Chapter 23
They left through the front door. Unhurried.
Brody walked ahead with the gun still in his hand and Ren beside him, so close their shoulders touched.
Jax and Rocco covered the flanks, moving between the fallen bodies of the guards with the efficiency of people clearing up after a party that should never have been held.
The front garden smelled of gunpowder and wet earth. An automatic sprinkler was still running somewhere, indifferent to everything, watering Dimitri Reznov’s rose beds with the same programmed precision as always.
Ren stepped onto the damp grass and the cold rose through the soles of his feet through the thin sneakers they had given him during his captivity. He breathed in deeply. The night air filled his lungs and for one fleeting second he thought he had never known what it really meant to breathe.
Then a figure emerged from the shadows beside the exit gate.
Jax raised his weapon. Rocco repositioned.
“No.”
The voice was low, familiar. Sergei stepped forward with his hands open and visible on both sides of his body. No weapons. No vest. The black t-shirt showed the shape of his enormous shoulders and there was a cut above his left eyebrow dripping blood onto his cheekbone.
Brody stopped. His arm crossed Ren’s chest in an instinctive barrier.
“I have no employer anymore.”
The English came out perfect. Clean. Without a trace of a Russian accent. Every vowel in place, every consonant articulated with the precision of someone who has spent years pretending not to master a language.
Ren blinked.
He looked at him. Looked again. Days of listening to him grunt monosyllables in Russian, weeks of believing he didn’t understand a word, weeks during which Ren had said things to his face—insults, escape plans, out loud reflections on the lock and the window and the possible routes out—with the idiotic confidence of someone talking in front of a piece of furniture.
“You speak English.”
It wasn’t a question.
Sergei tilted his head. A minimal apology that contained rather little remorse.
“I speak six languages. English is the least interesting.”
Brody turned to Ren. The question needed no words. Those gray eyes with their reddened edges found his in the darkness and waited.
Ren looked at Sergei. The Russian who had never laid a hand on him except when Ren had attacked him. The Russian who had left the door open when Ren asked him to hide. The Russian who had brought extra blankets without anyone ordering him to, on the two nights when the temperature had dropped.
He nodded.
Brody looked back at Sergei.
“Get in the car.”
Sergei moved toward the black van Rocco had parked on the other side of the street. And then Ren moved.
He walked toward the Russian with short, quick steps and Sergei stopped when he sensed his approach.
He turned. He had more than thirty centimeters on Ren and weighed twice as much.
His gray eyes—different from Brody’s, paler, flatter, without that perpetual combustion at the edges—dropped to find Ren’s.
And then, Ren punched him in the jaw.
It wasn’t clean. His knuckles hurt and the impact reverberated up to his elbow. But Sergei’s head turned to the right and the Russian took half a step back to recover his balance.
Silence.
Sergei brought his hand to his jaw. Moved it from side to side. Looked at Ren without resentment, with something close to understanding.
Behind him, Jax let out a short bark of a laugh that cut through the night.
“Still got it.”
Ren shook out his hand. His knuckles were burning.
“Six languages. Fuck you, Sergei.”
The Russian didn’t say a thing. There was no need.
Marta had the kitchen lit up like a lighthouse when they came through the back door of the mansion.
The warm ceiling lights spilled over the central island where she had laid out plates, cups, a steaming coffee pot, a basket of freshly baked bread, butter, jam, scrambled eggs in a wide dish and crispy bacon in another.
As though she knew the exact hour they would arrive.
As though making breakfast at four in the morning for men who smelled of gunpowder and blood was something she did every Tuesday.
She asked nothing.
She looked at Brody, looked at Ren, counted heads, added another plate when she saw Sergei come in behind Rocco.
Her eyes lingered on the Russian a second longer than strictly necessary.
Then she went back to the coffee pot and poured a cup that she set down precisely where Sergei ended up sitting, as though she had calculated the man’s trajectory before he knew himself where he was going.
Ren dropped onto the stool beside Brody.
The scent of raisins and walnuts enveloped him immediately, more intense than usual, denser, as though Brody’s body was compensating for the separation by producing twice what it normally emitted.
Ren closed his eyes. He let it in. It filled his lungs, loosened his shoulders, untied something in the pit of his stomach that had been taut for days.
