The air tasted of concrete and his own fear. A metallic taste at the back of his throat that reminded him of that first night, when his father’s men dragged him out of bed and shoved him into the trunk of a car without telling him where they were going. That time, too, he had tried to breathe. That time, too, he had failed.
He looked at his hands. The knuckles on his right hand had swollen, and the skin had split over the bones in a constellation of superficial cuts that had already stopped bleeding. The man he’d knocked down in the street weighed twice as much as he did. Ren remembered the crunch of nasal cartilage under his hand, the surprise in the guy’s eyes—pure disbelief, as if a kitten had bitten off his finger—and then the sharp thud of his back against the asphalt.
He could hit. Knew how. He’d been training for years for this, for when his body—too delicate, too blond, too omega—would have to prove it wasn’t what it seemed.
Ren stood up. The soles of his feet protested on the cold concrete. The wounds from the run stung.
Think.
The door swung inward. He’d seen it when the guard opened it. Hinges on the left. The cubicle’s space didn’t allow for much of a running start, but he didn’t need distance. He needed speed and a point of impact. Throat. Solar plexus if the guy was shorter. The groin if he were bigger. First strike to destabilize, second to create space, and then run. Always run. A sixty-three-kilo omega doesn’t win prolonged fights against trained alphas or betas. Hit and run. That’s what the instructor had taught him—the one he secretly paid with money he stole from his father’s wallet.
Strike and escape.
He positioned himself to the right of the door, pressed against the wall. From there, when the door opened, the doorframe would hide him. Half a second’s advantage. Enough.
He clenched his fists. The pain from his shattered knuckles shot up his forearm like an electric current. He welcomed it with relief. The pain was useful. The pain sharpened him.
They’re coming. They’re going to open that door. Another man will want to possess me. Someone else will try to break me. A man similar to Reznov.
Reznov.
The seven hundred thousand dollars echoed in his head with the obscene weight of a sentence. He remembered the auction hall. The overhead lights that blinded him. The dark silhouettes of the buyers beyond the spotlight, moving, raising hands or cardswith the same nonchalance with which they would have ordered another glass of champagne. And Reznov in the front row. Not as a silhouette. As a presence. His eyes fixed on Ren with a hungry clarity that cut through the glare of the spotlights.
Seven hundred thousand dollars.
No one pays that much to lose the merchandise.
Ren took a deep breath. The air scratched his throat. He flexed his fingers, then clenched them again. He tested his stance. Left leg forward, weight on the right, low center of gravity. If the guy coming in was big—and they’d be big, they were always big—he’d go straight for the throat. A strike with the heel of his hand to the Adam’s apple. Dirty, brutal, effective. Ren didn’t have the luxury of fighting clean.
When that door opens, you go. You don’t think. You go.
The light bulb flickered.
He fell silent. He listened. The blood pounded in his ears so hard he had to open his mouth so the sound of his own breathing wouldn’t drown out the sounds from outside.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
And then.
A step. Heavy. Then another. The faint creak of a sole on the floor of the guardhouse. Ren stopped breathing. The muscles in his legs tensed like steel cables, and every nerve ending in his body ignited at once, flooding him with a fierce, almost painful clarity.
The bolt slid open.
Metal against metal. The same sound as before but reversed, like a sentence being retracted, and the door moved. Ren saw the sliver of light widen centimeter by centimeter. The door swung open toward him and covered him for a fraction of a second—his half-second head start—and then he saw the shadow of the body on the other side and stopped thinking.
He burst out.
The full weight of his body thrust forward, his right fist already raised, his eyes searching for the throat of the man blocking the door, and he found it.
Or rather, he crashed into him.
It was like hitting a wall. The fellow was enormous. He was not fat or bloated, but huge, possessing the solidity of an old oak tree and a body mass imprinted in his bones, not built in a gym. The impact shook Ren’s teeth and stopped him in his tracks, his fist trapped between his own chest and the stranger’s torso, useless, absurd, without even having unfolded.
And then he smelled it.
