Chapter 10 #3
She doesn't ask where we were. Just peels the other two bandages. Cleans each laceration with something that stings enough to make me grip the edge of the mattress. Applies fresh ointment. Fresh gauze. Tapes them down with quick, precise motions.
"Three lacerations," she says, for Atlas's benefit as much as mine. "Two are superficial and slight—they'll close on their own. The third is deeper. It's not infected yet but it needs to be watched. I'll leave oral antibiotics and a topical."
Yet. The word sits in the room.
"You can put your shirt back on."
I do. Fast. My cheeks are burning—a deep, crawling heat that has nothing to do with my omega biology and everything to do with the fact that Atlas just watched a stranger examine marks that were put on my body while I was naked and restrained and gagged.
Marks he saw being made. Something I’d nearly forgotten.
The humiliation is a living thing. It sits on my chest and presses down and I focus on zipping the hoodie all the way to my throat like the fabric can undo what he's already seen.
"You're dehydrated," Dr. Callahan continues, packing her bag.
"Your blood pressure is low. Stress markers are elevated, which is expected.
" She pulls two bottles from her bag—one prescription, one over-the-counter—and sets them on the nightstand beside the water.
"Antibiotics twice a day with food. Ibuprofen as needed for pain.
Keep the lacerations clean and dry—no soaking, pat dry after showers.
" She looks at me directly. "And I need you to sleep.
Real sleep. Your body has been running on cortisol and adrenaline for days and it needs to crash. Twenty-four hours minimum."
"Twenty-four hours?"
"Minimum," she repeats. "Your body will tell you when it's done. Listen to it."
She packs up and follows Atlas out of the room to go back on Bane next. I hear her voice through the wall—wrist abrasions, residual sedative load that needs to clear his system.
Same twenty-four hours. No exceptions.
I sit on the edge of my bed. The adrenaline is draining out of me in real time, like someone pulled a plug. My hands start to tremble. My vision softens at the edges. The mattress is obscenely comfortable and my body is screaming at me to fall backward into it and not surface for a year.
"Come eat something first."
Zero. In the doorway. Leaning against the frame with his arms crossed, watching me the way he watches everything—like he's taking a photograph with his eyes.
When did he get there?
"I'm not hungry."
"I don't care. Kitchen. Now."
I should argue. My body wants to argue—wants to collapse, wants the pillow, wants oblivion.
But there's something in Zero's voice that isn't a command.
It's closer to a request wearing a command's clothes, and the fact that Zero is asking me to eat instead of telling me I'm prey or pinning me to a wall is so far outside our established dynamic that it gets me off the bed out of sheer curiosity.
Or because I’m a damn idiot.
The kitchen is all white marble and brushed steel. Zero pulls a chair out for me at the island—actually pulls it out, like a ma?tre d'—and the gesture is so incongruent with everything I know about this man that I stop and stare at him.
"What?" His eyebrows lift. Defensive.
"Nothing. Just didn't know you owned manners."
"Sit down before I change my mind."
I sit. He sets a plate in front of me. Toast, scrambled eggs, sliced fruit. Simple. Already made. He's been waiting for this.
"When did you make eggs?"
"While you were in the shower." He leans against the counter opposite me.
Arms crossed. The stance is casual but his eyes aren't—they're moving over me in the new clothes, the damp hair, the clean skin, and I can see him cataloging the difference.
Filing it away. Replacing whatever version of me he's been carrying in his head for five days with the version standing in front of him now. "Eat."
I eat. The eggs are good. Buttery, a little salt, slightly overdone at the edges the way they always are when someone cooks them with too much heat and not enough patience. Exactly how Zero would make eggs if I had to guess.
"These are good," I say. Surprised.
"Don't sound so shocked."
"I didn't know you could cook."
His mouth does something. A twitch at the corner that he kills before it becomes a smile. "I can cook four things. Eggs. Pasta. Steak. And anything you can microwave." He pushes off the counter. Opens a cabinet. Pulls out a glass. "My mother taught me the eggs."
The sentence lands between us with unexpected weight.
Zero, who has never, in the entire time I've lived under his roof, volunteered a single personal detail that wasn't designed to intimidate or control just handed me something real. Something soft. Over scrambled eggs.
I don't push. Don't ask. Just let it sit there, warm and fragile, and watch him fill the glass with water and set it beside my plate.
