Chapter 20
The cigar smoke rose in slow spirals toward the double-height ceiling.
Dimitri Reznov occupied a cognac-colored leather armchair with the ease of a man who doesn’t rise for anyone, legs crossed, a glass of whiskey resting on the armrest. The ice had long since stopped clinking. The amber liquid barely moved.
Ren felt himself released. The hands of the alpha, who had been carrying him, set him down on the marble with just enough care to ensure nothing of value broke. Not the care one takes with a person. The care one takes with a fragile package whose contents belong to someone else.
Reznov looked down at him. He didn’t lean forward. He didn’t approach. His eyes moved over the swollen cheekbone, the dried blood at his temple, the zip ties marking his wrists, the posture folded in on itself with arms crossed over his abdomen. The smile that curved his lips was in no hurry.
“It seems the escape didn’t agree with you.”
The voice was soft. Measured. The tone of a man commenting on the weather while watching a wounded animal at the side of the road.
Reznov took a long pull on his cigar. The ember flared orange and then died.
The smoke left his mouth in a controlled exhalation that dissolved over Ren’s head like an obscene benediction.
Ren didn’t answer. Not because he didn’t want to. Because his jaw throbbed with each heartbeat, and his tongue tasted of copper, and the words had gotten trapped somewhere between his stomach and his throat, blocked by nausea and panic and something else he didn’t want to name.
Reznov took a sip of whiskey. Savored it. Then moved his head a fraction. A minimal gesture, barely a tilt of the chin to the right.
The two alphas flanking Ren understood with no verbal instruction.
One of them grabbed Ren from under his arms. The other took hold of his bound feet.
They lifted him from the floor with the mechanical efficiency of men who have done the same thing dozens of times.
Ren twisted. The movement sent a stabbing pain from his cheekbone to the base of his skull and another from his ribs to his belly, and he stopped twisting.
They carried him out of the sitting room.
The last thing he saw before losing the angle of vision was Reznov raising his whiskey glass to his lips without looking at him.
As though Ren had already ceased to exist within his field of attention.
As though he were a piece of furniture that had just been moved aside so someone could clean underneath.
The stairs. Each floating steel step transmitted the alphas’ footsteps like a metallic pulse. Ren counted twelve before they turned down a hallway. Recessed lights cast white rectangles on the floor at regular intervals. Closed doors on both sides. One of them opened.
The room was large. A floor to ceiling window occupied the far wall, and the city’s nocturnal light spilled through the glass, casting long shadows across a bed with white sheets.
A bathroom visible through a half-open door.
Dark tiles. Chrome fixtures. Everything was immaculate. Everything sterile.
A pretty cage.
They set him on the floor. The first alpha produced a pair of scissors from his pocket and cut the ankle ties. Then the wrist ties. The plastic gave way with a dry snap, and the blood returned to Ren’s hands in a burning tingle that wrung a grunt from between his clenched teeth.
He didn’t wait for his fingers to recover their feeling.
He launched himself forward from the floor.
His legs failed at the first step, his knees unsteady from the time immobilized, but the momentum carried him far enough for his fist to reach the nearest alpha’s side.
A powerless blow that landed on the man’s ribs and produced no more effect than a stone thrown against a concrete wall.
The alpha didn’t even look at him. He pushed him away with a shove to the chest that sent him stumbling back three steps.
The door closed.
The sound of the electronic lock engaging filled the room. A short beep, a click, silence.
Ren threw himself against the door. Beat it with open palms. Then with his fists. Then pressed his forehead against the smooth, icy surface and beat that too, once, twice, three times, eyes shut and teeth buried in his lower lip until the copper taste came back.
“Open the damn door.”
His voice bounced off the walls and returned to him empty. No one answered. The alphas’ footsteps retreated down the hallway until they could no longer be heard.
Ren slid his forehead down the door. Then his hands. His fingers left damp marks on the white surface as they descended, his knees giving a fraction at a time, his body closing the distance between himself and the floor until there was no more distance to close.
He sat with his back against the door. Legs folded. Arms wrapped around himself. Chin against his chest.
