Page 101 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
He brought his hand to his stomach.
He closed his eyes. Breathed. Counted until the stab dissolved into nothing.
“We’re fine,” he whispered against his own fingers. “We’re fine.”
He lay curled on the floor of the room with his cheek resting on the cold wood and the blood drying on his chin. Everything hurt. Every muscle, every joint Sergei had forced, every centimeter of skin that had been slammed against hard surfaces.
But somewhere behind his ribs, beneath the pain, something beat that felt like a small victory. He had seen Sergei’s eyes. He had seen what they held.
Respect. Or something close to it.
It wasn’t much. Against a man like Reznov and a cage like this one, it was almost nothing.
But Ren had survived his whole life with almost nothing.
Chapter 22
The sound was tiny. A dry click, almost inaudible, that didn’t belong to any of the sounds Ren had heard during his days of confinement.
He knew the groan of the pipes at three in the morning. The hum of the heating system kicking on every hour and a half. Sergei’s footsteps every forty minutes as he made his circuit of the hallway, a route Ren had timed with the precision of someone who has nothing else to do. He knew the click of the electronic lock on the room at the far end of the corridor and the distant murmur of a television someone left on all night two floors below.
But this click was none of those things.
He opened his eyes in the darkness. His split lip still throbbed, swollen and warm, and his left arm protested when he leaned on it to sit up. He didn’t move fully. He waited. He counted the beats of his own heart against the pillow.
The second tap came twelve heartbeats later. Just as small, just as precise. Something striking glass.
He got out of bed without making a sound. His bare feet on the carpet didn’t produce so much as a whisper. He pressed himself against the side wall of the window, out of the sight-line of anyone looking from outside, and looked out.
Reznov’s garden under the moon was an orderly expanse of geometric hedges and white gravel that gleamed with an almost phosphorescent brightness. Nothing moved. Not the programmed sprinklers, not the security cameras Ren had located at the corners of the perimeter wall during his dead hours of observation through that same window.
Then he saw them.
Two translucent spheres resting on the gravel directly below his window. Tiny balls, marble-sized, that shouldn’t have been there because that gravel was raked every morning and Ren knew it because he had watched the gardener do it three days in a row at seven o’clock sharp.
Someone had fired them at his glass.
His heart accelerated. He forced himself not to move, not to press his palms against the pane, not to do anything stupid. He breathed through his nose. The cold air of the room filled his lungs and emptied them slowly.
He looked beyond the property walls, beyond the dark crowns of the trees lining the street, toward the urban horizon blinking in the distance like a living organism.
The illuminated sign floated above the roof line roughly two kilometers away. An enormous advertisement mounted on the roof of some commercial tower block: the blurred silhouette of a man, a cologne bottle, and below it, in white letters pulsing against the night like a heartbeat:
Coming.
Ren went still.
Any other night it would have been advertising. Visual noise from a city that never slept. But those two translucent spheres on the gravel turned that word into something else.
A message.
He stepped back from the window and the darkness of the room swallowed him. His mind was working at a speed it hadn’t reached in days. He dismissed the possibility of a trap by Reznov because Reznov didn’t need traps: he already had him. He dismissed the paranoia because the spheres were real and concrete and down there on the gravel.
Brody.
The name went through his chest like an electric charge. He had written him off for dead. He had cursed him for dying. And now two marbles against an armored window and a word on a lit sign were telling him that perhaps he had been wrong.
He had no time to feel. There would be time for that later, if there was a later.