He leaned toward Brody. His lips grazed the alpha’s jaw, the rough line where several days of stubble prickled against his skin.
“I missed you.”
He said it quietly. Just for him. Just for that five-centimeter space between his mouth and Brody’s ear where the world didn’t exist.
Brody didn’t answer with words. He passed his hand to the back of Ren’s neck, fingers threading into the blond hair, and held him there a moment. His thumb stroked the base of his skull in a slow movement that Ren felt travel down his spine like warm water.
Then he let him go and slid a plate toward him.
“Eat.”
Ren obeyed. Not because it was an order but because his body was demanding it loudly.
The first mouthful of scrambled eggs tasted of salt and butter and something that closely resembled being alive.
He chewed slowly. Brody put a piece of toast on his plate without being asked. Poured him juice. Passed him the jam.
And as he did it, his eyes moved over Ren’s face with the thoroughness of a cartographer drawing a new map. They stopped at the left cheekbone, swollen and violet. At the split eyebrow. At the lower lip, thick and inflamed from a blow that was already changing color.
Brody’s jaw tightened. His nostrils flared.
“Who?”
The question came out like a stone thrown at glass. Ren chewed his toast calmly and pointed at Sergei with the butter knife.
Sergei, in the act of grabbing a strip of bacon, stopped dead with his hand mid-reach. The entire table looked at him. Marta stopped pouring coffee.
“He attacked me first.”
The Russian’s voice sounded almost offended. He set the bacon on his plate with a delicacy that contrasted sharply with the size of his hands.
“Three times. Three different nights. The last time he bit through my forearm.”
He rolled up his sleeve. A semicircular bite mark crossed his forearm, red and clearly defined.”
Ren shrugged with his mouth full of toast.
“I had to try.”
“He broke a chair against the window.”
“It was a viable plan.”
“He tried to pick the lock with a plastic spoon.”
“And it would have worked if you hadn’t come in so fast.”
Jax leaned back on his stool and crossed his arms, his smile split unevenly across his face.
“Not a single doubt. Not one.”
Brody let out a breath through his nose. Something in his expression eased, not entirely, not enough for the tension in his jaw to disappear every time his eyes returned to Ren’s bruised cheekbone, but enough. He put another piece of toast on his plate.
Marta refilled Sergei’s coffee. This time the cup lingered in her hands a moment longer than necessary before she set it on the table. Sergei looked at her. Marta didn’t look back. She returned to the coffee pot with her lips pressed together and her cheeks flushed.
Ren saw it. He chewed his toast and filed it away.
The plates ended up in the sink and Marta disappeared with a cloth in her hand and one last furtive glance at Sergei that the Russian either didn’t catch or pretended not to.
The kitchen transformed. The morning light came in at an angle through the wide windows and bathed the wooden table where now only half-empty cups remained and Zev’s open laptop before him like an altar.
Zev didn’t look up. His fingers moved over the keyboard with the cadence of someone reading a score only he could see.
“The security cameras at Reznov’s mansion are clean.
Thirty-six hours of footage overwritten with a loop from the previous night.
The geolocation systems on the cars we used show the usual routes of Reznov’s drivers, nothing more.
The records of internal communications between Reznov and Malachi for the last six weeks… ”
A pause. Keying in.
“Gone.”
Brody nodded once. Ren watched Zev from across the table, the way the boy disappeared inside his own sentences as though they were tunnels. The screen lit his face from below and made him look even younger than he was.
“Reznov had an encrypted file on you.”
Zev said it addressing Brody without stopping his typing.
“Movements, contacts, transactions from the past year. Records of the times Rocco accessed restricted areas of the casino outside his shift. Photographs of the service entrance we used to get the omega out of the previous auction.”
Ren felt Brody tense beside him. He didn’t see it, he sensed it. The alpha’s temperature rose half a degree, maybe a full degree, and his scent thickened with a bitter note that hadn’t been there before.
“How much did he have?”
“Enough.”
Zev looked up for the first time. His dark eyes met Brody’s with a frankness stripped of emotion that reminded Ren of a surgeon assessing a wound.
“Enough for Malachi to need nothing more than a glance at it to decide you’re a problem. But it no longer exists. No server, no cloud backup, no physical drive in his safe. I checked twice.”
Brody nodded. His gaze shifted for a moment to Ren.
“Your brother signed the kill order alongside your father.”