And then it came.
Not fear of Reznov. Not the pain of his cheekbone, or his ribs, or his head that throbbed like a second broken heart. What came was the image of Brody behind the wheel with a hole in his chest.
The blood soaking through the gray shirt Ren had watched him put on that morning while they were getting dressed together in the bedroom.
The blood spread through the fabric with obscene speed, darkening it from the center outward like ink spilled on blotting paper.
Brody’s eyes searching for his. Brody’s mouth telling him to go.
Brody’s hand that never reached his because the embedded door had his legs trapped and he couldn’t move.
Ren had tried to pull him free. He had hauled on his shoulders with everything he had left and Brody had groaned in pain and the blood had welled faster and Ren had let go of his shoulders because he was making it worse; he was killing him with his own hands in trying to save him.
And then the alphas had opened his door and Ren had fought them, but it hadn’t been enough. It was never enough. His body was never enough against theirs. He could train every day for the rest of his life, and he would still be an omega against three alphas, and the result would always be the same.
The sob came from his chest like something solid, like it had edges, like it could cut his throat on the way out. He doubled over. His forehead touched his knees. His hands seized his own hair and pulled because he needed to feel a pain he could control, one that came from his own choices.
“Brody.”
His name tasted different when he said it through tears. It tasted of raisins and walnuts and the t-shirt Brody slept in and the sound of his breathing in the dark when he had promised he would stay.
Ren’s shoulders shook. His whole body shook.
And the worst of it, what drove his nails into his skull with the most force, was that he didn’t know whether Brody was alive.
The last image he had was the hole in his chest and the blood and those gray eyes losing focus.
And Ren had left him there. Not because he wanted to.
Because three pairs of hands had torn him from the car the way you tear a branch from the trunk it belongs to.
He brought his hands to his belly. Wrapped them around it with his fingers spread wide as though he could build a wall from the bones of his own hands.
“We’re alone,” he whispered.
The tears ran down his swollen cheekbone, and the contact of the salt water with the broken skin stung, but he didn’t wipe them away.
He let them fall on his knees, on his hands, on the floor of that room that wasn’t his and that smelled of nothing.
Of clean. Of absence. Of the complete opposite of the scent of home he had learned to need.
The hours dragged like wounded things across the floor of that room.
Ren didn’t move from his position against the door for what felt like an eternity.
Then, when his back burned so badly he could no longer ignore it, he got up and walked to the bed.
He didn’t lie down on it. He sat on the floor at its foot, knees against his chest, and rested his head against the edge of the mattress.
The light from the window changed. It turned orange, then purple, then deep blue.
Ren watched the transformation without really seeing it.
His eyes registered the colors but his mind was somewhere else, trapped in a loop of images he couldn’t stop: the gray shirt soaking red, Brody’s mouth forming words Ren had refused to obey, the crunch of metal compressing around the alpha’s legs.
He wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t thirsty. He had nothing that wasn’t this dull emptiness where the bond used to pull at him like an invisible thread.
Because he couldn’t feel it anymore.
Or perhaps he could feel it, but so faintly, so distant, that he didn’t know if it was real or if his mind was manufacturing something to keep itself from shattering entirely.
The books he had read in Brody’s library spoke of this: how the bond between fated mates could be perceived across a distance like a pulse, like an echo of the other’s heartbeat.
Ren searched for that echo inside himself and found silence.
A silence that could mean distance or could mean death.
He dug his nails into his forearms.
The darkness was complete when he heard footsteps in the hallway. Several pairs of feet. The lock turned with a metallic click that resonated through the empty room, and the door swung open, letting in a strip of yellow light that cut into his eyes.
“Good evening.”
Reznov’s voice. Soft, measured, like a late-night radio presenter. Ren didn’t lift his head. He kept his eyes fixed on an undefined point on the floor, between his own bare feet and the leg of the bedside table.
Reznov entered, followed by an enormous man, broader than he was tall, with the thick neck of a bull and hands the size of frying pans. The man carried a tray in one hand and a small bundle of clothing in the other.