Chapter 19
The gray sedan had vanished.
Ren noticed it first in Brody’s silence, in the way his eyes stopped alternating between the road and the rearview mirror and stayed fixed on the mirror for three, four, five seconds.
“Jax.”
“I see it. Or rather, I don’t, which is the problem.”
“Where did it go?”
“It turned off two blocks back.”
Ren sat up in his seat and looked over his shoulder. The road behind them was empty. The streetlights of the residential neighborhood cast yellowish circles on the clean asphalt. The mansion gates swept past on both sides like the ribs of some enormous animal.
“That’s not good,” Jax’s voice came through the speaker, flat.
“I know.”
“They don’t just disappear like that. Either they’ve lost us, which I doubt, or…”
The windshield exploded.
Not in a burst. A dry, almost surgical crack, followed by a shower of fragmented glass that rained over Ren like sharp hail. He squeezed his eyes shut on instinct, covered his face with his arms, and when he opened them, he saw the hole. Clean. Round. Level with Brody’s chest.
Brody’s mouth was open. Not in surprise.
In something more basic. His hands were still on the wheel but no longer gripping it; his fingers had gone slack like those of someone falling asleep.
A dark stain was spreading across his gray shirt from a point just below his left collarbone, soaking the fabric with a speed that didn’t seem possible.
“Brody.”
The car veered right. Ren grabbed the wheel with one hand and pulled, but Brody’s foot was still on the accelerator, and the vehicle lurched forward in an erratic arc that carried them out of the lane.
The impact came from Brody’s side.
Metal against metal. The most violent sound Ren had ever heard, a roar of iron that compressed his eardrums and slammed him into the passenger window with a force that emptied his lungs.
The seatbelt bit into his chest and shoulder.
His head bounced off the side window, which cracked but didn’t give.
For a second, maybe two, the world stopped making sense.
Up and down blurred together. Gravity pulled him in a direction he didn’t recognize.
Then, silence.
No. Not silence. A sharp, continuous ringing that bored into his left ear. And beneath it, as if through water, Jax’s voice shouting something through the speaker of the phone that had fallen to the floor among the broken glass.
Ren blinked. The taste of blood filled his mouth. He’d bitten his tongue, or his lip, or both. The cap Brody had put on him was somewhere on the dashboard, crumpled among shards of windshield.
“Brody.”
He looked at him.
The driver’s door no longer existed as such.
Brody’s legs were trapped against the seat as the door panel folded inward, a result of the disappeared gray sedan striking with such force, and Ren could see it now embedded in the side of their car like a steel parasite.
The steering wheel pinned him against the backrest. The stain on his shirt was no longer a stain; it was an entire map, dark red, spreading from his collarbone to his seatbelt.
Brody’s gray eyes were watching him. Open. Conscious. But with a watery brightness Ren had never seen in them before.
“Get out of the car.”
Brody’s voice didn’t sound like Brody’s voice. It sounded wet. Broken by something that was bubbling inside his chest.
“No.”
Ren unbuckled his seatbelt with fingers that trembled uncontrollably.
He turned toward Brody, knelt on his own seat and pressed both hands against his chest. The blood was warm.
Warm and slippery, and it wouldn’t stop.
It wouldn’t stop. He pressed the wound with both palms, and Brody hissed in pain, arching his back as much as the twisted metal would allow.
“You need to go.”
“Shut up.”
“Ren…”
“I said shut up!”
He tried to move him. Slid his hands under Brody’s arms and pulled.
Brody let out a groan, an animal sound that rose from the deepest part of his chest, and Ren saw why he wasn’t moving: the warped door had him trapped from the knee to the thigh of his left leg.
The metal had folded around him like a jaw.
“I can’t get you out.”
The words came out without permission. He hadn’t wanted to say them. Saying it made it real.
“I know.” Brody coughed. A fine spray flecked his lips. “That’s why you have to go.”
Jax’s voice erupted from the floor of the car, from the phone still connected among the shattered glass.
“Ren! REN! Someone answer me, for fuck’s sake!”
Ren lunged down and grabbed the phone. His hand was shaking so badly he nearly dropped it.
“Brody’s been shot! They shot him and I can’t get him out, the door has him pinned!”
“Where are you exactly?”
“I don’t know! Near the mansion, three or four blocks away!”
“I’m coming. Two minutes.”
