Page 106 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
Chapter 23
They left through the front door. Unhurried. Brody walked ahead with the gun still in his hand and Ren beside him, so close their shoulders touched. Jax and Rocco covered the flanks, moving between the fallen bodies of the guards with the efficiency of people clearing up after a party that should never have been held.
The front garden smelled of gunpowder and wet earth. An automatic sprinkler was still running somewhere, indifferent to everything, watering Dimitri Reznov’s rose beds with the same programmed precision as always.
Ren stepped onto the damp grass and the cold rose through the soles of his feet through the thin sneakers they had given him during his captivity. He breathed in deeply. The night air filled his lungs and for one fleeting second he thought he had never known what it really meant to breathe.
Then a figure emerged from the shadows beside the exit gate.
Jax raised his weapon. Rocco repositioned.
“No.”
The voice was low, familiar. Sergei stepped forward with his hands open and visible on both sides of his body. No weapons. No vest. The black t-shirt showed the shape of his enormousshoulders and there was a cut above his left eyebrow dripping blood onto his cheekbone.
Brody stopped. His arm crossed Ren’s chest in an instinctive barrier.
“I have no employer anymore.”
The English came out perfect. Clean. Without a trace of a Russian accent. Every vowel in place, every consonant articulated with the precision of someone who has spent years pretending not to master a language.
Ren blinked.
He looked at him. Looked again. Days of listening to him grunt monosyllables in Russian, weeks of believing he didn’t understand a word, weeks during which Ren had said things to his face—insults, escape plans, out loud reflections on the lock and the window and the possible routes out—with the idiotic confidence of someone talking in front of a piece of furniture.
“You speak English.”
It wasn’t a question.
Sergei tilted his head. A minimal apology that contained rather little remorse.
“I speak six languages. English is the least interesting.”
Brody turned to Ren. The question needed no words. Those gray eyes with their reddened edges found his in the darkness and waited.
Ren looked at Sergei. The Russian who had never laid a hand on him except when Ren had attacked him. The Russian who had left the door open when Ren asked him to hide. The Russian who had brought extra blankets without anyone ordering him to, on the two nights when the temperature had dropped.
He nodded.
Brody looked back at Sergei.
“Get in the car.”
Sergei moved toward the black van Rocco had parked on the other side of the street. And then Ren moved.
He walked toward the Russian with short, quick steps and Sergei stopped when he sensed his approach. He turned. He had more than thirty centimeters on Ren and weighed twice as much. His gray eyes—different from Brody’s, paler, flatter, without that perpetual combustion at the edges—dropped to find Ren’s.
And then, Ren punched him in the jaw.
It wasn’t clean. His knuckles hurt and the impact reverberated up to his elbow. But Sergei’s head turned to the right and the Russian took half a step back to recover his balance.
Silence.
Sergei brought his hand to his jaw. Moved it from side to side. Looked at Ren without resentment, with something close to understanding.
Behind him, Jax let out a short bark of a laugh that cut through the night.
“Still got it.”
