Chapter 19 #2
The alpha growled something in a language Ren didn’t recognize.
He grabbed Ren by the hair. Ren dug his fingers into the wrist holding him, drove his nails in until he felt the skin give, and with his other hand went for the eyes.
The alpha turned his face just in time. Ren’s fingers raked his temple and left four red furrows that bled.
From the front seat, the driver shouted something. An order. A complaint. Ren didn’t process it. His world had shrunk to that square meter of back seat, to the solid body pinning him, to the metallic smell of someone else’s blood mixed with stale sweat that turned his stomach.
He threw a knee. Aiming for the groin. Found the thigh instead. The impact was enough to make the alpha loosen his grip on his hair for half a second. Ren used it to twist and headbutt him on the bridge of the nose. Bone against cartilage. A wet crack. The alpha let go.
Ren pressed himself against the car door. Pulled the handle. Locked. He hit the window with his elbow. Nothing. Reinforced or armored, the glass didn’t even vibrate.
The alpha wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his hand. His eyes had changed. The professional indifference of a hired thug following orders was gone. There was something personal there now. Something broken.
He launched himself at Ren. Ren raised both arms. He blocked the first punch with his left forearm.
The second slipped through his guard and caught him in the ribs.
Air out of his lungs. Ren doubled over, but kept his arms up.
He couldn’t lower his arms. He kept his elbows pressed tight against his torso, against his belly, because there was something there to protect, something tiny and invisible that weighed more than his entire body.
The third punch caught his right side. The fourth aimed for the center of his body.
Ren turned at the last instant and took the impact on his hip. But the momentum of the fist compressed his lower abdomen. It wasn’t a direct blow. It was a graze. A pressure. Enough.
The world stopped.
Not the pain. Pain was secondary, was noise. What paralyzed him was terror. A terror so absolute and crystalline it erased everything else: the fight, the car, the alpha’s smell, the memory of Brody bleeding out. All of it vanished except the certainty that something fragile had just been struck.
His arms folded over his belly. He curled inward. Fetal position against the leather seat. Knees drawn up, forearms crossed over his abdomen, chin tucked into his chest.
The alpha didn’t hesitate.
The first punch caught his left cheekbone.
Ren’s head bounced off the armored window.
A white flash tore through his vision. The second blow hit his right temple.
The third, the same temple again. Or maybe it was the same punch repeating.
Or maybe there were five. Ren lost count.
He lost the sequence. The pain became a dull roar filling his skull like water flooding a sinking ship.
He didn’t let go of his belly. His arms stayed where they were, even as the rest of his body stopped responding. He felt something close around his wrists. Plastic. Zip ties. The dry click of a clasp pulling his hands together. Then his ankles. The same plastic. The same click.
The darkness didn’t come all at once. It settled in from the edges, like ink spilled in water, obscuring first the corners of his vision and then the center.
The last thing he saw clearly was the padded ceiling of the car, light gray, with a round mark that could have been a courtesy light or the sun seen from the bottom of a well.
After that, fragments.
The vibration of the engine traveling through the seat into his ribs. A curve that rolled him toward the door. A sharp brake that threw him forward and the ankle ties cutting into his skin as they bit against the bone.
The sound of an engine reverberating in an enclosed space. Echo. Concrete.
Hands under his arms. They lifted him from the seat as though he weighed nothing. They slung him over a shoulder. The position compressed his diaphragm and sent a wave of nausea surging up his throat. Ren opened his eyes.
Polished concrete floor. Cars lined up in rows.
Gray columns with numbers painted white.
An underground parking garage. The fluorescent lights bored into his retinas every time he opened his eyelids, so he kept them half-closed, catching glimpses.
An elevator. Steel doors. The muffled sound of a hydraulic mechanism lifting them.
The clarity came all at once when the elevator doors opened.
White marble. Smoked glass panels. A floating staircase of brushed steel rising toward an open second floor. Indirect lighting embedded in the ceiling like a scar of light. Everything clean and cold. Everything designed to make cruelty look like refinement.
Ren knew that lobby.
He had seen it two months ago, when Julian Valois had told him to have dinner with the alpha who would forgive his latest debt.
The alpha had taken him to a luxury restaurant and treated him with every appearance of respect.
But afterward he had invited him for a drink at his home, and there every trace of respect had evaporated.
He had made Ren kneel before him and forced his cock into his mouth, had come down his throat and made him swallow as though it were the nectar of the gods.
Damn him. Damn the garish, eccentric steel-and-glass mansion of Dimitri Reznov too.
The alpha carrying him lowered him from his shoulder and deposited him on the marble floor.
The zip ties kept him from standing. His knees struck the polished surface, and the impact drew a groan from him that sounded distant, as though it belonged to another body.
Ren raised his head. Blood from his own cheekbone dripped onto the white marble in small, dark drops that looked like crushed cherries.
His bound hands were still folded over his belly.