Chapter 17
Margot cups my face on her way out the door.
"I'm fine."
"You're always fine. That's what worries me.
" She kisses my forehead. Holds it for a beat longer than normal, her lips warm against my skin, and I let her because I've learned that pushing Margot away takes more energy than letting her love you.
"Call me if you need anything. We'll be home by midnight. "
Richard appears behind her. Sport coat, pressed shirt, ready to take my mother out for a night on the town. He kisses her cheek. Settles a hand on the small of her back.
"Don't burn the house down," he says to the room. To the four of us—me on the stairs, Atlas in the hallway, Bane leaning against the kitchen doorframe, Zero somewhere upstairs, a presence felt but not seen.
"No promises," Bane says. The charming smile.
The door closes. The car starts. Gravel crunches. Fades.
The house changes.
Nothing physical shifts. But the tension—the live wire that runs between the four of us, muted by parents and performance and the careful choreography of family dinners—snaps taut.
Three alphas and one omega. No audience. No buffer. Just the static charge of people who've been dancing around each other for weeks, held in check by nothing except choices nobody's made yet.
I wait for it. The closing in. The way they've been circling me—each of them close enough to touch but never making the first move. The tight lipped conversations. The careful distance.
The gravitational pull that tightens every time Margot and Richard leave and the house becomes ours.
But it doesn't come.
Atlas nods to me. Goes upstairs and I hear the door to his office click shut.
Bane pushes off the doorframe. "I'll be in the library if you need me." Walks away. Doesn't look back.
Upstairs, a door shuts. Zero's room.
I stand on the stairs alone. The house settling around me. Three brothers in three separate rooms, giving me exactly what I never asked for.
Space.
The absence of pressure is disorienting. I've been bracing for weeks—reading the room, cataloging exits, tracking their movements the way I've tracked every threat in every home I've ever lived in. And now they've pulled back and the room is empty and I don't know what to do with my hands.
So I scrub my face and try not to scream.
This is exhausting. All three of them.
I go to my room and I try to read. Sit on my bed with a novel open on my knees and read the same page four times. The words blur. My mind keeps slipping sideways—to Atlas's hand on my cock in is room, to Zero's breath on my nape at the dinner table, to Bane's voice in my ear as he fucked me.
I close the book. Reach for my notebook instead. The current one. I've been trying to write for two weeks—opening it, staring at the page, closing it. The words won't come. Every time I pick up the pen, the page just stares back and I stare at it and we have nothing to say to each other.
Tonight is different. Tonight the house is quiet and the brothers are behind closed doors and the pen feels warm in my hand and the words are already forming before the tip touches paper.
I want—
I write it. Don't stop.
I want Atlas. I want the way he holds my face like he's checking that I'm real. The way he said breathe with me when I was drowning and I did and the drowning stopped. He keeps trying to build that stupid cage and calls it safety and I should hate him for it but I can’t because inside the cage the floor is solid.
The ground doesn't move when Atlas is holding it.
I've never had that. I've never had a person who made the floor feel permanent.
The pen moves faster. My handwriting is getting messier, the letters running together the way they always do when I'm writing the real things.
I want Zero. This one scares me the most. He pinned me to a bench and didn't ask.
He read my journals and knows every shameful thought I've had since I was thirteen.
He's seen me at my worst—not the version I perform for the world but the version I write in notebooks and hide under textbooks.
The one who thinks the lowest of himself.
Zero saw that kid and instead of walking away he sat on my bed and put his thumb on my lip and said you belong to me.
The most fucked up part is I felt it. In my chest. Like a key turning in a lock I didn't know I had.
He terrifies me. And the terror is part of it. Because Zero doesn't want the version of me that smiles at dinner tables. He wants the version that breaks. And some deep, starving part of me wants to be broken by someone who'll stay to see what's underneath.
My hand is cramping. I don't stop.
I want Bane. Bane is the concrete cell. Bane is fingers laced through mine in the dark and a heartbeat against my spine and the word perfect whispered into my hair like a prayer.
