Chapter 7
Bane
Max sleeps for three hours. I know because I count the minutes.
Not intentionally—there's nothing else to do. No windows, no clock, just the fluorescent tube humming overhead and the boy curled against my chest, breathing slow and steady for the first time since I walked into this room. His face is pressed into my shoulder. His fingers are still laced through mine where my zip-tied hands rest against his sternum. He smells like himself and I can’t breathe him in deep enough.
They come for me while he's sleeping.
The lock buzzes. Two men. Efficient. They pull me from the bed without ceremony—Max jerks awake, scrambles upright, and I say "It's okay, it's just—" before the needle hits my neck and I grunt.
Then the world softens.
Another dose of sedative. Heavier this time.
The edges of the room blur and my legs go liquid and when they set me back on the mattress I can't quite remember how to arrange my limbs.
Max is there. Hands on my face. Saying something.
I can see his mouth moving but the words arrive late, waterlogged, like he's speaking from the other side of a pool.
The two men leave and I blink things back into focus.
"—fine," I manage. "I'm fine. Just fuzzy."
His expression says he doesn't believe me. Smart boy.
Time passes. The sedative settles into my bones like wet sand. Everything is soft. Distant. I'm aware of Max beside me on the bed—his warmth, his breathing, the way he watches me like he's cataloguing my symptoms—but it's all filtered through cotton.
The slot at the bottom of the door scrapes.
Food. Two trays.
I try to stand. Make it halfway before the room tilts sideways and I sway hard enough that my shoulder hits the wall.
"Sit down." Max's hands are on me immediately—firm, steady, guiding me back to the bed. "I've got it."
He retrieves the trays. Two sandwiches. Some kind of protein bars. Two bottles of water. He sets them between us on the mattress and tears open the first sandwich wrapper.
"Open."
I stare at him. "I can feed myself."
"Your hands are shaking."
He's right. My zip-tied hands are trembling—the sedative making my fine motor control garbage. I couldn't hold a sandwich steady if my life depended on it.
"Open," he says again. Patient. No judgment.
I open my mouth. He feeds me. Small bites, held steady, waiting while I chew. When I need water, he uncaps the bottle and holds it to my lips. Tips it carefully. Wipes the spill from my chin with his thumb.
I huff out a small laugh and he smiles, then offers me another bite.
Something cracks inside my chest.
I've been taken care of before. Atlas held me together after Mom died—fourteen years old, inconsolable, and my oldest brother sat on my bedroom floor for three days and didn't leave. But Atlas held me together the way a general holds a unit together. Structure. Routine. Orders.
This isn't that.
This is gentle hands and quiet patience and the simple act of feeding someone who can't feed himself. This is Max–gentle, kind, willing to help me out when I need it.
Even if I don’t deserve it.
"Your wrists," he says, when the food is done. He reaches for my hands. Turns them over. The zip ties have rubbed the skin raw—red, chafed, the edges starting to crack. "Hold still."
He tears two strips from the mattress cover. Thin fabric. Folds them carefully and slides them under the zip ties, padding the plastic against my skin. His fingers are precise. Deliberate. He adjusts each strip until the pressure eases.
"Better?"
"Yeah." My voice comes out rougher than I intended. I hadn’t realized my wrists were starting to hurt until the pressure eases. "Thank you."
He doesn't respond. Just caps the water bottle and sets it within my reach. Then he sits beside me. Close. Shoulder to shoulder.
The fluorescent hum fills the silence. It should be awkward. Two people in a concrete cell with nothing but time and proximity and the memory of everything that's been said between them—the cruelty, the confession, the kiss, the distance.
It's not awkward. It's the easiest silence I've ever sat in.
"How old were you?" Max asks in a quiet voice. Not looking at me. "When your mom died."
He must have seen something in my face that I thought I was hiding.
"Fourteen."
A nod. Small. Like the number confirmed something he already suspected.
"What was she like?"
Nobody asks me that. Atlas doesn't talk about her—it's the one room in his otherwise immaculate emotional architecture that stays locked. Zero breaks things when her name comes up. Richard remarried. And I—I put on the suit and got straight A's and never let anyone see the crater.
"Kind," I say. The sedative pulls the word out before I can dress it up.
"She was kind in a way that had nothing to do with weakness.
She'd tell my father he was wrong to his face.
She'd tell Atlas to stop trying to be perfect.
She'd—" I stop. Swallow. "She'd sit on my bed at night and read to me.
