Chapter 10
The city slides past the tinted windows in the fading light of early evening and I watch it without seeing it, my thumb moving across Bane’s knuckles in a rhythm I don't remember starting.
The car passes the highway exit for the estate.
I sit up. "That was our turn."
Bane stirs against my shoulder. Lifts his head. Blinks at the window, then at Reyes in the rearview mirror.
"Reyes. Where are we going?"
"Mr. Graves arranged a hotel downtown, sir.
" Reyes's voice is even. Professional. The voice of a man who's been briefed and doesn't elaborate unless asked.
"He thought it best that you and Mr. Carter take the night to rest before returning home.
Give yourselves time to... gather yourselves.
Before Mrs. Graves and Mr. Graves Senior. "
Before Margot.
The thought of her hits me in the chest—a sharp, sweet ache that I wasn't expecting. Margot in her cream cardigan, waiting by the phone. She’s probably been an absolute wreck.
Worrying in the quiet way she worries, where she doesn't say anything but her hands go still and her eyes get distant and you can see the social worker in her scanning for damage she can't name yet.
I want to see her. Want to press my face into her shoulder and breathe in her laundry detergent and hear her call me sweetheart in the voice she reserves for the worst days.
But she can't see me like this. Not in stained scrubs with blood on my lip and a bruise blooming across my cheek. Not with tender welts on my back that she might feel when she hugs me tight. Not when every line of my body is screaming something happened that I can't explain.
Atlas is right.
We need the night.
What I need right now is simpler. Get out of this car. Find a door I can lock from the inside. Peel these scrubs off my body and stand under water hot enough to scald and wash away everything—the facility, the fluorescent light, the hands, the sounds, the drain in the corner. All of it.
Scrub it off my skin and watch it circle the drain and disappear.
Reyes takes us downtown—past the financial district, past the waterfront, into the kind of neighborhood where the buildings are all glass and money.
He pulls around the back of the hotel, down a service ramp into an underground garage.
The fluorescent lighting reminds me of the facility and my chest tightens before I can stop it.
Bane feels me tense. His fingers squeeze mine.
"Different fluorescents," he mumbles against my shoulder. "These ones are warmer."
I blow out a ragged breath.
Reyes parks near a service elevator. Opens our door. I help Bane out—his legs are still a little unreliable, the sedative dragging at his coordination, and he leans on me more than he'd ever admit if he were fully conscious. Reyes walks ahead, keycard in hand, clearing the path.
The service elevator is steel and industrial.
It smells like laundered sheets and has not a spec of dust in the corners.
Bane props himself against the wall. I stand beside him.
Our reflections stare back at us from the brushed metal doors—two people in stained scrubs, one with a swollen cheek and dried blood on his lip, the other with raw wrists and bruised knuckles.
We look like we crawled out of a disaster.
We did.
The elevator opens onto a private hallway. One door at the end. Reyes swipes the keycard and pushes it open, stepping aside to let us through.
The suite unfolds in front of us—enormous, floor-to-ceiling windows framing the city skyline against a bruised purple sky, all pale marble and soft furniture and the kind of tasteful silence that only money can buy.
After five days of concrete and fluorescent hum, the space feels almost aggressive in its comfort.
Too open. Too much glass. My body keeps waiting for walls to close in.
Atlas is by the windows. Already facing the door. As if he was counting down the seconds until we walked through.
His eyes drop to our hands.
Bane's fingers release mine like he touched a live wire. Fast, sharp—not a letting go but a flinch, his hand jerking back to his side, and the absence burns up my arm like a phantom limb.
I feel the ghost of his grip for three full seconds after it's gone.
Bane doesn't look at me. His jaw sets. His shoulders square despite the sway in his step, and whatever we were in that cell—whatever softness, whatever honesty, whatever his mouth whispered against my hair while his knot held us together—gets locked behind a door I watch him close in real time.
Atlas saw. I don't know how much his expression gives away because I'm still adjusting to the light, but he saw our hands. And Bane knew he'd see. And dropped me like a secret.
Atlas’ eyes meet mine and the look on his face guts me.
He’s in yesterday's clothes—dress shirt wrinkled, sleeves still rolled to the elbows, collar open.
