Chapter 11 #2
How long has he been sitting there?
"Where's Atlas?" The words come out sharp. Breathless. My pulse is hammering in my throat. "Where's Bane? Is something—"
"Atlas is at home. Bane's asleep." His voice is low. Unhurried. The calm of a man who's been sitting in silence for a long time and is in no rush to break it. "Nothing's wrong."
"Then why are you—"
"Relax, Max."
I don't relax. The last time I was truly alone in a room with Zero, he had me bent over a weight bench.
The time before that, pinned to a pool table.
My body has learned a very specific lesson about what happens when there's no one between me and this man, and it's screaming that lesson at me now even as he sits perfectly still with his hands visible and his voice low and his posture almost—impossibly—non-threatening.
"How did you get in?"
"Key." He holds it up. A keycard, identical to mine. "Atlas has one. I have one. Perks of being the people who pay the bill."
"You could have knocked."
"I did. You were out cold." A pause. "I brought you something."
He reaches beside the chair. Picks up a white pharmacy bag. Sets it on the bed between us, careful, like he's placing a chess piece.
I open it. An amber prescription bottle. I turn it toward the gentle light and read the label.
My suppressants.
The same ones. The same dosage. Dr. Yao's name on the prescription—Atlas must have contacted her, pulled strings, done whatever it is the Graves family does when they need something they shouldn’t be able to get.
"Atlas got you a ninety-day supply," Zero says. He's watching me hold the bottle. Something moves behind his expression—subtle, guarded. "Figured you'd want them as soon as possible."
I turn the bottle over in my hands. Ninety days. Three months of chemical normalcy. Three months of not worrying about the pilot light, the warmth, the slow build that turns my body into a stranger.
"Ironic, isn't it." Zero's mouth twists.
Not a smile. Something darker. "Our family's been moving suppressants through distribution channels for years.
Black market, gray market—it's one of the most profitable arms of the operation.
And I had a bottle of them in my hands in your bedroom and didn't even know what they were.
" His jaw works. "Flushed them down the toilet like they were recreational. "
"That was you," I say. He denied it to my face. Smiled about it.
"Yeah." No smile now. Just the word. "I didn't know what they were.
I thought—" He stops. Drags his hand through his hair, pushing it back from his forehead in a gesture that looks almost tired.
"Doesn't matter what I thought. I did it.
And everything that happened after—your heat breaking through, the kitchen, all of it—that's on me. "
I stare at him. Zero admitting fault. I never thought I’d see the day.
"Atlas would have had them replaced in a day if I'd told him what I did," he continues. "But once your scent started changing—once I realized what the pills were—I kept it to myself." His jaw works. "Because I wanted—"
He cuts himself off. His jaw locks. His eyes slide to the window, away from me, and in the blue-gray light I watch a muscle jump in his cheek.
"Wanted what?"
He doesn't answer. But he doesn't need to. I can fill in the blank: he wanted my scent unleashed. My biology on display. The omega dragged to the surface so the alpha could respond to it.
He wanted me desperate. And he got what he wanted.
"You should take them," he says, still looking at the window. "The suppressants. The full course. Keep them somewhere I can't—" Another stop. Another jaw clench. "Somewhere safe."
Something in his voice catches on the word safe. Like he's filing himself under the category of things Max's suppressants need to be kept safe from. Which might be the most self-aware thing I've ever heard him say.
I set the bottle on the nightstand. Lie back against the pillows.
My heart is still thumping but the adrenaline is fading, replaced by confusion I don't have the energy to untangle.
Zero is in my room and he's just... sitting there.
That's the part I can't reconcile. The Zero I know doesn't sit.
He paces, he prowls, he vibrates with energy that needs an outlet.
This version of him is eerily calm. Like a big cat stretched out in the sun, all that power banked and resting, and the choice to rest is what makes the back of my neck prickle.
"You should take the ibuprofen too," he says. He stands—fluid, the way he always moves, like his joints are oiled and his muscles never fully disengage. "I'll be right back."
He leaves the room. I listen to him in the kitchen—a cabinet opening, the tap running, the clink of a glass.
Domestic sounds. Zero sounds, which shouldn't be domestic at all but somehow are.
