Page 98 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
Armored glass.
He pushed himself up to sitting and stared at the window with his mouth slightly open. Reznov wasn’t stupid. Of course he wasn’t stupid. A man who bought people didn’t leave windows that could be broken with a chair. This room was not a guest room or a temporary lodging. It was a cell designed to look like a bedroom. Every detail, from the plastic spoon to the armored glass, from the exterior lock to the absence of a mirror in the wardrobe, had been designed to contain without allowing the contents to destroy themselves. Because the contents were worth seven hundred thousand dollars.
Ren closed his mouth. Opened it again. Closed it.
The bolt didn’t turn. Sergei didn’t appear. And that too was information: the walls of that room were thick enough or insulated enough that the crash of a chair against armored glass didn’t reach the hallway. Or Sergei had heard and simply didn’t care because he knew as well as Ren did that the window would never give.
Both possibilities he’d considered had just died. The lock didn’t yield to a plastic spoon. The window didn’t yield to a solid wood chair. Ren looked at the door. Looked at the window. Looked at the ceiling. Looked at the floor.
He stood slowly. He walked to the exact center of the room, sat down cross-legged with his hands on his knees and stayed there, motionless, staring at the wall opposite without seeing it.
He needed to think. Not to react. To think.
The physical exits were sealed. Brute force was useless against an architecture designed to neutralize it. Which meant that if there was a way out—and there had to be, because Ren refused to accept there wasn’t—it would not be a broken window or a forced lock. It would be something else. Something that didn’t depend on muscles or tools he didn’t have.
Something that depended on what he did have.
He closed his eyes. Breathed deeply. The air in the room was neutral, clean, with no trace of anyone else’s pheromones. Neither Reznov nor Sergei had left an olfactory mark. Ren was alone with his own scent and the silence and a creature that weighed nothing and changed everything.
He remained there, seated in the center of his cell, eyes closed and hands on his knees, thinking.
The second night in the room with the armored glass was worse than the first. Not because of fear, which had already settled in as a constant hum behind his eyes, but because of the silence. A thick, padded silence that reminded him of the cheap hotel rooms where Julian used to leave him waiting with instructions not to move until whichever alpha arrived.
Ren didn’t sleep. He stayed sitting on the bed with his back against the headboard and his eyes fixed on the door, counting the hours by the light shifting on the other side of the indestructible window. When the sun began to filter in goldenstrips across the carpeted floor, Ren was still in the same position, legs drawn up against his chest and arms wrapped around his knees.
The bolt turned mid-morning.
Sergei entered first, as always—a ritual of territorial occupation that Ren now found entirely predictable. The Russian swept the room with his gaze, checked the intact window, the broken chair against the wall, the untouched food tray from the day before. He said nothing. He never said anything. He stepped aside and Dimitri Reznov entered with the stride of an owner, crossing the threshold the way a man enters his own sitting room.
He was wearing a dark gray suit without a tie and a white shirt open at the collar. Silver hair combed back with something that gleamed in the window light. He smelled of expensive tobacco and sandalwood, a scent that wasn’t unpleasant in itself but that triggered an instinctive nausea in Ren, the same way the proximity of any alpha who wasn’t Brody had repelled him since the bond had settled.
“You look better.”
Ren didn’t move. He remained seated on the bed with his legs crossed and his hands on his ankles, looking at an undefined point on the wall to Reznov’s left.
“You’ve eaten something, at least. That’s progress.”
He hadn’t eaten. Sergei had brought a second tray that morning and Ren had drunk the water and taken a bite of dry bread so as not to weaken himself, but the previous evening’s tray sat untouched on the side table. Reznov chose to overlook that contradiction, or didn’t see it.
Dimitri moved to the window and contemplated the garden outside with his hands in his trouser pockets. From that anglehis profile was almost paternal. Jaw relaxed, shoulders without tension, the posture of a man enjoying a pleasant view on a Sunday morning. Ren knew that calm was a tool as sharp as Sergei’s fists.
“You’re not going to talk to me.”
Silence.
“Very well.”
Reznov turned and leaned his hip against the ledge of the armored window. He crossed his arms.
“Then I’ll talk and you can decide whether it interests you to listen.”
Ren didn’t move his eyes from the wall. He counted the imperfections in the paint. One, two, three, four tiny flaws only visible because the sun was coming in at a low angle.
“I know you were with Brody Kovac.”
Five, six, seven. Ren counted. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink faster or breathe differently because he had rehearsed this moment in his head for hours, sitting cross-legged in the center of the room, preparing himself for whatever Reznov might throw at him. Brody’s name was the most obvious ammunition. Ren knew it. He’d been expecting it.
“It’s no secret, Ren. My men pulled you out of his car. Your clothes smelled of him.Yousmell of him.”
