Chapter 6
Zero
I can't sleep.
Haven't been able to since we found the car.
Haven't been able to do anything except hunt people down and pace and hit things and stand in the shower until the water went cold and my skin went numb and it still wasn't enough.
My body hums with violence that has nowhere to go.
My knuckles are split from the bag downstairs—four rounds, bare-fisted, until the leather was smeared red and my hands stopped working.
Didn't help. Nothing helps.
Bane is gone. Walked into a cage for Max like it was nothing. Like it was obvious. Like the decision didn't cost him anything except the jacket he buttoned before turning to follow Kline's man out the door.
It cost him everything. He just didn't flinch.
I would have flinched. That's the difference between me and my youngest brother. Bane acts from the heart. I act from the gut. And the gut is a dark, selfish place that doesn't volunteer for sacrifice—it volunteers for violence.
The duffel bag sits on my dresser. Max's bag. The one we pulled from his car the night he disappeared. Atlas tagged it as evidence, went through it once for information, set it aside.
I don't know why I'm standing in front of it. My feet brought me to it the way they always bring me toward Max—unconsciously, magnetically, like the needle of a compass that's been demagnetized and recalibrated to point at one specific person.
I unzip it.
His clothes.
The scent hits me like a freight train.
Vanilla. Honey. Smoke—the kind that curls off burning sugar, sweet and dark. Faint after days in a bag, but unmistakable. His. The scent that leaked through and filled the vents of the Graves estate and drove me out of my goddamn mind.
I pick up a t-shirt. Gray. Soft. Worn thin at the collar. I bring it to my face before I can talk myself out of it and breathe in so deep my lungs ache.
Max.
The scent is a fist around my chest. Not lust—not yet. Something rawer. The olfactory equivalent of a missing persons report. This person existed. This person was here. This person is gone and you didn't stop it.
I go through the bag. Jeans—folded, not rolled, because Max folds everything. Two more shirts. Underwear. A toothbrush in a plastic bag. A phone charger. The essentials of a boy who's been keeping one bag packed his whole life. Ready to disappear at a moment's notice.
Ready to leave before he can be left.
At the bottom, under the clothes, a notebook.
Brown. Faded. Worn soft at the corners, the cover creased from being shoved into bags and backpacks and probably under pillows.
A rubber band holding it closed. The kind of notebook Max probably bought at a drugstore for two dollars and carried with him everywhere because it holds things more valuable than anything money can buy.
I shouldn't open it.
This is Max's private world. The interior of a person who guards his interior because everyone who's ever seen it has used it against him. Opening this notebook is a violation. A trespass. He wouldn’t want me to.
And that’s exactly why I can’t help myself.
I open it.
The handwriting is small. Neat but cramped, like he's trying to fit as much as possible into as little space as possible. Trying not to take up room. Even on paper.
This notebook only covers the last six months or so. The newer volume. Whatever came before is somewhere else.
I start reading.
Someone flushed my suppressants.
I came home and the bottle was on my bed. Empty. Cap loose. All the pills—gone. Someone went into my room, found them in my dresser, and flushed every single one.
I know who it was. I don't have proof but I know.
I can’t call Dr. Yao. Can't get a refill. It's been three days since my last prescription. Three days. She can't give me more without an in-person visit and even then she'll ask questions I can't answer. Why do you need more already? Where did they go? Are you taking more than prescribed?
I can't tell her someone stole them. She'll tell Margot. And then Margot will worry and it will ruin everything.
I haven't missed a dose in eleven years. Not once. Not since I was nine.
I don't know what's going to happen to me.
I flip several pages and keep reading.
I woke up in Atlas's bed.
I don't remember how I got there. Last thing I remember is the kitchen—the floor tilting, my vision going gray at the edges, my legs giving out. Then nothing. Then waking up in sheets that smelled like cedar and leather and something darker. His sheets. His pillow. His smell soaked into my skin.
I felt safe.
That's the worst part. Not waking up in a stranger's bed in a house where I'm barely tolerated.
Not the headache splitting my skull or the nausea rolling through me in waves or the fact that my body is doing things I can't explain and can't control.
Not even the humiliation of collapsing in the kitchen like some damsel in a period novel.
