Chapter 11
I wake up alone.
The realization takes a few seconds to land—my body bracing for the fluorescent hum, the concrete ceiling, the thin mattress. Instead: blackout curtains. A pillow so soft my head has sunk into it like a stone into water. Sheets that smell like laundry detergent and nothing else.
No bleach. No institutional soap. No one else's sweat.
The hotel. Right.
I sit up. The room is dark except for a sliver of light under the curtains and the blue glow of a new phone on the nightstand. Plugged in. Charging. Someone put it there while I was sleeping.
The suite is quiet. Actually quiet—the deep, padded silence of thick walls and expensive insulation. I keep waiting for the facility sounds to fill the gap. The crying. The lullaby through the wall.
I swing my legs over the edge of the bed. My body reports in: stiff shoulders, sore ribs, the welts on my back pulling when I stretch. The bruise on my cheekbone throbs with my pulse. Everything hurts, but it's a manageable hurt. A healing hurt. The kind that means the worst is over.
I grab the phone off the charger and pad through the suite barefoot—the living room with its pale furniture, the kitchen. Everything still.
I stop at the second bedroom. Push the door open.
The bed is made. The room stripped clean—no clothes on the chair, no dent in the pillow, no trace of the man who was sleeping here twelve hours ago. Like he was never here at all.
Bane's gone.
Atlas's plan. Bane first, then me. Staggered return. He probably left hours ago—walked out while I was unconscious, buttoned his jacket the way he always does, squared his shoulders, and went home to play the dutiful son who pulled an all-nighter or two at the library.
I stand in the doorway of his empty room and try not to think about how it felt to wake up in the cell with his chest against my back and his hands laced through mine.
Try not to compare it to this—a king bed in a penthouse suite, surrounded by luxury, and the absence of a prison mattress hitting me like something I don't have a name for.
On the kitchen island, a note. Atlas's handwriting—precise, slightly slanted, the penmanship of someone who was taught by hand at an expensive school.
Max—
Call if you need anything. Rest today. There's food in the fridge or order whatever you want through room service—charge it to the room. I'll check in tonight.
Don't open the door for anyone you don't know.
— A
Below it, a room service menu and a keycard with the suite number written on the back. I open the fridge. Stocked—water, juice, fruit, deli containers, yogurt. Not hotel minibar fare. Someone went shopping. Atlas, probably, or someone he sent.
Everything is taken care of down to the last detail.
I eat standing up. Yogurt and a handful of grapes and half a turkey sandwich that I don't taste. I gulp down some instant coffee and eat until I’m full. My body accepts the food mechanically—fuel in, engine running. The hunger is there but distant, like a signal coming from far away.
When I’m finished, I pull out the phone and sit on the couch. The screen lights up and my chest tightens before I can stop it.
Notifications. Missed calls. Texts.
Margot.
I open the thread.
The messages scroll up from the bottom—days of conversation between my mother and someone pretending to be me. I read them with my heart in my throat.
Hey. I'm sorry I left like that. I just needed some space. Things with the guys have been rough. Staying with a friend from class. I'm okay. I love you.
My voice. My patterns. The lowercase, the spare punctuation, the run-together loveyou.
They nailed it. I can't tell the difference between the fake texts and my real ones, and the fact that Atlas and Bane studied me closely enough to replicate my voice to my own mother makes my chest tight in a way I can't quite name.
Gratitude, maybe. Or vertigo.
Margot's replies are Margot. Worried. Gentle. Reaching.
Sweetheart are you sure you're okay? You left so fast. I woke up and your room was— I was worried. Which friend? Do you need anything? I can come get you. Please just tell me you're safe.
I love you more. Please call me tomorrow? Just so I can hear your voice?
Goodnight sweetheart. I love you. Please call me tomorrow. Just want to hear your voice.
Three times she asked me to call. Three times they texted back instead. Because they can fake my words but they can't fake my voice, and Margot would know in one syllable that the person on the other end of the line wasn't her son.
I close the thread. Stare at the ceiling.
Then I open a new message. Type Bane's name.
The cursor blinks.
Hey….
Delete.
I just wanted to say…
Delete.
I hope you got home okay. I keep thinking about…
Delete.
Fuck.
The other night when you held me I felt…
Delete. Delete. Delete.
FUCK.
