Reznov took half a step back. Only half. Then he stopped, as though retreating further would concede something his pride wouldn’t allow. Brody covered the remaining distance in three long strides, circled the armchair and seized Reznov from behind. His right arm crossed the man’s chest like a steel bar. His left—the injured side—closed around his throat with a sound that Brody suppressed between clenched teeth. The whiskey glass struck the wooden floor and shattered into a fan of amber shards.
Reznov fought back. His shoulders tried to turn, his hands seized Brody’s forearm, his feet searched for traction on the floor. It didn’t last long. Brody squeezed and Reznov’s body went rigid against his chest, his back pinned to the tactical vest, his head forced upward by the pressure of the arm at his throat.
And then Brody turned him toward Ren.
Like an offering.
Ren was four steps away. The gun in his right hand, the barrel pointing at the floor. He looked at Reznov. Reznov looked at him.
The Russian’s eyes conveyed no fear. They conveyed calculation. Probabilities. Angles of negotiation. He was looking at Ren the same way he had looked at him in the auction room, the same way he had looked at him every time he entered his room: as something he owned and would continue to own because the law and the money and the entire world were on his side.
Ren took a step.
Another.
He stopped in front of Reznov. Close enough to smell his expensive cologne mixed with the sweat beginning to bead at his temples. Close enough to see the veins standing out in his neck under the pressure of Brody’s arm.
Ren hesitated.
Not out of fear. Not out of compassion. But because killing someone was something that couldn’t be undone. There was no going back, no draft to delete, no way to return the air to a body that had stopped breathing. It was an act that became part of whoever committed it, permanently. Ren knew this with the cold clarity of someone who has had too much time to think in locked rooms.
And then he remembered.
Reznov’s voice floating through the room where he’d been imprisoned:I know you’ve been with Brody and that could cost him his relationship with Malachi. The threat wrapped in silk, dressed in courtesy, served with a smile that never reached his eyes. The contract. His name written on a document like a racehorse’s. Seven hundred thousand dollars. The years of Julian Valois and his hands pushing him toward closed doors behind which waited men whose names Ren had never learned. The hands of those men. All the hands. The black latex jumpsuitclinging to his skin like a second layer of shame. The platform. The lights. The eyes of strangers appraising him like livestock.
He felt no rage.
He felt something colder. Something that had been solidifying inside his chest for weeks, perhaps for years, and that now had the consistency of old ice, the ice that forms at the bottom of lakes where the light never reaches.
Ren tucked the gun into his waistband. He raised his hand and pressed it against Brody’s tactical vest, against his abdomen, until his fingers found the grip of one of the tactical knives secured to the straps. He drew it out. The thirteen-centimeter blade caught the firelight.
Reznov watched him. The calculating eyes narrowed a millimeter. But he didn’t plead. Didn’t beg for mercy. He still didn’t believe Ren was capable of it.
Ren stabbed him in the heart.
The blade went in cleanly, between the third and fourth rib, with a brief resistance that gave way all at once when the steel found soft muscle. Ren felt the impact in his wrist, in his elbow, in his shoulder. He felt it travel the length of his arm like an electric current.
Reznov didn’t scream. His mouth fell open, his eyes dilated, and a sound that never quite became a word escaped his throat like the last breath from a bellowing. His hands released Brody’s forearm. They fell to his sides.
Brody let him go.
Reznov collapsed. His knees first, then his side, then his shoulder against the hardwood floor. He came to rest on his side beside the broken shards of his own glass, with the knife buriedto the hilt and his eyes open, staring at the fireplace that went on burning as though nothing in that room had changed.
Ren looked at the body. Looked at his own hands. Clean. The blood had stayed on the blade and on Reznov’s shirt, not on him.
He raised his eyes to Brody.
Brody was watching him. Those gray eyes with their reddened edges, his breathing heavy, one foot on Reznov’s fallen torso as though it were something he was stepping on to cross a river. His gloved hands came up and took Ren’s face.
The gloves were rough against his cheeks. They smelled of gunpowder and leather, and beneath all of that, beneath the war and the blood and the night, was the scent of raisins and walnuts that Ren would have recognized anywhere in the world.
Brody kissed him.
Long. Deep. With his mouth open and his breath warm and a desperation that wasn’t new but accumulated, compressed across days of separation that had felt like years. Ren grabbed the straps of the tactical vest and pulled him downward because Brody was too tall and Ren needed more, needed to sink into that kiss until there was no air left between them. Brody wrapped his good arm around his waist and pulled him against his body and Ren felt the bulk of the bandages beneath the vest and the runaway heartbeat of a heart that had nearly stopped beating and the fierce warmth of an alpha who had crossed the city to take him back.
Behind them, Jax cleared his throat.
Ren didn’t pull away. Neither did Brody.
