Chapter 5 #2
Max presses against me. Forehead against my collarbone, hands fisted in my shirt, his whole weight collapsing into me like a building giving up on its foundation.
He's naked—bare skin against my clothes, shaking so hard I feel it in my bones—and I wrap my zip-tied arms around him as best I can, awkward and limited and barely an embrace, and I hold on.
I don't think about the skin. Don't think about his body against mine.
I think about the scrubs on the bed behind me and the fact that they left him like this and what I'm going to do about it when I get the chance.
He's shaking so hard my teeth rattle.
I don't say it's okay. It's not okay. Nothing about this is okay.
I don't say you're safe. He's not safe. We're in a concrete cell in a trafficking facility and the door is locked and my hands are bound and I have no idea how to get us out.
I say: "That blindfold they put on me smelled like someone's gym bag. Like specifically someone who does not believe in washing their gym bag. I think it might be the worst thing that's happened to me today, and I was drugged and put in a car against my will, so that's saying something."
A sound escapes Max. Not a sob. Something smaller. Wetter. The ghost of a laugh, strangled at birth.
"I'm serious. When we get out of here, I'm filing a formal complaint about the blindfold. The kidnapping I can forgive. The blindfold hygiene is where I draw the line."
Another sound. Closer to a laugh this time. His fingers loosen slightly in my shirt.
"Also, if Atlas doesn't get us out of here within forty-eight hours, I'm going to kill him. And then the entire Graves empire will collapse within a week because I cannot do math. Zero can't either. We'll be bankrupt by Tuesday."
Max laughs. Broken. Wet. Shaking. But real.
I hold him tighter. My arms ache from the zip ties. My knees ache from the concrete. The sedative is making the world tilt sideways. I don't care. I would kneel on this floor for the rest of my life if it meant he kept making that sound.
You're not nothing. You were never nothing. I was lying. I was drowning in something I couldn't name and I lashed out because that's what I do. I said the cruelest thing I could think of because you walked into my house and my life and my chest and I didn't know what to do with you there.
I don't say that either.
The sobs slow. Settle. Max's breathing evens out—still shaky, still catching on the exhale, but no longer the drowning gasps of ten minutes ago. He doesn't pull away. Stays pressed against me, forehead in the hollow of my throat, his breath warm on my skin.
His bare skin is cold under my arms. Goosebumps everywhere. He's been naked on a concrete floor—for how long? Since they brought him back from that room?
"Hold on." I pull back. Just far enough. His eyes snap to mine—panicked, like I'm leaving—and I shake my head. "I'm not going anywhere. Just—hold on."
I push myself up. My knees grind on the concrete. Cross to the mattress. The gray scrubs are crumpled there—thin, institutional, tossed like an afterthought. I grab them with my bound hands and bring them back.
Max hasn't moved. Still curled on the floor, arms wrapped around his knees, chin tucked.
Trying to take up as little space as possible.
The welts on his back are vivid in the flat light.
I force myself to look at them—not flinch from them—because looking away would be another form of making him invisible.
"Arms up," I say.
He lifts his arms. Slowly—wincing, the movement pulling at the welts on his back.
I work the scrub top over his head, clumsy with my zip ties, and ease it down over his shoulders.
He hisses when the cotton touches the broken skin.
I slow down. Guide it the rest of the way with my fingertips, avoiding the worst of the marks.
The pants are harder. He has to stand, and standing takes effort—his legs are shaky, unsteady, and I brace him with my shoulder while he steps in one leg at a time. I pull the waistband up with both hands. Tie the drawstring.
He's dressed. It's just scrubs—thin and shapeless and too big—but something in his posture shifts the second the fabric settles over his skin. His shoulders drop a fraction. His breathing comes a little easier. Like he's been given back one small piece of himself.
I guide him back down to the floor. Sit beside him. He leans into me immediately—shoulder against shoulder, then his head dropping to rest against my collarbone and I put my arms around him again.
"They hurt you," I say. Not a question.
"I'm okay."
"Max."
"I'm—"
"Don't lie to me. Not here. Not in this room."