Even when I was too old for it. Even when I pretended I didn't want her to. "
Max's shoulder presses against mine. Just slightly.
"We handled it. When she died. Atlas ran things. Zero went off the rails for a while. I kept my head down." I shrug. The gesture feels stiff. Performative. The same shrug I've been giving people for ten years when they ask how I coped. "It was fine."
"It wasn't fine."
I look at him. He's not pushing—not the way Atlas pushes, with questions designed to crack you open. He's just stating a fact. Quiet. Certain. The way someone who knows what not fine looks like recognizes it in someone else.
"No," I say. "It wasn't. I was young and everyone expected me to fall apart, so I just..
. didn't. I became the easiest person in the house.
Never complained. Never cried. Never gave anyone a reason to check on me because there was already enough chaos to manage.
And after a while, everyone stopped looking.
Which was the point. Which was also the worst part. "
"Did it work? Being easy?"
"It meant nobody worried about me. It also meant nobody saw me. So yeah. It worked. It just cost everything."
The ghost of a smile. "I know that math."
"Yeah. I bet you do."
The silence opens something. Not a door—more like a seam. The kind that, once it starts, keeps giving.
"Linda used to lock me in the bathroom," Max says. Flat. The voice he uses for things that cost too much to say with inflection. "When my—when my body did things she didn't like. She'd scrub me with dish soap in cold water and lock the door and leave me on the tile floor."
My jaw tightens. I don't interrupt.
"She'd say I was disgusting. Unnatural. That it was my fault. My body. My sickness." He pauses. "Nine the first time. Sixteen when Margot got me out."
"Seven years."
"Seven years."
I want to say something that fixes it. There's nothing that fixes it.
"Margot found me through the system," he continues. "She was a social worker. She came to the house for a routine check and—" A breath. "I don't know what she saw. I never asked. But she came back. Three times. And then she started the paperwork."
"She chose you."
"Yeah." His voice does something—wavers, steadies. "She's the only person who ever has."
The words land in the space between us and sit there like something alive. Two people who lost mothers in different ways—his to cruelty, mine to cancer—and found that the absence shaped everything that came after.
The sedative must be cooling off in my system and I roll my neck, my senses coming back slowly.
"Business degree," I say. "That's what I'm doing.
The legitimate side. I want to take Graves Industries fully clean within ten years.
Atlas thinks I'm naive. Zero thinks I'm boring.
But the criminal side—it's what killed my mother.
The stress. The secrets. She knew. She always knew. And it ate her alive."
Max turns to look at me. Really look. Not the guarded sideways glance I've seen at the estate. A full, open, searching look that makes my chest do something uncomfortable.
"You want to take the whole thing legitimate?"
"Every division. Every shell company. Every dirty dollar."
"That's not naive. That's brave."
Nobody's ever called my ambition brave. Atlas calls it impractical. Zero calls it soft. Richard calls it premature. Brave is new. Brave hits different, coming from someone who knows what real bravery costs.
"You're easy to talk to," I say. The words fall out before the filter can catch them. "That's—I don't say that. To anyone. Ever."
Max's shoulder presses against mine. Just slightly. "You're easy to talk to when you're not being a fucking asshole."
I deserve that. "I know."
"I forgave you for that a while ago."
"You shouldn't have."
"Probably not. But I did."
∞∞∞
Max
The lock buzzes.
I tense immediately. The sound has become a trigger—a Pavlovian jolt that floods my body with adrenaline before my brain can process context.
Medical rounds happen every eight hours.
The injection that keeps the heat suppressed.
The woman in scrubs who doesn't speak, just swabs and sticks and leaves.
It's been almost nine hours. I can feel the edges—the faintest warmth in my belly, the prickle along my arms that means the blocker is wearing thin.
Which is dangerous considering Bane is sitting right next to me.
The door opens. Not the woman.
A guard. Mid-thirties. Thick neck. A nasty, ugly smirk. He's carrying the syringe—holding it up between two fingers like a cigarette. Casual. Amused.
"Medication time," he says.
He doesn't come in. Leans against the doorframe. Eyes moving between me and Bane—Bane slumped slightly against the wall, still a little glassy-eyed from the sedative. But more alert than before.
"Interesting setup." The guard rolls the syringe between his fingers. "Alpha and omega in a box." His gaze drops to the mattress. To how close Bane and I are sitting. "Real cozy."