Chapter 24
Three months after the rescue, the decaffeinated coffee still tasted like dirty water.
Ren stared at it with a frown, his hands wrapped around the cup as though the fault lay with the vessel rather than the contents.
The kitchen smelled of cinnamon and melted butter because Marta had decided that this particular morning called for cream buns, and the aroma clung to his palate like a deliberate provocation.
“This is not coffee,” he muttered against the rim of the cup.
No one answered. The kitchen was still empty, just Marta with her efficient movements by the oven, and him perched on the tall island stool with his legs crossed and Brody’s t-shirt stretching over his belly.
Because yes, it was stretching now. Three and a half months, and the curve was gentle but unmistakable, a small mound under the gray cotton that Ren caught himself touching with his open palm several times a day without thinking.
The sound of heavy boots on the wooden floor made him look up.
Sergei came in with his shoulders back and that military rigidity that never left him, not even at breakfast. His eyes found Ren, dropped half a second to his belly, and there it was. That look. Every single time.
“Stop.”
Sergei blinked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes you do.” Ren set his cup on the counter. “You didn’t break anything. The baby’s fine. I’m fine. We already talked about this. Stop looking at my stomach like you’re about to kneel down and beg forgiveness every time you see me.”
The Russian set his jaw. Ren knew it wasn’t only about the blows they had exchanged in the room where he’d been locked up.
It was about every night Sergei had stood guard on the other side of his door at Reznov’s house, knowing what Ren was and what awaited him.
But Ren wasn’t going to carry anyone else’s guilt. He had enough of his own.
“I’m fine, Sergei.”
A brusque nod. Nothing more.
Ren was about to return to his dirty water with pretensions of being coffee when he saw something that made his eyebrows climb to his hairline.
Sergei crossed the kitchen in three long strides and positioned himself behind Marta, who was struggling with a cast iron tray too heavy to slide into the oven one-handed.
The Russian said nothing. He simply reached his arms over her shoulders, took the tray, and slid it into the oven with the ease of someone moving a sheet of paper.
Marta turned. She came up to his sternum.
“Thank you, darling.”
Darling.
And Sergei. Sergei, the man who had pinned Ren to the floor with a knee in his back without breaking a sweat, the granite-carved Reznov guard who appeared to have been quarried from Siberian bedrock, looked at Marta with eyes that Ren could only describe as those of a lamb on its way to the slaughter. Soft. Disarmed. Completely surrendered.
Ren leaned on the counter with his chin in his hand and a smile growing across his face. Interesting. Very interesting. He had questions. Many questions. And he was going to ask all of them.
The kitchen door flew open as though someone had kicked it. Jax. Always Jax. He came in with his hair in disarray and a sleeveless shirt that left every muscle of his arms on display, the sweat of his morning training gleaming on his collarbone. His eyes found Ren out of habit, then dropped.
“Christ, Ren. You get rounder every day.”
“And you get more stupid every day. How is that possible? I thought there was a limit.”
Jax pressed a hand to his chest with theatrical injury.
“You wound me. And I came in to check on my nephew.”
“Your nephew is trying to digest this rubbish that Brody insists on calling coffee.” He lifted the cup. “Tell your boss that if he won’t let me have actual caffeine, I’m going to commit a crime.”
“You committed a fairly significant one three months ago, so I’m not impressed.”
Ren threw a kitchen cloth at his head. Jax dodged it laughing and went straight to the coffee maker to pour himself a cup of the real thing, the kind with caffeine and flavor and a reason to exist, and drank it in front of Ren while looking him in the eyes with deliberate cruelty.
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
Brody’s footsteps made no sound. They never did.
Ren only knew he was there because the scent of raisins and walnuts wrapped around him from behind like a blanket dropping over his shoulders, and then Brody’s hands settled exactly there, on his shoulders, and began working the knots Ren had been accumulating between his shoulder blades since he’d started sleeping on his side because his belly wouldn’t let him lie face down.
Ren closed his eyes. Brody’s thumbs pressed an exact point and something released in his neck with an almost audible click.
“Hmm.”
Brody’s lips grazed the top of his head.