A long silence. I feel his jaw work against my collarbone. Feel him deciding whether to trust me with it. And I understand—I understand—that trust is the most expensive thing I could ask for right now, because I spent months making sure he couldn't afford to give it.
"They put me on a cross," he says. "Stripped me. Used a—like a riding crop, or something. Hit me with it. Then they—" His voice catches. Steadies. "Plugged me. Gagged me. There was a man. Big. He talked to me like I was... livestock."
Every word lands on top of what I already know.
What I watched. The cross I can put a picture to now—Max's face pressed against wood, his back open to the room, the first strike landing and the sound that came through the glass.
But hearing it from him—hearing the flatness in his voice, the careful distance he's putting between himself and the memory—is different.
Worse. Because the glass gave me the image.
His voice gives me what the image couldn't: what it felt like from the inside.
My arms tighten around him. I can feel the raised welts under my forearms where they cross his back. Each one a line I will trace back to the hand that made it.
"He injected me with something that killed the heat blockers. And then my—" A shuddering breath. "My body just... responded. To everything. I couldn't stop it. The sounds I was making—I couldn't—"
"You don't have to explain."
"I want to." His voice cracks. "Because you're going to find out eventually. And I'd rather you hear it from me than see it on whatever footage they probably have."
He tells me. Not everything—I can hear the gaps, the places where the words hit a wall he can't climb over yet. But enough. The heat flooding back. His body betraying him on the cross. The sounds he made. The shame.
I saw it. The flush spreading across his skin.
His hips moving against the wood. The involuntary arch of his spine.
And I know—because I'm an alpha, because my biology is the mirror of his—that what his body did wasn't choice.
It was chemistry. It was a system designed to respond to stimulus, responding.
It was like blaming someone for bleeding when you cut them.
But he doesn't know that. He thinks it means something about who he is.
By the end, his voice is barely a whisper and my jaw is clenched so hard my molars creak.
Not at him. At every person in this building.
At the man with the whip. At the guards who punched him and cut his clothes off.
At the polished man who sat across from me at dinner and discussed Max's scent profile like he was reviewing a wine list.
Max is quiet for a long time. Then, barely audible:
"He made me come."
The words fall between us like something dropped from a height.
"On the cross. With the—with the plug, and the heat, and I—" His voice splinters. "I didn't want it. I wasn't—it wasn't—but my body just—and he said good. Like I'd done something right. Like that was the point."
My arms are around him and I can feel him shaking and I want to kill someone so badly my vision pulses.
"That wasn't you," I say. Low. Certain. The most important thing I've ever said. "That was chemistry. That was a system being manipulated by someone who knew exactly which buttons to push. You couldn’t help it."
He doesn't respond. But his hand finds the front of my shirt again. Holds on.
"There was a wall," he says after a while. Quieter now. Almost thoughtful, like he's trying to work something out. "In the room. One wall was different—dark. Like a mirror. Too perfect. Too... placed. I kept thinking—" A pause. "What if someone was on the other side?"
My chest tightens.
"Someone was," I say.
He goes still against me. Completely still. The breathing stops.
"What?"
"I was behind that wall, Max. Me and Atlas and Zero. The man—Kline—he made it go transparent. To show us."
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
I feel him pulling away—not physically, not yet, but something inside him retreating, shutting doors, boarding windows. The shame hitting fresh. He showed me his worst moment and now he's realizing I watched it.
"You saw," he says. Barely audible.
"I saw."
"Everything."
"Yes."
His breathing changes. Faster. The edge of panic. I tighten my arms around him—not forcefully, just pressure.
Grounding.
I'm here. I'm not leaving.
"And you came anyway." His voice is strange. Hollow. Like he's testing a theory he doesn't believe. "You saw all of that—what I looked like, what my body was doing, the sounds I—you saw all of that. And you walked in here anyway."
"Of course I did."
"Why?"
The question hangs between us.
I think about the first dinner. You're nothing. You're nobody. The look on his face—not angry, not defiant. Hurt. The kind of hurt that says I already knew this but I was hoping I was wrong.
I think about the library. The chair. His hand slipping, my hand catching him, his face inches from mine and those dark eyes wide with surprise, and the half-second where neither of us breathed.