Chapter 15 #2
From the upper left corner, a faint crack snaked across the ceiling like a dry river toward the center of the molding. Ren had memorized it over the last two hours. Every fork, every tiny imperfection. He knew it better than the map of his own life.
He was lying on his back on the bed with his arms crossed over his chest, still dressed, still wearing his shoes.
He hadn’t cried. Not because he didn’t want to, but because his body had run out of fuel for that.
What remained inside him was something colder, stiller.
A dark sediment settling at the bottom of his stomach.
His father wanted him dead.
That phrase echoed in his head like the rhythm of a constant drip.
Not that he didn’t already know it, not that Julian Valois had ever been a father in the genuine sense of the word.
But it was one thing to know that your father sold you off by the night to wealthy alphas, and quite another to know that he preferred your corpse to your freedom.
And his brother.
Ren closed his eyes. The older brother, who had once taught him to ride a bike in the family’s backyard before the family home had become a shell filled with debt and empty bottles. That brother had signed as well.
Three knocks on the door. Sharp, spaced out, as if the hand delivering them were measuring each one.
Ren didn’t answer.
“It’s me.”
As if it could be anyone else. As if the scent of raisins and walnuts hadn’t already seeped under the door and wasn’t climbing up his throat.
“I don’t want to see you.”
Silence on the other side. Long. So long that Ren thought Brody had left.
“Then don’t look at me. But I need you to listen.”
Ren sat up in bed. He rubbed his face with both hands, running his fingers through his blond hair that was already needing a trim. He looked at his palms as if he expected to find answers written in the lines of his hands. There were none.
He stood up and opened the door.
Brody filled the entire doorway. The black shirt from before had its sleeves rolled up further, with the top button undone.
His gray eyes, with that perpetual red rim, looked at him with something that wasn’t an apology.
It was patience. The patience you exercise when you know you’re going to earn it with blood.
“Five minutes,” Ren said.
“I need more.”
“Five minutes. And if I don’t like what I hear, you’re out.”
Brody nodded once and went in. He didn’t sit down. He stood by the window, his profile silhouetted against the evening light seeping through the half-open curtains, and Ren hated even in that moment, the silhouette of that man stirred something so primal in him he could barely breathe.
Ren sat on the edge of the bed. He crossed his arms. He waited.
“I started working for my uncle when I was sixteen,” Brody said.
His voice sounded unfamiliar. Stripped of his usual authority, as if he’d spoken without his armor.
“I was sixteen, I’d just presented as an alpha, and Malachi was the only one in the family who offered me anything resembling a future.
My mother had died two years earlier. My father never existed. ”
Ren didn’t move. He didn’t relax his arms.
“At first, it was clean work. Or what seemed clean. Numbers. Basic casino accounting. Errands. Malachi taught me how to run a business, how to dress, and how to talk to the right people. He made me someone.” Brody ran a hand through his black hair, a gesture Ren hadn’t seen him make before and that betrayed something more raw than nervousness.
“I was grateful. Malachi pulled me out of nowhere and gave me a life. I owed him everything.”
“And the auctions?”
“I’m getting to that,” Brody turned toward him.
The orange light split his face in two, one half lit and the other in shadow.
“For the first three years, I knew nothing. The casino has six floors, three above ground and three below. I worked on the second floor. Offices, management, day-to-day logistics. I never went down to the basement.”
“When did you go down?”
“At nineteen. Malachi started giving me more responsibility. He told me it was time for me to see the entire business, that if I was going to inherit it someday, I needed to know every part. He took me to the basement one December night, four days before Christmas.” Brody clenched his jaw.
A muscle twitched beneath the skin of his cheek.
“There were six Omegas in individual cells. Three women, three men. All under twenty-five. All drugged. Two of them bore bruises no one had bothered to cover up.”
Ren swallowed. The metallic taste of fear filled his mouth, though the fear wasn’t for himself but for those six names he would never know.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing,” Brody uttered the word as if a fingernail were being torn from him.
“I did nothing, Ren. I was nineteen, alone in the world, and the only man who’d ever treated me like a son had just shown me the hell he kept hidden beneath his casino as casually as he might have shown me the wine cellar.
And I stood there, watching, silent, and nodded when Malachi asked me if I was ready to be a part of it. ”
The silence that followed was thick. Ren could hear his own pulse.
“I said yes. I went along with it. For months I worked with him side by side on the logistics of the auctions. I learned how it all worked: how they selected the omegas, how they contacted the indebted families, how they agreed on prices, how they organized the auction nights, and who the regular buyers were. Everything, Ren. I learned everything.”
“You took part.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t sugarcoat it. He didn’t soften it. He didn’t say, “I had to do it” or “I had no choice.” He said yes and let the word fall between them like a stone into water.
Ren clenched his teeth so hard his gums ached.
“And how long did it take you to decide it was wrong? Or did you need someone to tell you?”
“I always knew it was wrong. From the first night I went down into those basements.” Brody locked eyes with him.
“But I did something worse than failing to distinguish right from wrong. I distinguished it perfectly, and yet I went along with it. Because I needed to see the full scope of what my uncle had built before I could destroy it.”
Ren blinked.
“Every document I signed, every meeting I attended, every auction I witnessed, gave me another piece of the map. Buyers’ names.