The worst part is that for one second—one stupid, reckless second—surrounded by his scent, I felt safe.
In this house where Bane told me I'm nothing.
Where Zero looks at me like I'm something to break.
Where Richard smiles politely and doesn't mean it.
Where I eat dinner at a table full of people who wish I wasn't there and pretend so hard my jaw aches from smiling back.
I felt safe in Atlas's bed. And I hate it. Because safe is how you get hurt. Safe is the feeling right before the floor drops out.
I won't make that mistake again.
I turn pages. My throat is getting tight. Each entry is a window into a person I thought I understood and didn't understand at all.
I confronted Zero about my pills.
In the lounge. He was at the pool table like he owned it—because he does, because everything in this house is theirs and I'm just the charity case taking up space in their old room.
I told him to stay out of my room. He smiled like I'd said something funny. I told him he flushed my pills. He said "I have no idea what you're talking about" with that smile that's all teeth and no warmth.
I said fuck you and tried to leave. He grabbed my arm. Iron grip. Fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. Asked me what the pills were. Called them "mystery pills." Asked if I had "a little habit" I was hiding from Mommy. Like it was a joke. Like my entire life isn't held together by those pills.
I shoved him. He grinned. Actually grinned. Said "there it is, I knew you had some fight in you" like I'd done exactly what he wanted.
Then he slammed me against the wall. I hit him—connected with his jaw, felt it in my knuckles for days after.
He punched me in the stomach. Then he grabbed my hair and slammed me face-down on the pool table and pinned me there and I couldn't move and I couldn't breathe and he smelled like gunpowder and black coffee and something electric, like ozone, like a storm about to break.
And I hated him. And my body was on fire. And those two things lived in the same moment and I wanted to scream and I wanted to arch up against him and I wanted to disappear.
I hate that I don't actually hate him.
My heart pounds. I flip another page.
What if I can't keep pretending I'm normal?
The way they all look at me now is different. Like they know something. Like they can smell something I'm trying to hide. Especially Zero. He looks at me like he wants to devour me. Like he's trying to figure out how I taste. Like he's angry that he wants me at all.
I know that feeling.
I close the notebook. Press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
He grabbed my hair and slammed me face-down on the pool table and I couldn't move and I couldn't breathe.
I did that. I remember doing it. Remember the grin on my face when he shoved me—the thrill of it, the satisfaction of finally getting a reaction from the boy who'd been a ghost for weeks. I remember pinning him to the felt and feeling his body tense underneath me and thinking there you are.
I wasn't thinking about what it felt like from his side. About the iron grip on his arm. About his head hitting the drywall. About being held down by someone bigger and stronger in a house where he already felt like prey.
And my body was on fire. And those two things lived in the same moment.
That line. The one that makes my chest crack. Because he wasn't just scared. He was wanting—wanting and hating himself for it, terrified and aroused in the same breath, and I was too busy enjoying the fight to see any of it.
The self-loathing is familiar. I break everything. Push away everyone. Turn want into violence because I don't know how to turn it into anything else.
But this is worse. Max left this house and drove into a trap because I—because all of us, but mostly me—made this place feel more dangerous than a parking lot at midnight with a stranger.
I need more. I need the whole picture. Not just the last few months—all of it.
I need all of Max.
I take the notebook and go to his room.
The scent hits harder here. Days old but soaked into the walls, the sheets, the carpet. Vanilla and honey and smoke. My body responds—pupils dilating, blood rushing south, a want so acute it borders on grief.
I stand in the doorway and breathe it in. Let it hurt.
The room looks mostly the same. Bed unmade—the same as when we came searching for him the other night. A drawer left open from someone searching. But most of Max's things are still here. He only took the one bag. Everything else stayed behind.
His books are still here. Organized by spine color—reds together, blues together, greens fading into yellows. Objectively insane. Makes my mouth twitch despite everything.
Index cards on the desk covered in story ideas. Character sketches. Fragments of sentences that go nowhere and everywhere.
Max is a writer. I keep forgetting. Keep seeing the omega, the body, the scent—forgetting that underneath is a mind that creates worlds. A mind that noticed I smelled like rain and gunpowder and wrote it down because noticing things is how he survives.