I close the message app. Set the phone face-down on the cushion beside me.
He's home. He's with his brothers. He's probably asleep in his own bed, in his own room, in a house where the walls aren't concrete and no one is watching through cameras.
He doesn't need a text from the omega stepbrother who complicated his life.
He has enough to deal with.
And I’m an idiot.
And a coward.
I head back to my room and grab my laptop. I open it. Check my student portal.
Three missed assignments. A paper due in two days I haven't started. Discussion board posts marked incomplete. An email from my creative writing professor: Max, I noticed you haven't submitted your last two pieces. Is everything alright? Please don't hesitate to reach out if you need an extension.
I stare at the assignments. Read the same paragraph of instructions three times.
The words slide off my brain like water off glass—I can see them but I can't hold them, can't make them mean anything, can't connect the person who cared about deadlines and grades with the person sitting in a hotel penthouse with bandages on his back and a cover story to memorize.
Everything just feels different now. Like I’m not the Max I was before. School is…
I care about it. I want to write. But deadlines and fitting into the perfect box of what a student is supposed to be just feels too exhausting to manage.
I close the laptop.
I stand up from the couch and take stock. Stretch my arms above my head—the welts pull but don't scream. Roll my neck. Flex my hands. The wrist abrasions are fading, pink instead of angry red.
Wait…
I go still. Close my eyes. Check in with my body the way I've learned to—scanning for the warmth, the prickle, the low hum of biology winding up. The pilot light.
The part of my biology I’ve become painfully familiar with lately.
Nothing.
My body temperature is normal. My skin isn't flushed.
The ache that's been squatting in my belly for weeks—the constant, low-grade emergency of an omega whose suppressants failed—is just..
. absent. The facility blockers have definitely worn off by now.
If the heat was coming back, I'd feel the crawl starting. The warmth building. The slow wind-up.
Instead I feel quiet. Like my biology has exhaled.
Like whatever Bane did—the knot, the release, twenty minutes locked together on a prison mattress—satisfied something deep enough that it's not asking for more.
My body got what it needed and the cycle reset and for the first time in weeks, I feel like myself.
I think about Bane inside me. The knot swelling. The fullness. The way everything just... stopped hurting.
My face heats. I press my palms against my cheeks and shove the thought sideways.
I wander back to the kitchen. Read Atlas's note again. The handwriting is so precise it looks printed, except for the A at the bottom—slightly rushed, the tail of the letter trailing off like he was already reaching for his phone or his keys or the next crisis.
Rest today. He underlined it. Twice.
The tiredness is still there. Muted by the food and the coffee I found in the cabinet, but present—a heaviness behind my eyes, a drag in my limbs that won't quite lift. The doctor said twenty-four hours. My body agrees.
I rinse my plate. Set it in the sink. Walk back down the hallway to my room, pulling the curtains tighter until the city disappears and the room goes dark enough that time loses its edges.
I crawl under the covers. The sheets are cool against my skin and the pillow is soft and the silence holds me the way concrete walls never did.
I sleep. Deep. Dreamless. The heavy, greedy sleep of a body that's been running on fumes and has finally been given permission to stop.
∞∞∞
I wake up because someone is in the room.
I don't know how I know. Some animal part of my brain, some leftover survival wiring from the facility, registers the change before my eyes open—a presence, a weight in the air, the nearly imperceptible sound of someone breathing who isn't me.
My eyes open. The room is dim. Curtains still drawn.
The chair in the corner is occupied.
I can't see his face. Just the outline—legs stretched out, arms draped over the armrests, a body at rest in the blue-gray glow of city light filtering through the curtain gap.
For one freezing, airless second I'm back in the facility, waking up to a stranger in the dark, and my lungs lock and my hands claw at the sheets and the scream building in my throat—
Gunpowder. Black coffee. Ozone.
Zero.
Every muscle in my body seizes.
I lurch upright—sheets tangling around my legs, hands fisting in the comforter.
Now that I know it's him, the details sharpen. Black t-shirt, sleeves tight around his arms, dark hair pushed back from his face. The shadows carve his cheekbones sharper than usual. His split knuckles rest on the leather armrest, scabbed over but still angry.
He’s dragged the chair close to the bed, his spread legs straddling the edge of it.
He's watching me. Those black eyes steady and unblinking, patient in a way Zero is never patient about anything.