Chapter 15 #2
I look away. I can watch—that's the problem.
I can watch and I recognize what I'm seeing.
The thing inside Zero that makes this possible, the cold patient surgical thing—I felt it in the facility.
When I stood up through the sedatives and closed my hands around a guard's throat.
When I slammed a man's head into a concrete wall and watched the blood pool and didn't feel anything except good.
We're the same. Zero and I. Same cloth, same father, same capacity. The difference is he's always known it. Made peace with it years ago.
I'm still pretending it isn't there.
The shorter guard under my knee is whimpering. He's been lying still since I put him down—smart enough to know that what's happening to his partner is a preview.
I haul him up by the back of his neck. Push him into a kitchen chair. He sits. Shaking. His cheek is swelling where it hit the floor. His eyes dart to his partner—on his knees in front of Zero, both hands destroyed, sobbing quietly into his own chest.
"You know who I am," I say.
He nods. Fast. Desperate.
"Then you know what's coming."
I don't draw it out. Zero has his way. I have mine. Efficient. Final.
I work his face first—the jaw that smirked, the mouth that said boss's cameras caught the whole show, the eyes that looked at Max like he was something to consume. My fists are steady and precise and each impact is a sentence in a language I don't enjoy speaking but speak fluently.
He goes down after the fourth hit. I let him fall. Stand over him. My knuckles are split and bleeding. His face is a mess of blood and swelling. He's breathing—ragged, wet, but breathing. Conscious. Looking up at me through one eye that's already closing.
"Remember this," I say. "Every morning. Every time you look in a mirror. Remember why."
Zero finishes a few minutes after I do. He stands up from the shaved-head guard and looks at his own hands—bloody to the wrists, the knuckles raw, his fingers steady as stone.
He flexes them once. Twice. Like he's testing whether they still work the way they're supposed to.
The guard is on the floor. Both hands broken. Face battered. Alive. Breathing. He'll use those hands again eventually—months from now, after pins and physical therapy and pain that no prison sentence could replicate. Every morning he reaches for a coffee cup and can't grip it, he'll remember.
Zero wanted that. Not death. Death is too fast, too final. Zero deals in daily. The lesson you relearn every time you try to button your shirt and can't.
We leave the apartment as fast and as casual as we arrived. Down the stairs. Into the car. The cold air hits my face and I breathe it in—deep, hungry, clearing the smell of blood and sweat and fear from my lungs.
Zero drives.
The city slides past the windows. Streetlights casting orange bars across the dashboard, then gone, then back. The car smells like copper. Like us.
My hands ache. I flex them on my thighs. The blood is drying—going tacky, dark, tightening the skin across my knuckles. Zero's hands on the steering wheel look the same.
We match.
Neither of us speaks for a long time. There's nothing to say about what we just did that needs saying. It was necessary. It's done. The silence echoes that certainty.
Until I break it.
“Zero,” I murmur. "I need to tell you something."
Zero doesn't look at me. His eyes stay on the road. His jaw is relaxed—more relaxed than I've seen it in weeks.
"And I'm telling you because I'm not going to hide it or pretend, and because I'd rather you hear it from me than figure it out on your own."
His hands shift on the wheel. The only acknowledgment. He's listening.
"Max and I knotted. In the facility. During his heat."
The car doesn't swerve. Zero's hands don't tighten on the wheel. He just drives. Takes a turn. Checks his mirror. And the absence of reaction is its own kind of violence—Zero deciding how he feels before he lets me see any of it.
"I didn't bite him. I wanted to. More than anything I've ever wanted." The words come out steady. I've been rehearsing them for days. "But I didn't. That's his choice to make. Not mine."
Silence.
A red light. Zero stops.
His thumb taps the steering wheel. Once. Twice. Processing. I can almost hear the gears turning—knotted means Alpha recognition, means his body accepted Bane, means the bond is biological even without the bite.
Zero knows what all of that means. He's an alpha too.
"I want him, Zero." I turn to face my brother.
His profile is sharp against the streetlight—the angular jaw, the straight nose, the dark hair falling across his forehead.
The blood on his hands catching the red light from the signal.
"I'm going to claim him. When he's ready.