He returns with the water in one hand, his body filling the doorway for a second before he crosses to the bed.
Sits on the edge. The mattress dips under his weight and the proximity hits me—the width of his shoulders, the veins running down his forearms, the tattoos, a scar on his inner wrist I've never noticed before.
He smells like the cold outside, like he walked here through the night air.
He picks up the ibuprofen from the nightstand. Shakes two into his palm. Holds them out.
"Take them."
I take them from his hand. Our fingers brush—a low hum that starts in my fingertips and spreads up my wrist, different from the jolt in the hallway last night, slower, steadier. I put them in my mouth. Take the glass from his other hand.
I swallow.
Zero watches my throat. His eyes track the tilt of my head, the bob of my Adam's apple, the column of my neck exposed as I drink.
His gaze stays there a beat too long. Two beats.
His pupils dilating in the dim light, the black swallowing the dark amber, and I feel the weight of his attention like a hand pressing against my pulse point.
I lower the glass. Set it on the nightstand. My hand is steady but my pulse isn't.
"There's something else," he says. And his voice has changed—quieter, stripped of the usual armor. He's looking at his hands. At the split knuckles. Working up to it.
"I read your journals."
The words hit me like cold water.
"What?"
"While you were gone. In the facility." He leans forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them.
The posture makes him look younger somehow—hunched, the sharp angles of his body folded in on themselves.
"I went into your room. Found the notebooks in the chest at the foot of your bed.
And I read them. All of them. The red one from when you were thirteen.
The blue one. The brown one. Every page. "
The room tilts. The notebooks. The ones I hid at the bottom of the chest under textbooks like they were contraband.
Everything is in those pages. Linda and everything she did to me.
The basement. What I felt, what I wanted, what I hated myself for wanting.
Every ugly, private, bleeding thing I've ever put into words because paper was the only place safe enough to hold it.
And Zero read them.
Oh God.
"You had no right." My voice shakes. The anger is there—hot, bright, climbing my throat. "Those were mine. Those were private. You—"
"I know."
"You went through my things. While I was—while they had me in a—" I can't finish. The violation and the vulnerability are knotted together so tight I can't separate them. Every private thought I would never dare to share. Every vulnerability. Every weakness.
Every thought I had about him.
He read I came harder than I've ever come in my life while he was degrading me.
He read maybe I deserve it.
Fuck my life.
"Max." His voice cuts through the spiral. Not sharp—firm. The way you'd grab someone's arm before they step off a curb. "Let me get this out. Then you can be as angry as you want."
I press my lips together. My hands are fists in the sheets.
"I shouldn't have read them. It was a violation and I know it and I'm not going to pretend I had a good reason because I didn't. I was out of my mind and I went looking for—I don't know.
Something. Some piece of you I could hold onto while you were in that place.
" He swallows. Hard. I watch his throat work.
"But I read them. And I can't unread them. "
He pauses. His hands settle on his thighs.
"The basement," he says. The word comes out rough. Scraped. "I didn't know it was your first time."
My face burns. I look away.
"I didn't ask. Didn't check. Just took what I wanted and left you on the floor." His voice is steady but there's a crack running through it—I can hear it widening with every word. "You wrote that you deserved it. That maybe Linda was right about you. That maybe that's all you're good for."
I can't breathe. Hearing my own words in his mouth is like being turned inside out.
"You were wrong." He says it simply. A fact. "You were wrong about all of it. And I'm sorry. For what happened in that basement. For hurting you. For making you think that what I did was what you deserved."
I stare at him, my ears ringing.
Zero Graves just apologized to me. Every word looked like it cost him a tooth, but he said them. Looked me in the eye and said I'm sorry and meant it.
My anger doesn't disappear. It's still there, hot and justified. He read my journals. He saw parts of me that no one was ever supposed to see.
But underneath the anger, a different feeling is breathing. Small and starved. The part of me that heard I'm sorry and didn't know what to do with it because no one has ever said those words to me about the things that actually mattered.
The silence stretches. Zero doesn't fill it. Doesn't rush me. Just sits on the edge of the bed with his hands on his thighs and waits.
Then he reaches out.