And for the first time, the idea didn’t taste bitter.
He was choosing. Actively, consciously, with every muscle he tensed when Brody got too close. He was planting his feet on the ground exactly as Jax described.
He picked up the glass of milk. Drank. The cold liquid slid down his throat and cleared up something that had been murky for days. Because if biology was the push and not the decision, then there was a possibility—albeit remote, uncomfortable, and hard to swallow—that the push had a direction that wasn’t just destructive.
Biology had pushed him toward Brody. And Brody was the reason he wasn’t chained to Dimitri Reznov’s bed. Biology had led him to stay when every rational cell in his brain was telling him to run. And staying meant a roof, walls, and an unlocked door. Biology had calmed him with a scent of raisins and walnuts when panic threatened to devour him. And that calm had allowed him to sleep for the first decent few hours in months.
What if it wasn’t a trick of the body? What if it were a mechanism? What if biology, for once in his life, wasn’t working against him but building a bridge toward something his mind refused to recognize as safe?
The banana tasted sweet. Too sweet. Like when he was a child and his mother would slice the fruit into thin rounds and place them in a cat-shaped bowl.
No.
Ren set the plate down on the counter. The memory dissolved as quickly as it had come, replaced by something more urgent. Because there was a problem that neither biology, nor Brody, nor the sweatshirt could solve.
His father.
Julian Valois had sold him out. He’d sold him out just as he’d sold his mother’s jewelry, but Ren had vanished before the transaction was completed. Which meant Julian still owed a lot of money. And a Julian Valois in debt was a dangerous Julian Valois, because a man with no honor or scruples, backed into a corner, was capable of anything just to survive another day.
“Hey.”
Ren blinked. Jax was watching him from across the island with his spoon suspended halfway between the bowl and his mouth.
“Are you still here?”
Ren picked up the glass of milk. He squeezed it.
“Yeah. I’m still here.”
After breakfast, Ren walked through the part of the house he could access, hands in the pockets of the jeans someone had lenthim. Even though they were almost his size, he had to roll them up twice at the ankles, and the fabric dragged as he walked.
He visited the library, the living room, the dining room, the gardens. That was the extent of the perimeter Brody had marked out, as if Ren were a dog on an invisible leash.
He stopped in front of a door at the end of the east hallway that wasn’t part of the allowed route. Dark wood with a numeric keypad recessed into the frame at eye level. Four digits. Ren tried the most obvious combination: one-two-three-four. The little red light flashed twice, and nothing happened. He tried zero-zero-zero-zero. Same result. He pressed his ear against the wood. Silence on the other side, or something too muffled to make out.
He continued.
At the end of the west hallway was another door, this one without a panel but with a magnetic lock that responded to a card. Ren didn’t have a card. He pulled the handle three times with increasing force until the metal left a pink mark on his palm. The door didn’t budge a millimeter.
On the second floor, he found a third blocked entrance: a staircase leading up to what must have been a loft or a third floor. A steel grate blocked the way halfway up, secured with a digital lock that emitted a high-pitched beep when Ren touched it.
He stepped back.
Someone had designed that house to look open when in reality it was a box with sealed compartments. The high ceilings and generous windows gave an impression of freedom that crumbled the moment you tried to go beyond the permitted areas.
He rubbed his damp hands against his thighs and went downstairs.
The library occupied a corner of the south wing, with two walls of bookshelves reaching up to the ceiling and a large window overlooking the back garden. Ren had passed by there the day before without paying it any mind. Now he sank into one of the worn leather armchairs and scanned the spines.
Military history. Crime fiction. Mechanics manuals. Commercial law. Political philosophy. A haphazard collection that seemed to have been built by accumulation rather than by design. Ren stood up and ran his fingers along the lower shelves, where the books were smaller and less worn.
His hand paused.
The Biology of Bonding: Fated Mates and the Architecture of Instinct.
The spine was dark blue, unadorned, with the letters printed in silver. He pulled it off the shelf. The cover showed a double helix of DNA intertwined with what looked like two lines of smoke. Academic, but not entirely clinical. Ren opened the first page and read the dedication: For those who fight against who they are. And for those who stop doing so.
His mouth went dry.
