Chapter 22 #2
The gray eyes crinkled at the corners. Brody reached up and tore the balaclava off in one pull.
His dark hair fell across his forehead, sweat-damp, flattened.
There was a cut on his left cheekbone that was bleeding.
His skin was paler than Ren remembered, almost gray in that light.
But alive. With his jaw clenched and his shoulders tense and his breathing labored, but alive, upright, whole.
Ren lowered the wood.
He didn’t run to him. He didn’t throw himself into his arms. He stood there with his feet rooted to the floor and his knuckles white around the wood and his eyes fixed on Brody’s as though looking away might make him disappear.
“I watched you die.”
Brody took a step toward him. Just one.
“I didn’t die.”
His voice came out low, scraped, as though he’d been using it to shout for too long. Ren saw then that he was moving carefully, that his left hand was braced against the wall, and that beneath the tactical vest something bulged across his chest in a way that wasn’t normal.
The bullet wound. Bandaged, patched, held together by whatever was keeping him on his feet. But there.
“Let’s go.”
Brody extended his right hand toward him. Palm open, long fingers stained with something dark.
Ren let the piece of wood fall. The sound it made against the floor was insignificant compared to the chaos still roaring on the other side of the walls. He put his hand in Brody’s and the alpha’s fingers closed around his with a force that made his knuckles crack.
The scent of raisins and walnuts hit him like a wave.
The steel of the gun was warm when Ren closed his fingers around the grip.
Brody had been carrying it against his back, under the vest, and the metal had retained the heat of his body like a second skin.
Ren checked the weight, adjusted his grip, slid his thumb across the safety.
He didn’t thank him for the gesture. There was no need.
Brody pivoted on his heel and set off down the service passage with his left hand still grazing the wall. Ren followed a step behind, the gun pressed against his thigh, eyes sweeping the corners.
They didn’t speak.
There was no need for that either.
The passage opened into a wide distribution hall connecting the service area with the east wing of the mansion.
Two shadows waited against the opposite wall: one enormous, almost absurd in its size, which could only be Jax; the other more compact, broad shoulders and feet planted in a combat stance, which Ren recognized as Rocco by the way he held his head, always slightly tilted, like an animal listening for frequencies no one else could pick up. Both hooded, both armed.
Jax raised two fingers toward Brody. Pointed at the ceiling. Second floor.
Brody nodded.
They climbed the main staircase in formation.
Jax first, Brody behind, Ren pressed close to his back, Rocco covering the rear.
The marble steps were spattered with something Ren chose not to identify.
A body lay on the intermediate landing, face up, eyes open and staring at the crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling three floors above. Ren stepped over it without stopping.
On the second floor landing a guard came through a side door with his gun raised.
He didn’t get to aim. Jax intercepted him with a movement that was more mechanics than violence: arm extended, wrist rotation, a dry impact against the wall.
The guard crumpled and Jax took his weapon without breaking stride.
The main hallway of the east wing opened before them, long, lit by brass wall sconces casting golden circles on the pearl-gray carpet.
Three doors on each side. At the far end, the double doors of Reznov’s master suite.
Ren recognized them. He had never been inside but Sergei had once indicated them with a tilt of his chin when Reznov took him from his room to have dinner in the dining room.
A guard emerged from the second door on the left. Brody fired without slowing his pace. The suppressor reduced the sound to a wet crack, like a branch breaking underwater. The guard hit the door frame and slid to the floor, leaving a red line on the lacquered wood.
Another came out of the last door on the right. Rocco dealt with him from behind. Ren heard two muffled shots and the thud of a body hitting the floor.
They reached the double doors.
Brody stopped. He looked at Jax. Jax positioned himself to one side, Rocco to the other. Brody placed his hand on the brass handle and pressed it down slowly, the way you enter your own home.
The doors swung inward.
Dimitri Reznov’s suite was exactly as Ren had imagined it: obscene.
A room the size of an apartment, four-meter ceilings, burgundy velvet curtains falling to the floor, a four-poster bed that looked like a monument to something Ren preferred not to think about.
A fireplace burning despite the heating being on. Mirrors. Too many mirrors.
And in the center of it all, Dimitri Reznov.
Seated in a leather armchair beside the fireplace. Legs crossed. A glass of something amber in his right hand, held between three fingers as though he were in a private club waiting for someone to bring him the cigar menu. The fire gilded one side of his face and left the other in shadow.
Two guards flanked the armchair. Armed, tense, eyes jumping between the four intruders who had just entered the room.
Jax raised his weapon at the one on the left. Rocco aimed at the one on the right.
Silence.
Reznov took a sip from his glass.
The two guards looked at each other. Looked at Reznov.
Looked at the guns pointed at them. The one on the left was the first to raise his hands, slowly, and walk toward the door in sideways steps without turning his back on anyone.
The one on the right followed three seconds later.
Their footsteps faded down the stairs and disappeared.
Reznov clicked his tongue.
“Good help is so hard to find these days. There was a time when a man could trust that loyalty would last at least until the end of the evening.”
He stood. The movement was slow, deliberate, the glass still in his hand.
Tall. Elegant even now, his three-piece suit immaculate, his silver hair combed back without a strand out of place.
As though the house weren’t full of his fallen men.
As though the broken glass and the gunshots and the blood on the stairs were a minor inconvenience, an interruption to his nightly routine.
