Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
ATLAS
You protect everyone else, but who protects you?
You can’t fix everything for everyone else all the time. And that’s okay. I can help. I’ll carry things with you.
Max slept in my arms, finally at rest after tossing and turning for hours. I couldn’t join him; I was too restless and sweaty, aching for something I couldn’t let myself have.
Make love to me, please.
If only he knew I had loved him far longer than he realized. Far longer than I realized.
But that was the problem, wasn’t it?
My mind spun around and around. As quietly as possible, I extricated myself from the bed and padded into the bathroom, snagging the mask I’d discarded in my fervor to show him just how much I wanted him.
Even that short distance from my unclaimed mate tugged at my skin, stretching me thin. My head pounded, and my chest burned. I was sure if I turned the lights on I’d see black spots dancing in my vision.
Splashing water on my face, I accepted the reality I feared most.
It didn’t work.
We’d culminated the heat without a claim, and it didn’t work. The bond was incomplete but intact, and I was still in rut.
Mate him, mate him, mate him! my alpha growled, dragging its claws down my back. The fire in my veins stoked to a roaring heat, demanding I listen to my mate who begged for my mark.
I shook my head to clear it and considered my options.
I could either tell Max everything, beg him to forgive me, and seal the bond out of necessity, or go back on suppressants and hope for the best. Honestly, I couldn’t decide which scared me more—the possibility of losing Max after finally calling him mine or dying from slow, painful organ failure.
Or, was it confronting the reality that I did need him that frightened me most?
I don’t need—
Yes, you do!
It was a long time ago, but I’d needed someone, once. When I was too young to understand the significance of watching my father hit my mom until she stopped moving, too young to understand she wouldn’t ever get up again, I’d needed someone.
Someone to trust. Someone who cared. I’d thought all I had to do was tell them what happened, and help would come. The police would save us.
That was what they were meant to do, right? Protect the innocent? The downtrodden? Those who couldn’t fight for themselves?
My reckoning with the way the world really worked happened when I was nine years old, locked in our room, banging my hands against the window as the police drove away, taking my mother’s body with them and leaving me and my brother alone.
With him.
No one had listened when I told them what’d really happened. Their faces turned away from my tears once money was exchanged, passed from blood-stained hands to dirty ones. I didn’t understand until long after just how much power money held, even when a mother was dead.
But when he unlocked the door of our room and found me yelling and screaming, I did understand why it was better to stay quiet. My father’s fists, belt, and whatever else he could find to beat me—and then my brother—were effective teachers.
Saint had already figured that out. He was the stoic, unbending mountain to my raging, violent storm.
And I hated him for it.
How could he be so calm, so quiet, when the only way I knew how to release the pressure valve on the days our father was home was to scream until the sky came down?
How could he sit quiet and behave, when words like depression, suicide, and “It’s selfish, really, for her to leave you alone with the boys. You’re such a devoted dad,” were whispered behind the hands of adults who thought we couldn’t hear?
Eventually, after that storm inside me was tempered into submission again and again and again, I finally saw through my brother’s cold facade.
While my rage was hot lava pouring down a hillside, consuming everything in its path, his was ice, freezing the ground we stood on solid until nothing remained alive. Together, his quiet words and secret plans honed my wrath like a weapon, sharpening it into something useful.
Something deadly.
But that didn’t come until much later, when we were taller and stronger than our father ever was. And when it finally did, we both got the revenge planted in us all those years ago.
To this day, that rage still simmered in my chest; an endless bed of coals that would never be extinguished. For the longest time, I was certain it was the only thing that kept me alive.
Now, though… I peered into the mirror, startled by the reflection of my true face. Even cloaked in darkness, it felt like I’d come home.
Which meant letting go of Max was never an option.
On silent feet I slipped out of his bedroom. It wasn’t the first time I’d snuck around while he slept. Out on the balcony so I wouldn’t wake him, peering over the moonlit bay, I called my brother.
“Atlas?” he answered, voice thick with sleep and worry. “What’s wrong?”
The tiniest light flickered on in the house across the water. Huh. So that’s what my lamp looks like from over here. “Can’t I just call to chat?”
“It’s one in the goddamn morning, and the last time you called me you were dying.”
I cringed. Had it really been two years since I last called Saint? We texted occasionally, mostly when I wanted to see my nephew—or when I wanted him scarce so my omega could spend his heat in peace without a nosy boss sniffing around. “Still not out of the woods on that one. How’s Enz?”
He sighed. “He has three songs ready to play for you, and we’ve already had to sew two octopus legs back on because he carries it everywhere. He’s been asking when you two can go to the aquarium again.”
Guilt and longing battled it out for first place in my chest. “We just finished the renovations for the new freshwater conservation wing. I’ll take him as soon as I’m… as soon as I can.”
For a moment, I pictured Max standing next to me while I showed Enzo the new rehabilitation habitats. The idea of holding his hand in public, with no masks or secrets between us, made the longing pull ahead.
The line was quiet for a moment. “How are you, really?”
I tried and failed to clear the catch in my throat. “Not great.”
“Is it fixable?”
I was doing my best not to throw up over the side of the balcony, and my head ached so fiercely I was fairly certain I was losing vision in one eye.
Worst of all, I wasn’t sure if it was from the rut deteriorating my body or the stress of finally showing Max everything, knowing I could lose him.
Still, I chuckled. “Maybe, but this one’s a doozy. ”
“Can I help?”
I leaned on the railing to steady myself, staring at that tiny light across the lake, and asked the question I’d spent my entire adult life avoiding. “If you had the choice to cut ties with me, take Enzo, and walk away from anyone who would ever use him to avenge someone I killed, would you?”
My brother considered it. I appreciated that he knew I wanted the truth, and not a platitude. “I would never walk away from you, little brother,” he said quietly. “And neither will the one who’s right for you.”
I wiped a hand down my face. “I’m not so sure I wouldn’t deserve it.” I looked back inside. The bedroom was still dark, but Max could wake at any time. “I should go. I have some things to sort through before the morning.”
“Alright. Oh, Atlas?”
“Hmm?”
“Please don’t break my cook’s heart. I’ve gained seven pounds eating all the food he makes when you piss him off. We’re too old to fuck around with cardiovascular health. Also, don’t forget to finish painting the hole you put in my wall.”
I laughed, even though it made my pounding headache worse. “Noted.”
The light went out a minute or so after we hung up. Nausea roiled in my gut, and I made it to the kitchen sink just in time to be sick. Rinsing it down the drain, I closed my eyes and centered myself.
Fixing this meant I had to tell Max everything.
Everything. He deserved to know it all, before deciding whether or not he wanted a life with me.
I couldn’t do that, though, feeling like this.
I’d fuck it up, and it wasn’t fair to him to have to choose whether or not to walk away from me while I looked like I was at death’s door.
Because I was at death’s door.
So, I shot off a text before tiptoeing back into the bedroom to hold Max and watch him sleep for a little while longer.
Just in case it was the last time.