Page 95 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
He wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t thirsty. He had nothing that wasn’t this dull emptiness where the bond used to pull at him like an invisible thread.
Because he couldn’t feel it anymore.
Or perhaps he could feel it, but so faintly, so distant, that he didn’t know if it was real or if his mind was manufacturing something to keep itself from shattering entirely. The books he had read in Brody’s library spoke of this: how the bond between fated mates could be perceived across a distance like a pulse, like an echo of the other’s heartbeat. Ren searched for that echo inside himself and found silence. A silence that could mean distance or could mean death.
He dug his nails into his forearms.
The darkness was complete when he heard footsteps in the hallway. Several pairs of feet. The lock turned with a metallic click that resonated through the empty room, and the door swung open, letting in a strip of yellow light that cut into his eyes.
“Good evening.”
Reznov’s voice. Soft, measured, like a late-night radio presenter. Ren didn’t lift his head. He kept his eyes fixed on an undefined point on the floor, between his own bare feet and the leg of the bedside table.
Reznov entered, followed by an enormous man, broader than he was tall, with the thick neck of a bull and hands the size of fryingpans. The man carried a tray in one hand and a small bundle of clothing in the other.
“Sergei,” said Reznov, gesturing toward the guard with an elegant movement of his wrist, “will be your shadow from now on. He speaks nothing but Russian and has strict orders never to address you under any circumstances, so save yourself the effort of trying anything with him.”
Sergei crossed the room with heavy steps. He set the folded clothes on the bathroom counter through the open door. Then he placed the tray on the bedside table, close enough to Ren that he could smell the bread and something warm, soup, perhaps. His stomach didn’t react.
Reznov leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed. He was wearing a dark suit without a tie, his shirt collar open, a gold watch on his wrist that caught the light from the hallway.
“You should shower. You have blood on your face and in your hair.” A pause. “And eat. You’re no use to anyone starved.”
Ren didn’t turn his head. Didn’t blink. He kept his gaze fixed on the same point on the floor as though he had found something fascinating there, something that deserved his complete attention. The air entered and left through his nose with a mechanical regularity that required no conscious participation on his part.
Reznov waited. Ten seconds. Twenty. The silence thickened between them until it was almost tangible.
“As you wish.”
His tone didn’t change. He didn’t grow angry, didn’t insist, didn’t threaten. He simply straightened from the doorframe, smoothed his lapel with an automatic gesture, and stepped out into the hallway. Sergei followed. The door closed.
The lock.
That sound. That definitive click of metal against metal that separated the world outside from the one within. Ren knew it the way he knew the sound of his own breathing. He had heard it every night for years in Julian Valois’s house, every time his father decided it was time for Ren to stop existing until he was needed again. The click of the lock meant he was not a person, but a possession stored in its box.
And for weeks in Brody’s mansion there had been no lock. No closed door, no key, no barrier of any kind. Ren moved through the house wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He slept with the door unbolted because Brody was beside him and there was nothing outside that room that could come in and be worse than loneliness. And when Ren went out—to the gym or the library or the kitchen at three in the morning because the pregnancy gave him ridiculous cravings—no one barred his way.
Brody had taken away the locks.
And now he was dead.
The thought struck him with the force of something new, though it wasn’t. He had been thinking it for hours, turning it over, chewing it without swallowing it. But saying it inside his head with those exact words—Brody is dead—made something fracture in his chest differently to the fractures before.
“Idiot,” he whispered.
The word came out without air behind it, barely a movement of his lips.
“You fucking idiot.”
Louder. His fists clenched on his knees.
“You let yourself get killed.”
His voice bounced off the white walls of that room that smelled of industrial detergent and came back to him distorted, smaller, and more broken than he had intended.
Because that was the unforgivable thing. Not that Reznov had captured him. Not that his father had sold him. Not that the world’s design allowed alphas, who thought they owned everything, to exchange omegas as currency. The unforgivable thing was that Brody Kovac had shown him what it felt like not to be afraid and then had let himself be shot through the chest for not having protected himself better, for not having been faster, for not having seen the bullet coming.
He had given him hope. That was the unforgivable thing. He had told him that he would be there. He had promised with his actions and his pheromones and his body wrapped around Ren’s each night that there was a future without locks. And Ren, fool that he was, had believed him. Had stopped fighting the bond. Had opened his hands and released his rage and allowed himself to want something, to desire something, to need someone.
