Chapter 21 #2
Ren didn’t sleep. He stayed sitting on the bed with his back against the headboard and his eyes fixed on the door, counting the hours by the light shifting on the other side of the indestructible window.
When the sun began to filter in golden strips across the carpeted floor, Ren was still in the same position, legs drawn up against his chest and arms wrapped around his knees.
The bolt turned mid-morning.
Sergei entered first, as always—a ritual of territorial occupation that Ren now found entirely predictable.
The Russian swept the room with his gaze, checked the intact window, the broken chair against the wall, the untouched food tray from the day before.
He said nothing. He never said anything.
He stepped aside and Dimitri Reznov entered with the stride of an owner, crossing the threshold the way a man enters his own sitting room.
He was wearing a dark gray suit without a tie and a white shirt open at the collar.
Silver hair combed back with something that gleamed in the window light.
He smelled of expensive tobacco and sandalwood, a scent that wasn’t unpleasant in itself but that triggered an instinctive nausea in Ren, the same way the proximity of any alpha who wasn’t Brody had repelled him since the bond had settled.
“You look better.”
Ren didn’t move. He remained seated on the bed with his legs crossed and his hands on his ankles, looking at an undefined point on the wall to Reznov’s left.
“You’ve eaten something, at least. That’s progress.”
He hadn’t eaten. Sergei had brought a second tray that morning and Ren had drunk the water and taken a bite of dry bread so as not to weaken himself, but the previous evening’s tray sat untouched on the side table. Reznov chose to overlook that contradiction, or didn’t see it.
Dimitri moved to the window and contemplated the garden outside with his hands in his trouser pockets.
From that angle his profile was almost paternal.
Jaw relaxed, shoulders without tension, the posture of a man enjoying a pleasant view on a Sunday morning.
Ren knew that calm was a tool as sharp as Sergei’s fists.
“You’re not going to talk to me.”
Silence.
“Very well.”
Reznov turned and leaned his hip against the ledge of the armored window. He crossed his arms.
“Then I’ll talk and you can decide whether it interests you to listen.”
Ren didn’t move his eyes from the wall. He counted the imperfections in the paint. One, two, three, four tiny flaws only visible because the sun was coming in at a low angle.
“I know you were with Brody Kovac.”
Five, six, seven. Ren counted. He didn’t move.
He didn’t blink faster or breathe differently because he had rehearsed this moment in his head for hours, sitting cross-legged in the center of the room, preparing himself for whatever Reznov might throw at him.
Brody’s name was the most obvious ammunition. Ren knew it. He’d been expecting it.
“It’s no secret, Ren. My men pulled you out of his car. Your clothes smelled of him. You smell of him.”
Reznov let the silence work for him for a few seconds.
“What I’m wondering is whether Brody understands what that might cost him.”
The eighth imperfection in the paint was shaped like a comma. Ren focused on it.
“Malachi doesn’t know where you’ve been these past weeks. Not yet. But I’m a naturally curious man and I have a habit of finding things out before sharing them.”
Reznov pushed away from the window and walked to the broken chair. He examined it as though it were a museum piece. He ran his fingers along the splintered leg.
“Brody has always had this tendency of his to collect broken things. Lost omegas, impossible causes. His uncle tolerates it because Brody is useful to him and because blood counts for something, but there are limits. Even for family.”
Ren counted the ninth imperfection. The tenth.
“Do you know what Malachi does when someone puts his business at risk?”
It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Reznov left precisely the right pause for the image to form on its own in the listener’s mind.
“He’s not a man who enjoys violence, I’ll grant you that. He’s violent on principle. For reputation. Because in this business reputation is the only thing that separates a man with power from a dead man. And his reputation has been… affected.”
Reznov released the broken chair leg and cleaned his fingers with a handkerchief he produced from his inside jacket pocket.
“Not only because of you. Two omegas were lost that night, not one.”
Ren stopped counting.
The movement was minimal. A blink that lasted a fraction of a second longer than normal. His jaw unclenching. The fingers on his ankles loosening just enough for someone observant to notice. And Reznov was observant.
The omega in the red latex.
Ren saw him every time he closed his eyes for too long.
That pale face under the auction room lights, dark eyes fixed straight ahead with a rigidity that wasn’t courage but pure dissociation, his body packed into that obscene jumpsuit while the men in the room appraised him like livestock.
Ren didn’t know his name. They hadn’t exchanged a single word.
But he had watched him tremble with fear, and something about the way the other omega had curled in on himself had lodged under Ren’s skin like a splinter he couldn’t extract.
He had escaped.
The triumph rose warm from his stomach. Small, silent, but fierce.
Someone else had run that night. Someone else had torn their body from the hands that meant to possess it and disappeared into the dark.
Ren didn’t smile. He didn’t change the expression on his face or look at Reznov or do anything that might betray the savage wave of satisfaction flooding his chest. But he felt it. He felt it completely.
“Two omegas in one night,” Reznov continued, his tone hardening by a degree.
“Seven hundred thousand for mine. Nine hundred thousand for the other. Malachi lost more than a million and a half dollars and the confidence of buyers who have been investing in his auctions for years. That kind of blow isn’t absorbed. It’s collected.”
Reznov approached the bed. He didn’t sit. He stood a meter from Ren, close enough for his shadow to fall across him.
“If Malachi discovers that his own nephew has been hiding one of the omegas who cost him that humiliation… Brody won’t only lose his position. He’ll lose something considerably harder to recover.”
Ren swallowed. The movement was involuntary, and he hated himself for it the moment it happened.
“Think about it. You have time. Not much, but some.”
Reznov moved toward the door. He stopped with his hand on the frame and turned halfway, offering Ren his patrician profile.