He was the first person who touched me and made it feel like I was being given something instead of having something taken.
Twenty years of being handled—by Linda, by foster parents, by a system that moved me like cargo—and Bane put his hands on me and I felt them and I thought oh.
This is what it's supposed to feel like.
He makes me feel like my body belongs to me. Like it's mine to give instead of mine to protect.
I sit back. Read what I've written. Three entries. Three men. Three different answers to three different hungers I didn't know I had until they fed them.
I can't rank them. I've been trying for days—running the equation, looking for the right answer. If I could figure out which one I could survive losing, I could let the other two go and be the kind of person who makes clean, simple choices.
The answer is none of them.
Every time I try to cut one loose, the part of me that needs what he gives starts screaming. Lose Atlas and the ground goes soft. Lose Zero and I go back to hiding. Lose Bane and I forget that touch can be a gift.
I pick up the pen again.
I want all three. And wanting all three makes me—what? Greedy? Broken? They're brothers. They're my stepbrothers. This isn't how families work. This isn't how anything works.
But I'm tired of how things are supposed to work. Supposed-to kept me in foster homes. Supposed-to kept me on Linda's tile floor. Supposed-to kept me swallowing suppressants and pretending I was something other than what I am.
I'm omega. I'm theirs. And I'm done apologizing for it.
I’m done letting my past steal my future. And my future is with the Graves brothers.
I close the notebook. Set the pen down. My hand is shaking—not from the cramping. From the truth of what I just wrote. The most honest pages I've produced since the facility, and they're not about pain or shame or Linda.
They're about want.
About admitting, in my own handwriting, that I want to be wanted. That I want to belong. That belonging to three people at once might be the only math that's ever made sense to me.
And then…
The warmth starts low in my belly.
The pilot light flickers. A flush climbing my neck. My skin prickling with a sensitivity I recognize—the early warning system, the body's first draft of a demand it hasn't finished writing yet.
Shit.
I need air.
The house is saturated. Cedar and leather from Atlas's office.
Gunpowder and coffee drifting from Zero's room.
Amber and sandalwood lingering in the hallway where Bane passed.
Three alpha scents layered in the ventilation system, in the walls, in the fabric of every surface I touch.
My body is tracking all of them without my permission—a compass with three norths, spinning.
I go downstairs. Out the back door. Across the garden, past the raised beds Margot planted, down the slope toward the pond. The evening air hits my skin and I breathe it in—cold, clean, carrying nothing but grass and water and the faint mineral smell of the shore.
The sun is going down. The light on the water is gold bleeding into copper, the kind of evening that feels like a doorway. Between day and night. Between one version of my life and another.
I stand at the edge. Breathe. Try to think clearly while the warmth builds in my belly and my skin hums and my body does its slow, patient work of betraying me.
The suppressants are in my dresser. I know exactly where they are. I took the first dose the morning after Zero brought them—swallowed the pill with water from the bathroom sink and felt the chemical wall rise up between my biology and the world.
Ninety days. Three months of normalcy.
Except, I haven’t touched the bottle since then.
I don't know why.
That's a fucking lie—I do know why.
I stopped because the wall was too high.
Because the suppressants don't just suppress the heat.
They suppress everything—the scent, the awareness, the way my body orients toward theirs like a plant toward light.
They flatten the thing I am. And I spent twenty years being flattened by a world that wanted me to be smaller, quieter, less, and I'm tired of it.
I want to feel this. Even if it scares me. Even if it's dangerous.
Even if three alphas in the house can smell exactly what I've done. Because I know it’s leaking out. There’s no hiding what’s happening to me again.
The water catches the last of the light. I press my palms against my thighs and breathe and wait.
Zero arrives first.
Because Zero always knows.
I hear him before I see him—footsteps on the slope, unhurried, the tread of a man who's been tracking a scent and isn't surprised by where it led.
He stops at the top of the hill. Hands in his pockets.
Dark silhouette against the darkening sky.
He doesn't speak. Just stands there, watching me, the dying light catching his jaw and his cheekbones and those dark eyes that see everything I try to hide.