Warm. Dry. Brief. Then he moved away and went to the coffee maker and poured his coffee without saying anything, his black hair falling bright and damp across his forehead and his black t-shirt clinging to his chest still warm from the shower.
Ren watched him move around the kitchen with that economy of movement that defined him, no superfluous gestures, no noise, nothing that was unnecessary.
And yet every time he passed close to Ren on his way to the fridge or the cup cupboard, his hand sought out some part of him.
A shoulder. The back of his neck. The low curve of his back.
As though checking he was still there. As though marking territory that was already his without any need for marks.
Zev appeared next, barefoot and with the tablet pressed to his chest like a shield.
He sat in the farthest corner of the island without greeting anyone, his eyes fixed on the screen, and began eating a piece of toast that Marta put in front of him without him asking for it.
The boy chewed without looking up, absorbed by whatever was occupying his mind at eight in the morning.
Code, probably. Or contingency plans. Or the seven layers of encryption he had added to the mansion’s security system the previous week after Ren had asked whether it could be hacked.
Zev had taken it as a personal challenge and hadn’t slept for three days.
Rocco was last. He came in already dressed in his impeccable shirt with his air of someone who can blend into any crowd, stole a bun from the tray Marta had just taken out of the oven, stuffed it entirely into his mouth and burned himself, cursed with his mouth full, and poured cold milk to put out the fire.
Ren watched them all from his stool with the decaf forgotten between his hands.
Sergei beside Marta, covering the oven’s back as though it were a tactical position, though the softness with which he watched her gave the lie to any strategy.
Jax leaning against the counter with his arms crossed and that permanent smile concealing fierce loyalty beneath layers of sarcasm.
Zev in his corner, invisible even when present, a brilliant and quiet mind that was one day going to surprise them all with something none of them would see coming.
Rocco with his perpetual hunger and his ability to be no one and everyone at once, to disappear in a room full of people and reappear exactly where he was needed.
And Brody. Standing by the window with his coffee between his hands and his gray eyes with their reddened edges fixed on Ren with that still intensity that no longer frightened him but anchored him to the ground.
Each of them had something stored in their chest they hadn’t yet fully shown.
Something still waiting to grow, to stretch toward the light, to take the shape that belonged to it.
Ren felt it the way you feel the weather shifting before it shifts.
Jax would find someone who returned all that fierceness to him in the form of tenderness.
Zev would look up from his screen one day and see the world he had built without realizing.
Rocco would stop disappearing the day someone asked him to stay.
And Sergei, who was already blooming without knowing it, beside a beta with strong hands and a sweet voice who called him darling without permission.
Ren brought his hand to his belly. The curve responded with an imperceptible movement. Or perhaps it was his imagination. It was still too early to feel it move.
But it was there.
And they were there.
And that was enough.
Conversations overlapped each other in the kitchen. Rocco was arguing with Zev about something involving a firewall—or perhaps a software update, Ren wasn’t paying attention—while Jax stole slices of ham from Sergei’s plate and the Russian growled at him without any real menace.
Brody set his cup on the counter and turned to Marta, who was moving back and forth between the table and the stove with her characteristic quiet efficiency.
“Sit down.”
Marta looked up from the bowl of fruit she was cutting.
“I still need to do the…”
“Sit down, Marta.”
Brody’s tone admitted no argument, but the beta looked at him with pressed lips as though she was about to answer back. The flush crept up her neck to her cheeks and she shook her head.
“There’s still the omelet and the…”
The squeal of a chair dragging across the tiles interrupted her. Sergei had placed a chair beside his own and was looking at her with an expression that was half order, half plea, his square jaw tilted toward her like a magnet seeking its opposite pole.
“Sit down,” Sergei repeated. It wasn’t a request.
Marta pulled off her apron with a brisk gesture, hung it on the hook beside the fridge and sat with her back straight and her hands in her lap like a student summoned to the headmistress’s office.
Sergei put in front of her a plate with sliced fruit and a piece of toast with jam.
She glanced at him sideways, her cheeks flushed, and picked up a piece of peach with her fingers.