Brody pulled off the balaclava with his free hand. His dark hair fell across his forehead again, damp, stuck to his skin. The cut on his cheekbone was still bleeding.
Reznov looked at him. Then looked at Ren. Ren felt those calculating eyes move across him like a scanner, cataloging, measuring, assessing.
“Kovac,” said Reznov, as though pronouncing the name of a wine that failed to impress him.
“My contract with the omega’s guardian is legal.
Signed, registered, binding. You can play soldier all you like, but in the eyes of the law that omega belongs to me for twelve months, and neither you nor your little band of costumed thugs is going to change that. ”
Brody didn’t respond.
He advanced.
Reznov took half a step back. Only half.
Then he stopped, as though retreating further would concede something his pride wouldn’t allow.
Brody covered the remaining distance in three long strides, circled the armchair and seized Reznov from behind.
His right arm crossed the man’s chest like a steel bar.
His left—the injured side—closed around his throat with a sound that Brody suppressed between clenched teeth.
The whiskey glass struck the wooden floor and shattered into a fan of amber shards.
Reznov fought back. His shoulders tried to turn, his hands seized Brody’s forearm, his feet searched for traction on the floor.
It didn’t last long. Brody squeezed and Reznov’s body went rigid against his chest, his back pinned to the tactical vest, his head forced upward by the pressure of the arm at his throat.
And then Brody turned him toward Ren.
Like an offering.
Ren was four steps away. The gun in his right hand, the barrel pointing at the floor. He looked at Reznov. Reznov looked at him.
The Russian’s eyes conveyed no fear. They conveyed calculation.
Probabilities. Angles of negotiation. He was looking at Ren the same way he had looked at him in the auction room, the same way he had looked at him every time he entered his room: as something he owned and would continue to own because the law and the money and the entire world were on his side.
Ren took a step.
Another.
He stopped in front of Reznov. Close enough to smell his expensive cologne mixed with the sweat beginning to bead at his temples. Close enough to see the veins standing out in his neck under the pressure of Brody’s arm.
Ren hesitated.
Not out of fear. Not out of compassion. But because killing someone was something that couldn’t be undone.
There was no going back, no draft to delete, no way to return the air to a body that had stopped breathing.
It was an act that became part of whoever committed it, permanently.
Ren knew this with the cold clarity of someone who has had too much time to think in locked rooms.
And then he remembered.
Reznov’s voice floating through the room where he’d been imprisoned: I know you’ve been with Brody and that could cost him his relationship with Malachi.
The threat wrapped in silk, dressed in courtesy, served with a smile that never reached his eyes.
The contract. His name written on a document like a racehorse’s.
Seven hundred thousand dollars. The years of Julian Valois and his hands pushing him toward closed doors behind which waited men whose names Ren had never learned.
The hands of those men. All the hands. The black latex jumpsuit clinging to his skin like a second layer of shame.
The platform. The lights. The eyes of strangers appraising him like livestock.
He felt no rage.
He felt something colder. Something that had been solidifying inside his chest for weeks, perhaps for years, and that now had the consistency of old ice, the ice that forms at the bottom of lakes where the light never reaches.
Ren tucked the gun into his waistband. He raised his hand and pressed it against Brody’s tactical vest, against his abdomen, until his fingers found the grip of one of the tactical knives secured to the straps. He drew it out. The thirteen-centimeter blade caught the firelight.
Reznov watched him. The calculating eyes narrowed a millimeter. But he didn’t plead. Didn’t beg for mercy. He still didn’t believe Ren was capable of it.
Ren stabbed him in the heart.
The blade went in cleanly, between the third and fourth rib, with a brief resistance that gave way all at once when the steel found soft muscle. Ren felt the impact in his wrist, in his elbow, in his shoulder. He felt it travel the length of his arm like an electric current.
Reznov didn’t scream. His mouth fell open, his eyes dilated, and a sound that never quite became a word escaped his throat like the last breath from a bellowing. His hands released Brody’s forearm. They fell to his sides.
Brody let him go.
Reznov collapsed. His knees first, then his side, then his shoulder against the hardwood floor.
He came to rest on his side beside the broken shards of his own glass, with the knife buried to the hilt and his eyes open, staring at the fireplace that went on burning as though nothing in that room had changed.
Ren looked at the body. Looked at his own hands. Clean. The blood had stayed on the blade and on Reznov’s shirt, not on him.
He raised his eyes to Brody.
Brody was watching him. Those gray eyes with their reddened edges, his breathing heavy, one foot on Reznov’s fallen torso as though it were something he was stepping on to cross a river. His gloved hands came up and took Ren’s face.
The gloves were rough against his cheeks. They smelled of gunpowder and leather, and beneath all of that, beneath the war and the blood and the night, was the scent of raisins and walnuts that Ren would have recognized anywhere in the world.
Brody kissed him.
Long. Deep. With his mouth open and his breath warm and a desperation that wasn’t new but accumulated, compressed across days of separation that had felt like years.
Ren grabbed the straps of the tactical vest and pulled him downward because Brody was too tall and Ren needed more, needed to sink into that kiss until there was no air left between them.
Brody wrapped his good arm around his waist and pulled him against his body and Ren felt the bulk of the bandages beneath the vest and the runaway heartbeat of a heart that had nearly stopped beating and the fierce warmth of an alpha who had crossed the city to take him back.
Behind them, Jax cleared his throat.
Ren didn’t pull away. Neither did Brody.