Bank accounts. Transportation routes. Contacts in the police, in the district attorney’s office, in courts that look the other way when it comes to private agreements between alphas and legal guardians of omegas.
” Brody uttered those last words with such visceral disgust that Ren felt it in his own skin.
”My uncle still considers me part of the business.
I still receive profits from the casino.
I’m still listed in the records as a partner. ”
There it was. Ren understood it before Brody said it. He understood it in the space between the sentences, in what Brody wasn’t saying but that hung in the air like a scent impossible to ignore.
“You profit from the auctions.”
“Yes.”
“From the money they pay for the omegas.”
“A portion goes into my accounts. It always has.”
Nausea rose up Ren’s esophagus. Hot, acidic. He brought a hand to his mouth and breathed through his nose. Brody’s scent—that damn scent of home, of warmth, of refuge—filled his lungs, and that made the nausea worse because his body was rejecting him and needing him at the same time.
“I can’t approve of that.” Ren’s voice came out small but firm. “I don’t care what you do with that money afterward. I don’t care if you use it to save every omega you pull out of there. It’s money stained with the lives of people like me, Brody. Do you understand that? Do you really understand?”
“I understand.” Brody didn’t back down an inch. “But it’s much more than that.”
“More than profiting from slavery?”
“If I cut my ties with the casino, I lose the eyes I have inside. I lose Rocco, who would no longer have a reason to be there. I lose access to the buyer records I update every month when Malachi sends them to me because he trusts me. I lose the ability to know when an auction is being prepared, who the omegas will be, where they’re getting them from. ”
Brody took a step toward him. Just one.
“If I leave, Malachi won’t just cut me off; he’ll make me an enemy. And if he makes me an enemy, everything I’ve gathered over the years becomes useless because I can’t keep gathering anymore.”
“Gathering what?”
“Evidence, Ren. Actual evidence. Documentation linking specific names to specific transactions. Recordings. Financial records. Testimonies from Omegas we’ve rescued who’ve agreed to testify if the time ever comes.”
Brody paused. He swallowed.
“Every case that goes to court changes something. Every time one of these private agreements is reported, the justice system views it more harshly than the last. Ten years ago, a judge would have dismissed an omega’s complaint against their legal guardian without batting an eye.
Today, it’s not that easy. There are precedents.
There are rulings. There is public opinion.
And every new case that comes to light pushes the line a little further. ”
Ren looked at him. He studied him, beyond the massive body and the scent that clouded his judgment. He searched for the lie in his eyes. He searched for the crack through which falsehood, inconsistency, or a cheap excuse might slip.
“The more cases that come out, the harder it will be for them to look the other way,” Brody continued.
“The harder it will be for an alpha to buy an omega in a room full of expensive suits and champagne and consider it a right. The closer we’ll be to the law ceasing to treat omegas as transferable property.
That’s what I’m doing. That’s what I’ve been doing since I was nineteen and stood silent in a basement in front of six cells. ”
Silence settled between them. Long, heavy, but different from before. It wasn’t the silence of a lie exposed. It was the silence of a truth too heavy for a single person to bear.
Ren loosened his arms. He didn’t uncross them, but he let his hands fall onto his knees. His fingers were trembling.
He believed him. He believed him not because he wanted to, not because his body was telling him to, not because Brody’s scent was wrapping his brain in warm cotton.
Ren believed him because he had seen the casino basement.
He had worn the latex jumpsuit. He had felt the stares of fifty men sizing him up like cattle.
And he knew, with the certainty of someone who had experienced firsthand the machinery Brody described, that no one could speak of that world like that without having known it from the inside.
“How many?” Ren asked.
“How many what?”
“Omegas. How many have you brought out?”
“Twenty-three in five years.”
Twenty-three. The number pierced his chest like a fine needle. Twenty-three people who had been where he was. Twenty-three bodies that someone dressed, displayed, and sold. Twenty-three lives that Brody snatched from his own uncle’s hands with tainted money and lies sustained for years.
“And the ones you didn’t get out?”
Brody didn’t answer. But his face said it all. His jaw clenched to the point of inhumanity, his eye sockets sunken from lack of sleep, that red rim circling his gray irises like a wound that never quite healed.
Ren looked down at his own hands. Open now on his knees. Pale, thin, with knuckles still bruised from the punch he’d thrown at Brody that morning in the training room.
“Five minutes,” he murmured.
“What?”
“I told you five minutes. You’ve been here over fifteen.”
Brody looked at him. Ren raised his eyes and met something he couldn’t name on the alpha’s face. It wasn’t relief. It wasn’t a victory. It was something closer to the silent gratitude of someone who knows they received a chance they didn’t deserve.
“Do I stay or do I go?” Brody asked.
Ren leaned back against the headboard. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Go. I need to think.”
Brody nodded. He walked to the door without saying another word. But before he left, he paused with his hand on the doorframe.
“Your father and your brother won’t find you here. I give you my word.”
“Your word is worth as much as your last name, Kovac.”
The blow landed where Ren wanted it to. He watched Brody take it, his back tensing beneath the black fabric, his knuckles white against the wood of the doorframe. But he didn’t respond. He walked out and closed the door with a soft click that sounded louder than a slam.
The echo of raisins and walnuts faded into the air, leaving Ren alone with twenty-three ghosts he didn’t know but somehow understood better than anyone.