Chapter 20 #2
“Sergei,” said Reznov, gesturing toward the guard with an elegant movement of his wrist, “will be your shadow from now on. He speaks nothing but Russian and has strict orders never to address you under any circumstances, so save yourself the effort of trying anything with him.”
Sergei crossed the room with heavy steps. He set the folded clothes on the bathroom counter through the open door. Then he placed the tray on the bedside table, close enough to Ren that he could smell the bread and something warm, soup, perhaps. His stomach didn’t react.
Reznov leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed. He was wearing a dark suit without a tie, his shirt collar open, a gold watch on his wrist that caught the light from the hallway.
“You should shower. You have blood on your face and in your hair.” A pause. “And eat. You’re no use to anyone starved.”
Ren didn’t turn his head. Didn’t blink. He kept his gaze fixed on the same point on the floor as though he had found something fascinating there, something that deserved his complete attention.
The air entered and left through his nose with a mechanical regularity that required no conscious participation on his part.
Reznov waited. Ten seconds. Twenty. The silence thickened between them until it was almost tangible.
“As you wish.”
His tone didn’t change. He didn’t grow angry, didn’t insist, didn’t threaten. He simply straightened from the doorframe, smoothed his lapel with an automatic gesture, and stepped out into the hallway. Sergei followed. The door closed.
The lock.
That sound. That definitive click of metal against metal that separated the world outside from the one within.
Ren knew it the way he knew the sound of his own breathing.
He had heard it every night for years in Julian Valois’s house, every time his father decided it was time for Ren to stop existing until he was needed again.
The click of the lock meant he was not a person, but a possession stored in its box.
And for weeks in Brody’s mansion there had been no lock.
No closed door, no key, no barrier of any kind.
Ren moved through the house wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted.
He slept with the door unbolted because Brody was beside him and there was nothing outside that room that could come in and be worse than loneliness.
And when Ren went out—to the gym or the library or the kitchen at three in the morning because the pregnancy gave him ridiculous cravings—no one barred his way.
Brody had taken away the locks.
And now he was dead.
The thought struck him with the force of something new, though it wasn’t.
He had been thinking it for hours, turning it over, chewing it without swallowing it.
But saying it inside his head with those exact words—Brody is dead—made something fracture in his chest differently to the fractures before.
“Idiot,” he whispered.
The word came out without air behind it, barely a movement of his lips.
“You fucking idiot.”
Louder. His fists clenched on his knees.
“You let yourself get killed.”
His voice bounced off the white walls of that room that smelled of industrial detergent and came back to him distorted, smaller, and more broken than he had intended.
Because that was the unforgivable thing.
Not that Reznov had captured him. Not that his father had sold him.
Not that the world’s design allowed alphas, who thought they owned everything, to exchange omegas as currency.
The unforgivable thing was that Brody Kovac had shown him what it felt like not to be afraid and then had let himself be shot through the chest for not having protected himself better, for not having been faster, for not having seen the bullet coming.
He had given him hope. That was the unforgivable thing.
He had told him that he would be there. He had promised with his actions and his pheromones and his body wrapped around Ren’s each night that there was a future without locks.
And Ren, fool that he was, had believed him.
Had stopped fighting the bond. Had opened his hands and released his rage and allowed himself to want something, to desire something, to need someone.
And now that someone had a hole in his chest, and Ren was locked in a room in Dimitri Reznov’s house with a Russian guard on the other side of the door, and a child in his belly who might no longer have a father.
He brought his hands to his stomach. Wrapped them around it. Pressed.
“I curse you, Brody Kovac,” he said through a closed throat. “I curse you for having existed.”
Because it would have been easier never to have known the difference.
It would have been easier to remain the Ren he had been before, the one who expected nothing from anyone and therefore could not be disappointed.
The one who knew that locks were the rule and not the exception.
The one who didn’t fall asleep wrapped in a scent of raisins and walnuts, thinking that tomorrow the world would still be a place where he had the right to take up space.
The food tray was getting cold on the bedside table.
Ren didn’t touch it. The clean clothes waited in the bathroom.
Ren didn’t get up. He stayed exactly where he was, sitting on the floor at the foot of a bed that wasn’t his, arms crossed over his belly and eyes dry because he had no tears left, and he hated Brody Kovac with every gram of strength remaining in his body because hating him was easier than admitting the alternative.
It was the cold that made him move.
Not willpower, not determination, not any noble thought about survival or resistance.
The cold. He had been sitting on the tiled floor for hours with his back against the metal frame of the bed and his body had gone numb in a way he recognized from childhood, from the nights when Julian locked him in the family’s basement home and the hours passed slow as tar until dawn came.
Back then it had also been the cold that moved him. Not fear. The cold.
He gripped the edge of the mattress and stood up .
His knees cracked. The muscles of his thighs protested, cramped from the position and from the blows he had taken in the car.
He stood still for a moment, swaying, eyes fixed on the closed door.
Behind it, Sergei was breathing. Ren could almost smell him through the wood: a stale, metallic scent, without nuance. An alpha without depth. A guard dog.
He turned toward the bathroom. The light inside was white, clinical, too bright when he pressed the switch.
He looked at himself in the mirror without meaning to but unable to help it.
His lower lip split. A violet bruise growing beneath his left eye.
Dried blood at his temple, on his neck, on his hands.
The blood on his hands wasn’t his.
Ren looked at his open palms. Lines of life crossed by channels of dark blood that had dried in the creases of his fingers, under his finger nails, between his knuckles.
