Chapter 5
Bane
The sedative tastes like burnt plastic at the back of my throat.
They inject me in the restaurant parking lot—two men, efficient, a needle in my neck before I've fully processed the cold night air.
The world softens. Edges dissolve. I feel myself being guided into the back of a vehicle, feel hands securing something thick and dark over my eyes—professional blindfold, padded, no light leaking at the edges.
My wrists are already zip-tied. They loop them through something bolted to the seat.
I'm thinking about Max.
About the way his shoulders shook behind the glass.
About the welts on his back—thin pink lines and darker ones underneath, the kind that split skin.
About the sound he made when the man touched him.
A muffled keen that carried through glass and candlelight and will live inside my chest until I die.
I'm thinking about the fact that he's been in this building for days and no one has held him.
The sedative makes everything swim—the rumble of the engine, the leather smell of the seat, the low murmur of voices I can't parse.
I focus on what I can track. Left turn. Straight for a while.
Right. The road surface changes—smooth to gravel, gravel to something else.
A ramp or a garage, the echoes compressing, the air temperature dropping. Underground.
Left turn. Thirty steps. Right turn. Fifteen steps.
I'm counting because Atlas would count. Because Atlas would memorize the route, file it away, build it into whatever plan gets us out. And since Atlas isn't here—since I walked away from my brothers and into the hands of a man who seals his threats with wax—the least I can do is pay attention.
Left turn. Thirty steps. Right turn. Fifteen steps.
I don't second-guess the decision. Not for a second. I watched Atlas's face when I spoke up—the flash of something I've never seen there before. Maybe a little bit of concern, but his shoulders relaxed slightly the minus I put the idea of going with Max on the table.
Hopefully Zero feels the same way too.
At least one of us can take care of Max.
I would have chewed off my own tongue to be the one to do it.
Because I can't stop seeing it. Max's body flushed and slick and responding—hips rocking against the wood, spine arching, sounds leaking through the gag that were desperate and wanting and utterly involuntary.
They stripped his blockers and forced his heat and put him on display like a piece of livestock in season, and that man—that hulking, dead-eyed man—ran his hands over Max's body like he was checking the merchandise.
Touched him. Handled him. Dragged instruments across his skin and watched him writhe and did it like a fucking demonstration.
And Max couldn't stop any of it. His body did what it was designed to do, and they used it against him, and somewhere behind the amber light and the leather and the restraints, the person I—
The person Max actually is was screaming.
Nobody is going to touch him again. Nobody. Not a guard. Not a handler. Not a buyer. Not anyone on this earth who hasn't fucking earned the right.
My job is simple. Be here. Put myself between Max and whatever comes through that door next.
They walk me through corridors. Concrete under my feet. The air is cool, sterile, carrying the faint chemical smell of industrial cleaner. I hear doors opening. Locks buzzing. The sound of this place—the one Max has been living in for days—settles around me like a second blindfold.
A door opens. Hands push me through. Not gently.
"Your friend is inside. The blindfold stays on until we leave."
The door closes. The lock buzzes.
Until we leave. They're gone.
I hook my bound hands under the bottom edge of the blindfold and shove it up. It catches on my brow, drags across my forehead, and I wrench it over my head with a grunt. It falls to the floor.
I blink.
The room is dim—a single fluorescent tube behind a metal cage, casting flat yellow-white light that makes everything look dead. Concrete walls. Concrete floor. A thin mattress on a bolted frame. A drain in the corner.
And Max.
He's on the floor against the far wall, knees drawn up, completely naked. Strewn across the bed are what looks like scrubs—thin, gray, too big for him. His wrists are bruised and raw from cuffs that they must have forgotten to put back on him. His head is down.
I stand there for half a second. Just looking at him. Taking in the reality of what I walked into.
Then I hear his breathing. Fast. Shallow. Panicked. Muffled by the leather strapped over his mouth.
Max is still gagged.
The rage that moves through me is so total it burns through the sedative like acid through gauze.
They put him on a cross. They whipped him.
They forced his heat. They made him perform for an audience.
And when they were done—when the show was over and the wall went dark—they threw him back in this box naked with the leather still buckled around his skull and didn't even give him back his voice.
