He could leave. The mansion. Brody. Everything.
He went back to the bedroom and sat on the bed with his legs crossed. He thought. The guardhouse had only one guard. The side gardens bordered a stone wall that didn’t seem to be over two and a half meters high. There were trees close enough to the wall to climb. At night, when it was dark enough, the guard in the guardhouse wouldn’t be able to cover the entire perimeter.
And then what?
Then the city. The streets. Normal people doing normal things, unaware that less than three miles away, people were being auctioned off like cattle. Ren had legs and knew how to use them. Less than twenty-four hours ago, he’d run barefoot through streets he didn’t know. He could do it again. This time with sneakers.
He had no money. No ID. No phone.
But he had hands and knew how to work. He could wash dishes at any restaurant that didn’t ask questions. At dawn, he could load boxes in a warehouse. Maybe even scrub floors. He’d done worse things for less honorable reasons.
He got up and opened the closet. Three T-shirts. Two pairs of pants. A gray hoodie that would be huge on him but would cover his hair and half his face. White sneakers a couple of sizes too big for his feet. It would do.
He’d need to make some changes. His hair, first. Natural platinum blonde was a distinctive feature. At any 24-hour pharmacy, he could buy dark hair dye if he got some money. Brown. Black. Whatever. Cut it short, too. His hair fell below hisears, and that was another identifiable feature. Shaved or very short. Nothing that drew attention.
The name. Ren Valois would cease to exist. It would be easy. The Valois weren’t a family that made the news. His father had kept a low profile, and Ren was an omega with no public history. He could be anyone. Choose a simple name that wouldn’t raise suspicion. Something that sounded like a supermarket cashier or a delivery person or a barista. Something invisible.
He could go north. Or east. Or to any city big enough to swallow a person whole. Disappear among millions of bodies and smells and voices. Rent a room without a lease in some damp basement where no one asked for ID. Live small. Live quietly. Live free.
Free from Reznov, who had paid seven hundred thousand dollars for his body.
Free from his father, who had tortured him since he reached adolescence.
Free from Brody Kovac, whose scent made him feel like he had a home when in reality he had nothing.
Ren closed the closet. He sat back down on the bed. He would wait for night to fall.
* * *
The mansion lay in semi-darkness. Ren had waited for the clock on the nightstand to strike twenty past two in the morning before moving. He dressed in the gray sweatshirt, jeans, and oversized sneakers. He tucked an extra T-shirt inside the sweatshirt, against his chest, in case he needed to change. He needed nothing more than that.
He walked down the hallway with light feet on the oak floorboards. The mansion creaked like any old structure does when it cools down at night: wooden bones settling in. Ren knew those sounds. His house had them too.
He went down the staircase hugging the wall where the steps didn’t groan. He had counted the steps during the tour Brody had given him that morning. Seventeen to the landing. Turn. Fourteen to the foyer. The front door was at the end, behind a stone archway leading to an entryway with a black-and-white marble floor like a chessboard.
There was no one there.
The silence was heavy. Ren crossed the foyer holding his breath, each step a dull thud inside his skull. The door was solid wood with a wrought-iron handle. No electronic lock. No visible alarm. Too easy.
But Ren would not stop to think about that. Not now. Not with freedom just a twist of the wrist away.
He grabbed the handle. The metal was cold beneath his fingers. He squeezed it.
“You don’t get to leave.”
The voice came from somewhere behind him, deep, without inflection. Like someone stating the time or the name of a street. Ren froze with his fingers clenched around the iron.
He turned slowly.
Brody was at the foot of the stairs. He wasn’t wearing shoes. Dark sweatpants, a black T-shirt stretched tight over his broad shoulders. His arms at his sides, his hands open. He didn’t look angry. He looked like something worse: inevitable. As if he’d known ever since Ren closed the closet that afternoon that this was going to happen.
Brody’s gray eyes watched him with a stillness that Ren instantly associated with a predator that doesn’t need to run because it has already calculated that the prey won’t get far.
“I don’t want this.”
The words came out of Ren’s mouth before he could think them, rough, with jagged edges. He wasn’t referring to the door or the mansion or the night. Brody knew it. Something in his jaw loosened, a tension giving way like a knot whose string had been cut.
“I know.”
