Chapter 21
He finished the last piece of bread without tasting it. He set the tray on the bedside table and remained sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands resting on his knees, breathing slowly. The weeping had dried up. The self-pity too. What remained was something colder, more useful: calculation.
He scanned the room with his eyes as though seeing it for the first time.
Four walls. High ceiling. Dark wood floor, well polished, expensive.
A double bed with white sheets. A bedside table on each side.
Two gray upholstered chairs beside a small table under the window.
A built-in wardrobe without a mirror. The bathroom door to the left.
The exit door facing the bed, solid, with an external bolt lock.
And the window.
Large. It occupied nearly the entire far wall.
Thick glass, a single fixed pane without hinges, without a handle, without any visible opening mechanism.
Beyond it, the night. Ren stood and approached.
He pressed his forehead against the glass.
Cold. Below, a side garden lit by ground-level lights that cast long shadows between hedges trimmed with a precision that felt obscene at this hour.
First floor. Perhaps four meters to the ground.
Maybe five. Grass below. Not concrete. Grass.
He moved away from the glass and returned to the bed. He sat. Looked at the tray. A white ceramic plate. A glass with the remains of water. And a plastic spoon.
Only a spoon. No fork, no knife. The food had been a soft stew that required no cutting.
All calculated. Ren picked up the spoon and turned it between his fingers.
Hard plastic, not the thin kind that snaps when bent.
The handle had a rounded edge but a certain rigidity.
It was nothing. Not a weapon, not a tool, not anything that could be of use in the hands of someone who wasn’t desperate enough.
Ren was desperate enough.
He got up and went to the door. He pressed his ear against the wood.
On the other side, nothing. Sergei didn’t talk, didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.
A guard trained to be a wall. Ren knelt in front of the lock and examined it closely.
A standard bolt lock, not a keyed one. The mechanism was activated from outside with a lever Ren had heard turn when they locked him in.
From inside there was only a circular keyhole, narrow, without a slot.
He inserted the end of the spoon handle into the hole.
It didn’t go in fully. He turned it. Plastic against metal.
The sound was minimal, a dry, faint click that meant nothing.
He pushed. Turned again. The plastic gave a millimeter at the edge and Ren straightened it with his fingers and tried again, this time applying lateral pressure to see if he could catch something inside the mechanism.
Nothing. The handle was too thick to reach the bolt and too flexible to generate the force he needed.
But he kept trying. Not because he believed it would work, but because he needed Sergei to open the door.
He made more noise. He scraped the metal with the plastic in quick, short movements that produced an intermittent, deliberate, irritating squeal. He counted the seconds. One. Two. Three. Four. Fi…
The bolt turned from outside with a sharp blow.
The door swung wide open and the mass of Sergei filled the frame like a block of concrete with eyes.
Ren stepped back. One step. Two. He raised his hands with his palms facing up in a gesture meant to look like surrender that was in fact measurement.
He measured the distance between Sergei’s chest and the hallway wall behind him.
He measured the speed at which the guard had opened it.
He measured the expression on his face: not alarm but pure irritation, jaw clenched, eyes narrowed, a vein standing out at his left temple.
Ren held out the spoon.
Sergei looked at it. Then looked at Ren.
His eyes swept the room looking for damage, destruction, any evidence of something more ambitious than an omega playing at lock-picking with a plastic spoon.
He found nothing because there was nothing.
Sergei snatched the spoon from Ren’s hand with a sharp tug that nearly took his fingers with it and produced a guttural sound that wasn’t a word in any language but whose meaning was universal: next time I won’t be this patient.
He turned. Closed the door. The bolt turned again.
Ren released the air he’d been holding since the door had opened.
Good. He now knew several things. One: Sergei took five seconds to react to noise.
Two: he opened the door in one movement, without peering in first, without caution, which meant he didn’t consider Ren a real threat.
Three: behind Sergei there was a hallway.
Ren had glimpsed a cream-colored wall and the corner of a painting before the guard’s bulk blocked everything.
