in case someone gets thirsty in the middle of the night.
He could have done none of that.
Ren brought the cuff of his sleeve to his nose. The smell filled his entire head.
He could have left me there.
There. The word ripped open his stomach like a zipper.
There was the lit stage, there were Reznov’s hands rising to bid, there was that repulsive figure falling like a slab onto his chest. There was a year of slavery.
There was the black latex jumpsuit that squeezed his skin like a second layer of shame.
There was the room smelling of expensive leather and cologne and the sweat of men who looked at bodies as one might look at livestock at a fair.
Ren remembered how Reznov had looked at him with his small, dark eyes from the front row: not with crude lust, not with the clumsiness of unfiltered desire, but with something worse.
With ownership. With the calmness of someone who already knows he’s going to win.
Reznov hadn’t desired him. He had inventoried him.
One year.
Twelve months of ownership. Three hundred sixty-five days without a name of his own, without a will, without the possibility of closing a door and being alone on the other side.
Ren had read about that. He’d heard the stories circulating in the corners his father frequented, those stories whispered amid nervous laughter about omegas who went in whole and came out broken.
That the contract stipulated he couldn’t be mutilated or killed didn’t mean other things couldn’t be done.
His mouth went dry.
He wouldn’t have survived.
It wasn’t an exaggeration. It wasn’t the drama of fear amplifying the shadows.
Ren knew this with the cold certainty of someone who knows their own limits because they’ve touched them too many times.
He would have fought. For a month, maybe two.
He would have bitten and scratched and spat, and he would have taken every blow with clenched teeth and his chin held high.
And then, slowly, like a candle burning down, he would have gone out.
Because Reznov wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t his refined cruelty, nor his thick hands, nor his soft baritone voice promising things Ren didn’t want to imagine. The problem was the cage. The problem had always been the cage.
Julian Valois had understood it before anyone else.
His own father. The man who should have been his first line of defense had been the first to discover that Ren’s freedom had a price.
And he had put it up for sale. Not all at once, not in one go.
That would have been almost merciful. He had done it piece by piece, night by night, hour by hour.
Like someone tearing down a house brick by brick and selling each one separately.
Fifty thousand for one night. The first time, Ren was barely sixteen, and Julian had told him it was a dinner.
Just a dinner. With a business partner. To discuss business.
The partner was sixty-two years old and had sweaty hands, and at two in the morning, when Ren tried to leave the restaurant’s private room, he found two men at the door who wouldn’t let him out.
Julian didn’t answer the phone that night.
Or the next. When Ren returned home three days later, his father looked at him from the couch with a glass of whiskey in his hand and a satisfied smile on his face, and said, “It wasn’t that bad, was it? ”
Seventy thousand the second time. A hundred thousand the third.
The price went up because Julian discovered men paid more for someone who seemed to know what they were doing. And Ren came back each time with his jaw clenched tighter and his eyes drier, and Julian raised the stakes.
But a year. An entire year belonging to someone without respite. Without the illusion of thinking about something else and pretending that this wasn’t happening. Without the possibility of counting down the hours until the worst was over.
Ren brought both hands to his face. The fabric of the sweatshirt covered his eyes. The scent of raisins and walnuts flooded his nostrils, and an emotion he hadn’t felt until that moment washed over him. Relief.
He had run away. He’d been given a chance, and he’d taken it. He’d run through the rain. He’d taken down an alpha twice his size. A smile curved his lips. He’d done it.
I’m here. And I’m safe. In the room with velvet curtains and a white ceiling.
Wearing the gray sweatshirt that looked ridiculous on him.
With the door unlocked. I’m here and not there.
He uncovered his eyes. The light was still streaming softly through the window.
The scent was still there, constant, asking for nothing in return.
Ren stared at the ceiling and let the truth sink into his body.
Brody Kovac smelled like home. And Ren hated that.
But maybe, just maybe, just for now, just this morning, he could allow himself not to fight it.
Ren gathered all his strength and got out of bed. After all, hunger was a powerful motivator, and the growling in his stomach was killing him. As he entered the bathroom, he stopped in front of the large mirror that greeted him.
Brody’s gray sweatshirt came down to his mid-thigh. The sleeves covered his hands completely, and the wide neckline exposed his left collarbone, pale and sharp. He looked like a kid stealing clothes from his dad’s closet. He looked exactly like what he was: an omega wrapped in his alpha’s garment.
He’s not your alpha.
He gripped the edge of the sink. His knuckles turned white.
The reflection returned blue eyes rimmed with violet shadows and a mouth pressed into a thin line.
Beneath the fabric that didn’t belong to him, his body was still the same body Julian had appraised and sold for nights.
The same body Reznov had bought for seven hundred thousand dollars.
The same body that had fallen asleep curled up in a fetal position, inhaling a stranger’s scent as if it were oxygen.
Pathetic.
He had allowed himself a morning. He had granted it to himself as a gift, as an indulgence.
But the indulgence had become something more in the space between the bed and the mirror.
It had become evidence. Proof that his body would always win.
Proof that biology was a chain more subtle than Reznov’s but just as functional.
What was the difference between a cage with bars and a cage that smelled of raisins and walnuts?
Ren yanked the sweatshirt off. The fabric caught on his chin, and he had to struggle for a second, stupid and clumsy, before tearing it off completely. He dropped it onto the tiled floor as if it were burning.
The cold hit him. Without the fabric, without the scent, the world became harsh and real again. He stood in his underwear in front of the mirror. His ribs were visible beneath his skin. The marks that were no longer there but that Ren could still see if he stared long enough.