Silence on the other side. Long. So long that Ren thought Brody had left.
“Then don’t look at me. But I need you to listen.”
Ren sat up in bed. He rubbed his face with both hands, running his fingers through his blond hair that was already needing a trim. He looked at his palms as if he expected to find answers written in the lines of his hands. There were none.
He stood up and opened the door.
Brody filled the entire doorway. The black shirt from before had its sleeves rolled up further, with the top button undone. His gray eyes, with that perpetual red rim, looked at him with something that wasn’t an apology. It was patience. The patience you exercise when you know you’re going to earn it with blood.
“Five minutes,” Ren said.
“I need more.”
“Five minutes. And if I don’t like what I hear, you’re out.”
Brody nodded once and went in. He didn’t sit down. He stood by the window, his profile silhouetted against the evening light seeping through the half-open curtains, and Ren hated even in that moment, the silhouette of that man stirred something so primal in him he could barely breathe.
Ren sat on the edge of the bed. He crossed his arms. He waited.
“I started working for my uncle when I was sixteen,” Brody said. His voice sounded unfamiliar. Stripped of his usual authority, as if he’d spoken without his armor. “I was sixteen, I’d just presented as an alpha, and Malachi was the only one in the family who offered me anything resembling a future. My mother had died two years earlier. My father never existed.”
Ren didn’t move. He didn’t relax his arms.
“At first, it was clean work. Or what seemed clean. Numbers. Basic casino accounting. Errands. Malachi taught me how to run a business, how to dress, and how to talk to the right people. He made me someone.” Brody ran a hand through his black hair, a gesture Ren hadn’t seen him make before and that betrayed something more raw than nervousness. “I was grateful. Malachi pulled me out of nowhere and gave me a life. I owed him everything.”
“And the auctions?”
“I’m getting to that,” Brody turned toward him. The orange light split his face in two, one half lit and the other in shadow. “For the first three years, I knew nothing. The casino has six floors, three above ground and three below. I worked on the second floor. Offices, management, day-to-day logistics. I never went down to the basement.”
“When did you go down?”
“At nineteen. Malachi started giving me more responsibility. He told me it was time for me to see the entire business, that if I was going to inherit it someday, I needed to know every part. He took me to the basement one December night, four days before Christmas.” Brody clenched his jaw. A muscle twitched beneath the skin of his cheek. “There were six Omegas in individual cells. Three women, three men. All under twenty-five. All drugged. Two of them bore bruises no one had bothered to cover up.”
Ren swallowed. The metallic taste of fear filled his mouth, though the fear wasn’t for himself but for those six names he would never know.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing,” Brody uttered the word as if a fingernail were being torn from him. “I did nothing, Ren. I was nineteen, alone in the world, and the only man who’d ever treated me like a son had just shown me the hell he kept hidden beneath his casino as casually as he might have shown me the wine cellar. And I stood there, watching, silent, and nodded when Malachi asked me if I was ready to be a part of it.”
The silence that followed was thick. Ren could hear his own pulse.
“I said yes. I went along with it. For months I worked with him side by side on the logistics of the auctions. I learned how it all worked: how they selected the omegas, how they contacted the indebted families, how they agreed on prices, how they organized the auction nights, and who the regular buyers were. Everything, Ren. I learned everything.”
“You took part.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t sugarcoat it. He didn’t soften it. He didn’t say, “I had to do it” or “I had no choice.” He said yes and let the word fall between them like a stone into water.
Ren clenched his teeth so hard his gums ached.
“And how long did it take you to decide it was wrong? Or did you need someone to tell you?”
“I always knew it was wrong. From the first night I went down into those basements.” Brody locked eyes with him. “But I did something worse than failing to distinguish right from wrong. I distinguished it perfectly, and yet I went along with it. Because I needed to see the full scope of what my uncle had built before I could destroy it.”
Ren blinked.
“Every document I signed, every meeting I attended, every auction I witnessed, gave me another piece of the map. Buyers’ names. Bank accounts. Transportation routes. Contacts in the police, in the district attorney’s office, in courts that look the other way when it comes to private agreements between alphas and legal guardians of omegas.” Brody uttered those last words with such visceral disgust that Ren felt it in his own skin. ”My uncle still considers me part of the business. I still receive profits from the casino. I’m still listed in the records as a partner.”