Brody’s blood. It had gotten under his skin when he had pressed the chest wound, trying to stop the bleeding in those chaotic seconds inside the car.
The blood had welled up warm between his fingers, warmer than anything he had ever touched, and soaked through Brody’s shirt and Ren’s hands and the seat and everything.
He turned on the shower. The water took time to heat.
He removed the clothes he had put on, he couldn’t remember when, and stepped under the spray even though it wasn’t quite warm yet.
The shock of cold water against his skull made him clench his teeth.
Then the heat came. Gradual, persistent, deep.
It worked its way into his muscles and his bones and something further in, something that had no name but had been frozen for hours.
He stood there, letting the water fall over him without moving, arms hanging at his sides and eyes closed.
Images. The windshield exploding. Brody’s head snapping back as though pushed by an invisible hand.
The wet sound of the bullet’s impact against his chest. The car slamming into them from the side with a violence that reminded him of two enormous animals colliding.
The metal folding around Brody’s legs like closing fingers.
Jax’s voice shouting something through the phone that Ren didn’t understand because the world had shrunk to the size of the wound in Brody’s chest and the warmth of the blood between his fingers.
And then the arms that tore him from the car. The blows. The darkness.
Ren opened his eyes and looked at his hands under the stream.
The water ran pink between his fingers, carrying Brody’s blood toward the drain.
He scrubbed. He used the soap someone—Sergei, probably—had left on a shelf.
He scrubbed his palms, the backs of his hands, and beneath his finger nails.
He scrubbed until his skin turned red and the water stopped coloring and ran clear.
But the smell remained. Not the blood. The other one.
Raisins, walnuts, something that recalled freshly baked bread on a winter morning.
Brody’s scent embedded in his pores at a level that soap couldn’t reach.
Ren knew from what he had read in the library that the smell of a fated mate couldn’t be eliminated with water or chemistry.
It lived in the skin at a cellular level.
It would remain there as long as Brody was alive.
He stopped.
As long as Brody was alive.
If the scent was still there, it meant the bond hadn’t broken. Because a bond like theirs only breaks with death.
Ren stood motionless under the stream with his hands open before his face and his heart hammering against his ribs.
It wasn’t a certainty. It was a possibility, fragile and slippery as the soap between his fingers.
Perhaps the scent took time to fade. Perhaps the body needed time to register the loss.
But perhaps not. Perhaps Brody was still breathing somewhere, with a hole in his chest and his legs trapped in the crumpled metal of a car, but breathing.
He would not lean on that. He would not build anything on an olfactory hypothesis in the middle of the night in the shower of his cell. But he kept it. He folded it and placed it in a corner of his mind, and let nothing else in.
He soaped his entire body. He scrubbed his arms, his neck, his legs, his chest. He avoided his stomach until he couldn’t avoid it any longer.
He passed his hand over his belly with a care he gave to no other part of himself and left it there a moment.
Flat. Silent. Too early for anything to show, and yet Ren knew what was inside.
A tiny thing, formless, nameless still, entirely dependent on him.
On him. Not his father. Not Reznov. Not a judge or a law or any alpha who believed he had the right to decide who was whose property.
Because that was what Reznov believed. And what the law guaranteed him.
Ren understood this with a clarity that admitted no self-deception: before any court in that country, what had happened on the road was not a kidnapping but the lawful recovery of property.
Julian Valois had signed the transfer. Julian was his legal guardian.
Omegas could never gain legal independence.
Never. There was no mechanism, no precedent, not a single law anywhere in the civil code that contemplated the possibility of an omega existing outside the guardianship of an alpha, whether father, husband, or buyer.
The auction contract was as legal as any bill of sale for any movable property.
Ren was movable property.
He had been since the day his second nature manifested at fourteen, and Julian looked at him with a smile Ren didn’t understand until much later. That smile said: Now you’re worth something. Not as a son. As an asset.
He turned off the tap. The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the drip of water falling from his hair to the floor of the shower tray.
He dried himself with the towel next to the sink.
He dressed in the clothes Sergei had left: gray cotton trousers and a plain white t-shirt.
Institutional clothing. Clothing of belonging.
He looked at himself in the mirror a second time.
The same bruised face. The same blue eyes, too pale for the darkness they contained.
But something had changed between the first time he had looked and this one.
The first time he had seen a victim. Now he saw someone who carried inside him a card that no one knew existed.
Reznov had bought an omega without a mark, without a bond, without a pregnancy.
That was the merchandise for which he had paid seven hundred thousand dollars.
What he had received was something else entirely.
Growing inside Ren was the child of a Kovac.
The nephew of Malachi. And if there was one thing Ren knew about alphas, it was that the blood of their lineage carried a weight that no bill of sale could override.
He would not be weak. He had never been. Not when Julian dragged him by the arm to a stranger’s room. Not when the casino betas tore the clothes from him. Not when he ran barefoot through empty streets, not knowing if the next corner would return him to hell. And not now. Not with this inside him.
He leaned on the sink with both hands and looked himself in the eyes in the mirror.
“You are going to survive this,” he said quietly, addressing his belly as much as himself.
He left the bathroom. The food tray was still on the bedside table.
He sat on the edge of the bed, drew it close and ate slowly, without hunger, without desire, chewing each mouthful as an act of discipline.
Because his body needed nourishment and whatever his body needed, he would give it.
He no longer had the luxury of surrender.