Our. Not my. Ours.
Ren nodded.
They stood without letting go of each other’s hand. Brody came around the table and Ren followed and they left the kitchen for the long hallway that Ren knew from memory because he had walked it dozens of times in the weeks he had spent in that house. At first he had walked it as a prisoner who doesn’t trust his jailer. Then as a guest who doesn’t trust his host. Then as an omega who doesn’t trust his alpha. And that first night, when Brody had guided him down that same corridor holding his handwith the awkwardness of someone touching something fragile for the first time, Ren had felt fear and desire and confusion in equal measure.
Now he walked the same hallway with Brody’s hand wrapped around his and he felt no fear. No confusion. No need to pull away and prove he could survive alone.
He could survive alone. He already knew that. He had survived alone for twenty-one years in a house where his own father treated him as currency. He had survived the auction, the escape, the dark streets, Reznov, his own fists bleeding against guards who out massed him threefold. He didn’t need anyone to survive.
But he wanted someone to live with.
The difference between those two things was an abyss Ren had crossed without noticing, perhaps that night he had fallen asleep wrapped in a hoodie that smelled of raisins and walnuts, perhaps when he had knelt on the bathroom floor with two pink lines between his fingers, perhaps when he had driven a knife into a man’s heart and kissed another with lips stained by violence.
Brody squeezed his hand when they reached the door. Not hard. Just present.
Ren squeezed back.
They went in together.
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 fromSiberian 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.