“We don’t have two minutes!”
And they didn’t. Because the doors of the gray sedan opened. Both at once: the driver’s and the rear passenger’s. And from a third door Ren hadn’t seen, a white van parked behind the sedan with its headlights off like the dead eyes of a nocturnal animal, a third figure emerged.
Three men. Three alphas. He knew it by the way they moved, by the width of their shoulders, by the heavy cadence of their footsteps on the asphalt. One of them was holding something. Not a weapon. Something worse: a plastic zip tie.
“Ren,” Brody’s hand closed around his wrist. Blood on his fingers. Blood everywhere. “Run.”
Ren looked at him. Held his gaze. Placed his hand against his cheek and felt the feverish heat of his skin and the erratic pulse beating at his jaw.
“I’m not leaving you.”
The passenger door opened.
The first alpha’s hand reached in before his body did, searching for Ren’s arm, and Ren met it with a kick that connected with his solar plexus.
The man doubled over. Ren kicked again, this time at his face, and felt the satisfying crunch of cartilage under his sneaker.
The alpha staggered back, howling, hands clutching his nose.
The second came through the same side. Bigger.
More prepared. Ren threw a punch that caught him on the jaw but barely moved him.
The alpha seized his forearm and yanked.
Ren sank his teeth into the hand gripping him.
He bit until he tasted someone else’s blood, until bone scraped against his incisors. The alpha roared and let go.
Ren scrambled back over Brody, placing himself between him and the open door. Brody’s blood was soaking through his jeans. He could smell it mingling with the scent of raisins and walnuts that was fading with every second that passed.
The third alpha didn’t grab him. He circled the car from behind. Ren spotted him in the side mirror, still hanging from its shattered mount. He was coming from his side. They were going to catch him in a pincer.
“No!”
He launched himself at the one in front with his full body weight.
Elbow to the throat. Knee to the groin. Everything Jax had taught him in their training sessions, every technique, every dirty trick, every move designed to compensate for the mass difference between an omega and an alpha.
He landed a clean blow to the second man’s solar plexus and watched him stagger.
But the third was already there.
He wrapped both arms around Ren’s torso from behind.
Ren kicked. Threw his head back, aiming for the nose, and caught him on the chin instead.
The impact rattled his own skull and filled his vision with white stars, but he didn’t stop.
He slammed his heels into the alpha’s shins.
He twisted like something wild and desperate.
The screech of tires came like a thunderclap.
Jax.
He saw him get out of the car before it had fully stopped.
He moved with a fluidity that didn’t match his size, as though gravity didn’t apply the same rules to him.
The first alpha, the one with the broken nose, barely had time to turn before Jax’s fist connected with his temple in a blow that sounded like a bat striking a watermelon.
He crumpled. Jax didn’t stop. He moved to the second, grabbed him by the collar of his jacket, lifted him, and slammed him against the hood of the gray sedan with a methodical violence that looked less like rage than pure efficiency.
But the third alpha still had Ren. And there was another car.
Black. No plates. It pulled up alongside the van in a controlled skid. The rear door swung open on its own.
The alpha holding him lifted him off the ground. Ren screamed. Not a scream of fear, but a guttural, primal scream, the cry of an animal being torn from its pack. He clawed at the surrounding arms. He twisted, freed one arm and struck backward, aiming for eyes, throat, any soft point.
“Brody!”
Brody’s voice didn’t come. Or it came too weakly to cut through the chaos.
The alpha shoved him into the black car. Ren beat against the door, the window, the seat, everything. Other hands inside the car pinned his arms while the first man held his legs. The door slammed shut.
The engine roared. The tires screamed. And through the rear window Ren watched Jax sprinting after them, his legs eating up meters of asphalt at a speed impossible for a man his size, and the black car leaving him behind.
The last thing he saw before the street disappeared around a corner was Brody’s wrecked car under the yellow light of a streetlamp.
The passenger door hung open like a mouth.
And inside, invisible from that distance but present in every fiber of his body, the scent of raisins and walnuts guttering out like a candle starved of air.
Ren’s fist connected with the alpha’s cheek and twisted his head to one side.
He didn’t wait to see the effect. He drove his elbow toward his throat, missed by centimeters, and caught the collarbone.
The car rocked with each impact, the leather seats squealing under the struggle of two bodies that didn’t fit in that cramped space.