I'm not asking permission and I'm not backing off. "
I brace. For the explosion. The territorial rage.
The Zero I’ve grown up watching. Who is a live wire ready to explode into a rage at any given second. The unhinged one.
That Zero would put me through this windshield for what I just said.
The light turns green. Zero drives.
"You and Atlas." His voice is quiet but there's an edge underneath.
Frustration, not anger—the frustration of watching two people miss the point and not being able to hit them hard enough to make them see it.
"You both do this. Act like it's a fucking race.
Like whoever gets there first plants a flag and the rest of us go home. "
"That's not what I—"
"Have you thought about what Max wants?"
The question fills the car.
"What he actually needs? Not what your biology is telling you to do. Not what your knot is telling you he is. What the actual person wants."
I open my mouth. Close it.
"Because you don't know him." Zero takes a left turn.
His voice drops into a register I've rarely heard from him—not the sharp, not the cruel, but the one that lives underneath all of it.
The one that costs him. "You think you do.
You held him through a heat and now you think you understand what he is, who he is. But you don't know the half of it."
He takes another turn. His jaw tight. His eyes on the road.
"That kid kept a bag packed by the door since he was thirteen, Bane. Six foster homes in four years. His last placement—the one before Margot—she was fucked. He’s been through some shit.
" He lets that sit. I feel it land in my chest like a brick.
"Nobody once—not once—asked him what he wanted.
They moved him. Placed him. Used him. And when they were done, they sent him back. "
I don't ask how he knows this. Zero has always had a way of knowing things he shouldn't—reading people, reading rooms, finding the information that gives him leverage. But this doesn't sound like leverage.
It sounds like something that's been eating him alive.
"And now three alphas are circling him like wolves at a carcass, and nobody's stopped to wonder if the reason he flinches isn't because he's afraid of us. Or me." His grip tightens on the wheel. "It's because he's fucking been here before. We just dress better than the foster homes did."
I stare at my brother. My jaw is working and I can feel the defensive justification climbing my throat—I'm not like them, I'm different, I knotted him gently, I asked, I didn't bite—but the words die before they reach my mouth.
Because maybe Zero isn't wrong. My warning—I'm going to claim him—echoes back at me and it sounds different now. Sounds like every alpha who ever looked at an omega and saw property.
Sounds like the guard I just put on the floor.
"I'm not fighting you for him." Zero's eyes stay on the road.
"Not fighting Atlas either. Max wants all three of us?
Fine. He wants one? The other two shut up and deal.
" He stops at another light. Turns to look at me for the first time since the car started moving.
"But I'm done deciding for him. I tried that. I want that. But, I think, it’s the reason he packed a bag and ran in the first place. "
The light from a passing car washes across his face and for a second I don't recognize him. Same features—the jaw, the dark eyes, the scar on his cheekbone from a fight when he was seventeen. But the person behind them has changed.
Or maybe he hasn’t completely changed–he’s just decided to keep his intensity in check.
Max did that. Somehow, without any of us seeing it happen.
The light changes. He drives.
But something gives. The possessiveness doesn't disappear—it's biological, wired into my cells, the thing that made my knot swell inside Max's body and my teeth ache for the bonding gland at the junction of his neck.
You don't switch that off. You don't reason your way out of a million years of evolution screaming mine, keep, claim.
But the frame around it loosens. Just enough for a different question to fit through.
The question I wasn't asking: could I share him?
Not grudgingly. Not white-knuckling through it while my brothers' hands are on the person I want. Actually share him. Hold one piece of something larger and let it be enough.
The facility. Max pressed against my chest. Fingers laced through mine. His heartbeat against my sternum. The knot and the almost-bite and the way I whispered you're perfect because he is—complicated and damaged and scared and brave and mine.
Except maybe not just mine.
Atlas's face when we walked through the hotel door. The composure crumbling. The way he held Max like letting go would kill him. Atlas, who carried Max to his bed before any of us knew what he was. Who said no when he wanted to say yes. Who sold his empire and would do it again.
Zero making an effort not to steamroll Max. Not to overwhelm him, scare him. His first instinct was to consume–and he did. But now? He’s different. He’s patient.
As if he already knows that Max belongs to him and he isn’t worried about waiting for the inevitable.