“A piece of paper with an address and instructions.”
Ren remembered the scrap of paper, Rocco placing it in his hand, the insignificant weight of that rectangle that had changed his life.
“And how many accept it?”
“Few.” The honesty of the answer surprised Ren. “Most think it’s a trap.”
“I thought so too.”
“But you ran here.”
It wasn’t a question. Brody said it with something that wasn’t exactly admiration, more like a stark acknowledgment—that of someone who knows the cost of choosing the unknown abyss when the alternative has a first and last name and seven hundred thousand reasons to claim you.
“I had no choice.” Ren shrugged with a lightness he didn’t feel.
“There’s always a choice. And you chose the right one.”
Silence. Brody’s scent fluctuated with his breath, subtle waves that Ren felt like soft blows to the chest. He focused on thepain in the soles of his feet, on the scrapes from the asphalt, on anything but the urge to breathe deeper.
“Is that what you do? Rescue omegas from auctions?” Ren loaded the word rescue with a sarcasm he didn’t entirely intend but needed as a shield.
“I wouldn’t call it that.” Brody frowned. “We give them an alternative. What they do with it is up to them.”
“And then what? Do I stay locked up here?”
“You’re not locked in. The door isn’t bolted from the inside or the outside.”
Ren remembered the tiny room in the security booth, the sound of the bolt sliding shut, the panic devouring his insides. Brody must have read something on his face because he took half a step forward and stopped dead in his tracks, the muscles in his neck taut as strings.
“That was the guard’s mistake. It won’t happen again.”
Ren swallowed hard. The next question weighed so heavily on him that he could barely bring it to his lips.
“Does my family know I’m here?”
The change in Brody was microscopic, but Ren caught it. A blink. His jaw tightened a millimeter. The fingers of his right hand tapped once against the surface of the dresser.
“First things first: you need to eat breakfast.”
“I asked you a question.”
“And I’m telling you that you haven’t eaten in over fourteen hours.” Brody already had the phone in his hand. He dialed a number without taking his eyes off Ren, as if offering him a challenge or a truce—it was hard to tell which. “Marta. Make breakfast for Ren. Yes. Full breakfast.”
He hung up. He slipped the phone into his back pocket.
Ren watched him from the bed with those blue eyes his mother used to compare to Murano glass; eyes he’d always hated for being too pretty, too omega, too vulnerable. He fixed them on Brody with all the hardness he could muster.
“You didn’t answer me.”
“Eat first. We’ll talk later.”
The evasion was so transparent it almost glowed. Ren wanted to press him, to force the answer out of him, but his body reminded him with a spasm in his stomach that Brody wasn’t lying about the fourteen hours. Maybe more. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. Before the auction, they’d given him water and nothing else, because they wanted his stomach to be flat under the latex.
They stood in silence, each in his own corner of the room, separated by three meters of dark wooden floor that looked like a minefield. Brody’s scent filled the space with the stubbornness of something alive. Ren breathed through his mouth.
Ren noticed the clothes before Brody said anything. A folded pile on the armchair by the window: a pair of dark jeans, a soft gray cotton T-shirt, underwear still in its wrapper. All his size or close to it. Someone had gone to the trouble of figuring it out.
“The bathroom is over there.” Brody nodded toward a side door that Ren hadn’t noticed the night before. “There are clean towels. Take as long as you need.”