His hair is wrecked. His jaw is shadowed with stubble I've never seen on him before because Atlas Graves does not allow stubble.
His eyes are red-rimmed and raw and locked on me with an intensity that borders on physical contact.
He's been awake for days. I can see it in every line of his body—the way he holds himself upright through sheer force of will, the slight tremor in his hands that he's pressing flat against his thighs to hide.
My heart skips a beat as I stare at him. Just as handsome as his youngest brother, but his strength damped to show just how worried he was about us.
About me…
Zero is on the couch. Or was—he's already standing, already moving, unfolding from the cushions in one fluid motion.
He's in all black, arms bare, and the bruises on his knuckles have company: fresh ones, layered over old ones.
His eyes find me and stay there and I feel the weight of his attention settle over me like a hand on the back of my neck.
Nobody moves for a second. The four of us in a hotel suite at night, the city glittering behind the glass, and the silence is so full of things unsaid it practically hums.
I'm aware of all three of them simultaneously. The way I'm always aware of them—a biological radar I never asked for, picking up signals I can't turn off.
Atlas's cedar and leather, faded from days without showering but still there, still steady, still the scent that means control and safety and the hands that held my face in the kitchen.
Zero's gunpowder and ozone, sharper than usual, spiked with something feral and sleep-deprived.
And Bane—beside me but suddenly miles away, his amber and sandalwood muted under institutional soap, his body language rewritten for an audience of two.
Three alphas. One room. One omega standing between them in bloody scrubs.
The air should feel dangerous. And yet…
It feels like coming home.
Atlas breaks first.
He crosses the room and his hands find my face—both palms, cupping my jaw, tilting my head into the light with a gentleness that contradicts everything about his grip.
His thumbs hover near the swollen cheek without touching it.
His eyes catalog the damage—the bruise blooming along my cheekbone, the split lip, the torn collar of my scrubs, the marks on my wrists.
His pulse hammers against my jaw. I feel it through his palms—fast, hard, the pulse of a man who's been counting minutes for days and has finally stopped.
Something shifts behind his eyes. The composure cracks. For a fraction of a second I see what's underneath—the fear, the guilt, the desperate relief that's too big for his face to hold—and then he pulls me against his chest and his arms close around me and he holds on.
He holds on the way you hold something you almost lost.
Tight enough that I can feel his heartbeat slamming against my cheek. Tight enough that welts across my back ache and I don't care. His hand cradles the back of my head. His chin rests on top of my hair. And he breathes—one long, shuddering exhale that I feel in my whole body.
His scent floods me. Cedar and leather and underneath it the darker note—the one I first caught in his bedroom, the one that lived in his sheets when he carried me there, the one my body reads as mine before my brain can correct it.
My hands find the back of his shirt. Grip.
Hold on the way he's holding on, and for a few seconds the word stepbrother loses all its syllables and means nothing at all.
"Don't ever do that again." Barely audible. Spoken into my hair, meant for no one but me. "Don't ever walk out of the house without telling me. Do you understand?"
I nod against his chest. My eyes are burning. And I'm thinking about my bedroom—please, Atlas, please—and his no, and the way leaving felt like the only option.
But right now I’m a mix of wanting to say is it wasn't your fault. And it was all your fault.
But then my mind scrambles because his arms are around me and his heart is hammering and he smells like the safest place I've ever been.
He holds me for a long time. Longer than a stepbrother should.
Long enough that I feel Zero watching from his flank, his body rigid, his scent sharpening with something I can't name.
Long enough that I feel Bane carefully not watching from behind us, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, giving us something he has no obligation to give.
Long enough that Atlas doesn't care about either of them seeing, and that tells me more than any words could about what the last five days cost him.
He searched. He cared. He moved heaven and earth to see me home.
I can feel it in my bones.
When he finally lets go—slowly, his hands trailing from my shoulders to my arms to my wrists, like letting go is something he has to do in stages—he steps back and the composure is back. Mostly. His eyes are still too bright.
"There's a doctor coming. Thirty minutes." He clears his throat. Straightens his collar. The Atlas I know clicking back into place like a dislocated joint.
Then he turns to Bane.