I will remember that. I will remember every detail of this, and when the time comes, I will present the bill.
"Max." I keep my voice steady. Low. The fluorescent light is dim and flat and makes everything look worse—the bruises darker, the skin paler, the gag a strip of black leather cutting across his face. "It's me. It's Bane."
A muffled sound. Not a word. Something that might have been my name if his mouth could form it. Then silence. Then the breathing gets faster—not calming down, speeding up. Like hearing my voice made it worse. Like being rescued is its own kind of breaking.
I drop to my knees. The concrete is cold through my pants.
I reach out with bound hands—slow, careful—and touch his shoulder.
His bare skin too pale. He flinches under my touch so violently his whole body jerks away and his back hits the wall.
His eyes—wide, glassy, animal-terrified—stare at me over the gag like he's not sure whether I'm real or another thing this place has invented to hurt him.
Something white-hot moves through my chest. Not the flinch itself—the meaning of it.
They’ve taught him to flinch from hands in the dark.
They’ve turned touch into threat. And now I can see what they've done—the flush on his skin, the trembling that hasn't stopped, the way he's holding himself like everything hurts.
"It's me." Softer now. "It's just me. I'm not going to hurt you."
Nobody is. Not while I'm breathing. Not while I have a body to put between you and them.
I follow the flinch. Find his shoulder again.
Trail my fingers up—carefully, slowly, letting him watch my hands move so he knows where I'm going.
My fingertips find the edge of a welt. Raised.
Hot. Running diagonally across his shoulder blade as he leans forward.
Then another one below it, intersecting.
I see them now in the flat light—angry red lines, the deeper ones dark and split.
My jaw locks so hard it aches.
I catalog them by touch. Two welts on his upper back. A third lower, deeper—the skin broken, tacky with dried blood. A bruise on his ribs that makes him hiss when my fingers brush it. His skin is hot everywhere—residual heat, suppressants fighting biology—and damp with sweat.
I find the leather strap of the gag.
The buckle is behind his head. I can see the strap but my fingers are thick and clumsy with the sedative, the zip ties limiting my range.
I fumble with the metal. Curse. Try again.
The buckle is small and my hands are unsteady from the fury pounding through me, and the leather is wet—tears or sweat or both—and I can feel Max trembling under my fingers.
His whole body vibrating like a plucked string.
"Come on. Come on, come on—"
The buckle gives. The strap loosens. I pull the gag free and Max gasps—a raw, desperate intake of air, the sound of someone surfacing after too long underwater. Then another breath. And another. Each one a ragged sob that shakes his whole frame.
"Bane?"
My name in his mouth. Broken. Incredulous. Like he's not sure I'm real.
"Yeah." My bound hands find his face. Cup it.
His cheeks are wet. His skin is hot. I see the tracks of dried tears, the swollen lip, the red marks where the gag dug into the corners of his mouth.
I hold him the way I held him in his room that night—palms against his cheeks, thumbs where his tears are—except that night I kissed him, and right now I'm looking at him in flat fluorescent light in a concrete cell, and the distance between those two moments is the cruelest thing I've ever measured.
"Yeah, it's me. I'm here."
"How—what are you—why are you here?"
"Because you shouldn't be alone."
"But—are they coming? Atlas, are they—is someone—" His voice cracks. Splinters. The words tumbling out fast and fragmented, each one more desperate than the last. "Are they going to get us out?"
"It's complicated." I hate saying it. Hate the way his face crumbles around the edges when I do. "Atlas and Zero are working on it. They know where we are. It's going to happen—hopefully soon."
"Hopefully?" The word comes out like I've hit him.
"Soon," I say again. Firmer. Like saying it with more conviction will make it more true. "But I couldn't—" I stop. Start over. "I wasn't going to let you sit in here alone while they figured it out. That wasn't an option."
His mouth opens. Closes. His chin trembles—a small, terrible thing—and something behind his eyes just... gives way.
Max breaks.
Not quietly. Not the controlled tears I watched through the glass.
Full-body, shuddering sobs that wrack his frame, that shake his shoulders and clench his fists and make sounds I've only heard once before in my life—the night my mother died, the sounds I made into Atlas's chest while he held me and said nothing because there was nothing to say.