"Thank you," I say. For the eggs. For the water. For saying something real.
He shrugs. The gesture is too casual. Performed. He picks up a dish towel, wipes down a counter that's already clean, and I realize he needs something to do with his hands.
"Zero."
He looks up. The dish towel stops moving.
"I'm okay. Really."
Zero holds my gaze for a long moment. Then he nods. Once. Small.
Maybe he needed to hear those words more than he'll ever say.
He leans forward onto the counter. Puts his head in his hands. Breathes—deep, shuddering. His shoulders rise and fall. The bruised knuckles press against his forehead. He stays like that for five seconds. Ten.
I've never seen Zero be still before. He's always moving—pacing, prowling, vibrating with energy that needs somewhere to go. This stillness is different.
It’s honestly unsettling.
He lifts his head. Drags his hands down his face. When they drop to the counter, his eyes are red but dry.
"Finish your eggs," he says. Quieter than before.
I finish my eggs.
When I’m finish, I stand up to take my plate to the sink and the room tilts. My hand shoots out—grabs the edge of the counter, misses, grabs air—and then Zero is there.
I didn't see him move. He was across the counter and now his hand is closed around my arm and his other palm is flat against my lower back, fingers spread wide, holding me upright.
As if it was instinct. Alpha instinct. The same biological wiring that made Bane burn through a double dose of sedatives.
"Easy." His voice is different up close. Stripped of the sarcasm and the performance and the careful cruelty he wears like cologne. What's left is just him. Just his voice, low and rough with sleeplessness, vibrating through his palm into my spine.
I should step back.
I don't step back.
My hand is on his chest—I put it there without deciding to, flat against his sternum, and I can feel his heart hammering. Fast. His t-shirt is thin and warm and underneath it his body is a wall of heat and his scent is everywhere—gunpowder and coffee so overwhelming it invades my senses.
My brain is screaming at me to run away from him, but the rest of my body wants to be consumed by him.
His gaze drops to my mouth. Stays there.
"You should—" He starts. Stops. His fingers tighten on my arm. The hand on my lower back presses harder, pulling me a fraction closer, and I feel his breath on my face—warm, unsteady, carrying traces of the coffee he's been drinking all night. "We should—"
We should stop. We should remember that you're my stepbrother. We should remember that Zero doesn’t really care, he just wants to consume.
His forehead tips toward mine. An inch. Half an inch. My hand curls into his shirt.
"Max."
Atlas. In the doorway to the hall. His voice is quiet but the timing is surgical. He sees exactly what's happening—Zero's hands on me, my hand on Zero's chest, the charged air between us dense enough to taste.
Zero's jaw clenches. His hand slides off my back—slow, reluctant, his fingers dragging across the fabric of the hoodie like they're memorizing the shape of my spine on the way out.
He steps away. Doesn't look at Atlas. His hands hang at his sides and his fists open and close once, twice, like he's letting something go that he never quite had a grip on.
"You need rest," Atlas says. To me. Gentle.
But his eyes move to Zero for a half-second—a look I can't fully read, something between warning and recognition and a grim acknowledgment as if they’re both drowning in the same water.
"Bane's already out. The doctor said twenty-four hours minimum. Zero, walk her out."
I nod. My legs feel like they're made of wet paper.
Atlas crosses the room. His hand finds the small of my back—in the exact spot Zero's was, and I know he knows because his fingers settle into the warmth Zero left behind with a possessiveness that's barely disguised as guidance.
He walks me down the hallway. Slow. Patient.
Matching my shuffle, his body close enough that his scent wraps around me and my brain scrambles.
Too many pheromones. Too many alphas.
It’s overwhelming.
His thumb moves against my lower back. A small circle. Unconscious or deliberate—with Atlas, the line between the two is thinner than he'd ever admit.
The bedroom is dim. He's drawn the curtains while I was eating. The bed is turned down. The water and ibuprofen wait on the nightstand.
I sit on the edge of the mattress. He stands in front of me.
The light from the hallway catches the side of his face and I can see every hour of the last five days written there—the hollows under his cheekbones, the lines around his mouth, the way his eyes keep moving over me like he's afraid I'll disappear if he blinks.
"What about Margot?" I ask. "She must be losing her mind—"
"She doesn't know, Max." His voice is steady. "As far as Margot and Richard are concerned, you've been staying with a friend from class. Needed some space. Bane had exams and stayed on campus to study."