Page 12 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
“How…?” the guard began, but Ren didn’t give him a chance. He raised his right hand, unfolding the damp paper with trembling fingers that wouldn’t quite obey him, and pressed it against the glass of the window.
The sentry looked at the paper. He looked at Ren. Then back at the paper.
Something flashed behind his eyes. A quick decision, made with the efficiency of someone following a rehearsed protocol. He stood up. The chair rolled backward and hit the back wall of the guardhouse with a thud.
“Come in.”
He opened the side door. Ren hesitated for a second—a second in which another scream tore through the night, closer, much closer, and his body decided for him—and stepped into the sentry box. The space was tiny. It smelled of stale coffee and leather. The heat from the heater hit his wet skin like a warm slap.
The guard didn’t touch him. He moved to one side and pointed to a door Ren hadn’t seen from the outside, built into the back wall of the guardhouse, painted the same gray as the wall.
“In here.”
He opened it. Behind it, a room. No. A cubicle. A cell. Two meters by two, maybe less. Bare concrete walls. A light-bulb in the ceiling emitted a yellow glow. A wooden bench pressed against the left wall. Nothing else. No windows. No exits.
Ren took half a step back.
“I’m not going in there.”
“Listen,” the guard lowered his voice. He spoke with an accent Ren couldn’t place. Slavic, perhaps. Or Baltic. “Stay here. Keep quiet. Don’t bang on the door. Refrain from screaming. Are you understanding?
The guard’s eyes weren’t cruel. But they weren’t kind either. They were the eyes of someone who follows orders without questioning their content.
Ren stepped into the cubicle. The concrete floor was cold beneath his battered feet, and the contrast with the heat of the guardhouse sent a shiver down his spine. He sat down on the wooden bench. His knees were shaking. Everything was shaking.
The guard looked at him one last time. Again, that slow blink, that tense jaw.
“He won’t be long.”
He closed the door.
And then Ren heard it. The oldest sound in the world. Metal sliding against metal. The bolt slid shut with a definitive click that reverberated off the concrete walls like a muffled gunshot.
Locked in.
The air changed. It thickened. The walls closed in by a centimeter, then two, ten. The yellowish light bulb flickered, and Ren could have sworn the room was shrinking with every pulse of light.
He got to his feet, sat down, stood up again. Took the two steps the cubicle allowed and pressed his palms against the door. Cold. Solid. Not a millimeter of play in the hinges.
Trap.
The word exploded in his head with the obscene clarity of a truth he’d been avoiding. Rocco was working for someone. Someone who wanted an omega without going through the auction, without paying Reznov’s seven hundred thousand, without leaving a trace. They’d given him an address and false hope, and he’d run straight into the cage like the frightened animal he was.
He slumped onto the bench. He clenched his hands between his knees to make them stop shaking. It didn’t work.
Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.
The silence on the other side of the door was total.
Chapter 4
Time warped inside the cubicle.
With no windows, no clock, and no sounds coming from beyond the door, Ren lost track of the minutes he’d been there. Could have been five, could have been forty. The yellowish light bulb kept flickering at irregular intervals, like an arrhythmic pulse, and every time the light faltered, the cubicle plunged for half a second into a total darkness that squeezed his chest like a fist.
He forced himself to breathe. In. Out. In. Out.
It didn’t work.