“Ren.”
The voice was softer. Almost pleasant. The kind of softness that precedes a blade.
“If you decide to abandon this pointless, defiant attitude you’ve been maintaining these past few days… perhaps I can forget that I know where you’ve been. And with whom.”
Sergei held the door for him. Reznov left. The bolt turned.
Ren stayed motionless on the bed with his eyes fixed on the closed door and his heart beating in his throat. He lowered his hand to his belly without thinking, a gesture that had already become automatic, and pressed his fingers against the fabric of his t-shirt.
Three days.
Ren had spent three days counting Sergei’s footsteps.
The creak of his left knee when he turned.
The exact four seconds it took him to set the tray on the bedside table.
The way the alpha always entered with his right shoulder first, leaving his left side exposed for a fraction of a second before he squared his body to face the room.
Four seconds. Left side. Knee that creaked.
It wasn’t much. Against an alpha Sergei’s size, it was almost nothing. But Ren had fought his whole life with almost nothing.
On the third night, when the light from the hallway filtered under the door and the bolt turned with its metallic click, Ren was sitting on the edge of the bed with his legs folded beneath him and his back hunched. The posture of a defeated omega. Of an animal that has stopped resisting.
Sergei entered with his right shoulder. Tray in his left hand. His eyes swept the room out of habit but lingered on Ren for only an instant, because the image was the same as it had been for the past three nights: a small blond body curled in on itself that posed no threat whatsoever.
Ren moved.
Not toward the door. Toward Sergei.
He used the bed as a springboard and drove his elbow at the guard’s throat.
Sergei dropped the tray with a crash of porcelain against the floor and turned his face just in time to take the blow on his jaw.
The impact vibrated through Ren from his elbow to his shoulder but he didn’t stop.
Second strike: a knee to the left leg, the one with the creaking knee.
Sergei grunted and his weight destabilized for half a second.
Half a second.
Ren slipped under his arm, made for the door. His fingers grazed the frame.
Sergei’s hand caught his ankle like a steel vice and Ren crashed face-first into the floor.
The impact split his lip against his teeth and the metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth.
He rolled instinctively, protecting his belly, and threw a blind kick that connected with something soft.
Sergei forced air out between clenched teeth.
Ren crawled. His knees burned against the wooden floor. Two meters to the door. A meter and a half. His fingertips scraped the baseboard of the frame when Sergei’s weight landed on him like an avalanche.
He couldn’t breathe.
The alpha pinned his right arm by twisting it up behind his back and planted his knee between Ren’s shoulder blades.
Ren kicked, shook his head, tried to bite his wrist. Sergei adjusted his grip and pressed Ren’s face against the floor with an open palm on the back of his neck.
Ren felt the cold of the wood against his crushed cheek and the pressure of bone against his split lip.
He growled. Not the growl of a submissive omega but an animal sound that rose from the depths of his chest, guttural and furious. He tensed every muscle in his body and tried to lift his torso against Sergei’s weight. He didn’t move him a centimeter.
Sergei increased the pressure on his neck. A warning. Ren felt his vertebrae protest with a crack and he stopped. Not because he surrendered but because his body had reached the limit of what it could give against an alpha who out massed him threefold.
They stayed like that. Both breathing hard. Sergei’s breath was heavy against the back of Ren’s skull, warm and rough. Ren’s was a wheeze through bloody teeth blowing against the floor in small red bubbles.
Sergei eased the pressure off his knee. Not entirely, but enough for Ren to expand his lungs. He released his neck but kept the arm twisted.
Ren turned his head.
He looked up at him from below, cheek pressed to the floor and mouth open in a smile that showed teeth stained red. Blood between his incisors. Blood on his gums. His blue eyes blazing feverishly beneath the strand of blond hair plastered to his forehead with sweat.
Sergei looked at him. Not with the blank gaze of the other nights but with something different, something Ren didn’t immediately identify because he wasn’t accustomed to seeing it directed at him from an alpha.
The guard’s dark eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared once, as though he were recalibrating something in his head.
He released his arm.
He stood slowly, not taking his eyes off Ren the way you keep your eyes on a wounded animal that can still bite. He took a step back. Two.
“Упрямый ублюдок.”
The words came out low and hoarse from the exertion. Ren didn’t understand a syllable, but he understood the tone. It wasn’t contempt. It wasn’t the condescension alphas reserved for omegas who dared raise a fist. It was something else.
Ren kept smiling from the floor with his red teeth.
Sergei shook his head once, as if to himself, and left the room.
The bolt turned.
The sound sank into Ren’s stomach like a stone but he didn’t move until Sergei’s footsteps had faded down the hallway. Then he curled up. His body folded in on itself like a dry leaf and his mouth opened in a silent groan he didn’t let out.
His arm burned from shoulder to wrist. His left knee throbbed where he’d hit it against the floor in the fall.
His split lip pulsed in time with his heartbeat and he could feel his face already swelling.
But none of that mattered as much as the sharp, brief stab that crossed his lower abdomen when he rolled onto his side.
He brought his hand to his stomach.
He closed his eyes. Breathed. Counted until the stab dissolved into nothing.
“We’re fine,” he whispered against his own fingers. “We’re fine.”
He lay curled on the floor of the room with his cheek resting on the cold wood and the blood drying on his chin. Everything hurt. Every muscle, every joint Sergei had forced, every centimeter of skin that had been slammed against hard surfaces.
But somewhere behind his ribs, beneath the pain, something beat that felt like a small victory. He had seen Sergei’s eyes. He had seen what they held.
Respect. Or something close to it.
It wasn’t much. Against a man like Reznov and a cage like this one, it was almost nothing.
But Ren had survived his whole life with almost nothing.