But there was a hallway. There was space.
He filed the information away the same way he’d filed away the pregnancy: folded into a corner of his mind and sealed off from everything else.
The spoon was gone. They had taken the only tool he had, pathetic as it was. He had the room and everything it contained.
He looked at the chairs.
He looked at the window.
Four meters. Maybe five. Grass below. If he broke the glass, the noise would alert Sergei.
Five seconds. In five seconds Ren could be hanging from the frame and dropping.
The impact against the ground would be hard but not lethal if he landed right, if he rolled, if he protected his belly.
And then he’d have to run. Barefoot over grass, then over whatever lay beyond the garden, with no knowledge of the property layout, no idea how many guards were outside, no idea of anything.
But five seconds of a head start were five seconds of a head start.
He went to the nearest chair. It was heavier than it looked. Solid wood beneath the gray upholstery. Ren lifted it with both hands and gauged the weight, distributing it between his arms. He could throw it. Not with elegance but with enough force.
He positioned himself in front of the window two meters back. He spread his feet. Bent his knees. Breathed in. He swung the chair back once to build momentum and launched it at the glass with his full body weight behind the movement.
The chair hit the window with a brutal crash that reverberated through the entire room.
The glass didn’t break. Didn’t crack. Didn’t splinter.
The chair bounced back as though it had struck a steel wall and flew back toward Ren at a speed he hadn’t expected.
He threw himself to the floor on instinct.
The chair passed over him at the height his head had occupied half a second earlier and slammed into the opposite wall with a crack of splintered wood.
Ren lay face down on the floor, breathing ragged, heart hammering against his ribs. He turned slowly. The chair was on its side against the wall with one leg broken and the back twisted. The window was untouched. Not a mark. Not a scratch. Not the shadow of a crack.
Armored glass.
He pushed himself up to sitting and stared at the window with his mouth slightly open.
Reznov wasn’t stupid. Of course he wasn’t stupid.
A man who bought people didn’t leave windows that could be broken with a chair.
This room was not a guest room or a temporary lodging.
It was a cell designed to look like a bedroom.
Every detail, from the plastic spoon to the armored glass, from the exterior lock to the absence of a mirror in the wardrobe, had been designed to contain without allowing the contents to destroy themselves.
Because the contents were worth seven hundred thousand dollars.
Ren closed his mouth. Opened it again. Closed it.
The bolt didn’t turn. Sergei didn’t appear.
And that too was information: the walls of that room were thick enough or insulated enough that the crash of a chair against armored glass didn’t reach the hallway.
Or Sergei had heard and simply didn’t care because he knew as well as Ren did that the window would never give.
Both possibilities he’d considered had just died. The lock didn’t yield to a plastic spoon. The window didn’t yield to a solid wood chair. Ren looked at the door. Looked at the window. Looked at the ceiling. Looked at the floor.
He stood slowly. He walked to the exact center of the room, sat down cross-legged with his hands on his knees and stayed there, motionless, staring at the wall opposite without seeing it.
He needed to think. Not to react. To think.
The physical exits were sealed. Brute force was useless against an architecture designed to neutralize it.
Which meant that if there was a way out—and there had to be, because Ren refused to accept there wasn’t—it would not be a broken window or a forced lock.
It would be something else. Something that didn’t depend on muscles or tools he didn’t have.
Something that depended on what he did have.
He closed his eyes. Breathed deeply. The air in the room was neutral, clean, with no trace of anyone else’s pheromones. Neither Reznov nor Sergei had left an olfactory mark. Ren was alone with his own scent and the silence and a creature that weighed nothing and changed everything.
He remained there, seated in the center of his cell, eyes closed and hands on his knees, thinking.
The second night in the room with the armored glass was worse than the first. Not because of fear, which had already settled in as a constant hum behind his eyes, but because of the silence.
A thick, padded silence that reminded him of the cheap hotel rooms where Julian used to leave him waiting with instructions not to move until whichever alpha arrived.