Chapter 19 #2
"For weeks. And I have Atlas's bond humming in my chest and Bane's arms around me every night and it's not enough.
Because there's this hole where Zero should be and I keep pretending it's not there.
" I press my palms flat on the table. "Every time I try to go to him, something locks up.
My body remembers the old version and won't let me walk forward.
But I can't—" I shake my head. "I can't keep pretending I don't think about him.
That I don't want him just as badly as the other two.
That the thing he wakes up in me isn't also the thing that makes me feel the most alive. "
"So what's stopping you?"
"The foster kid math." My voice comes out small. "Want plus hope equals loss. Every time I've wanted something this much, it disappears."
“The other two didn’t.”
Wren reaches across the table. Her hand covers mine. Small. Warm. The fingernails bitten to the quick—a habit she's been working on.
"Can I tell you something?" she says.
"Yeah."
"The first night in this apartment—the night you helped me move in—I stood in the kitchen for twenty minutes staring at the fridge."
I wait.
"Not because it was fancy or anything. It's a normal fridge.
But it was full. Bane's people stocked it before I got here.
Eggs, milk, fruit, cheese. Things I hadn't had in months.
And I stood there with the door open, cold air on my face, and I kept thinking: this is a trick.
Someone is going to come take this away.
I shouldn't eat any of it because then I'll know what it tastes like and when it's gone, I'll miss it. "
Her grip tightens on my hand.
"And then I thought: fuck that. I thought—if it disappears tomorrow, at least tonight I'll know what a full fridge feels like. At least tonight I won't go to bed hungry because I was too scared to eat."
She squeezes my hand once. Lets go.
"Eat the food, Max." Her eyes hold mine. Dark and steady and older than nineteen, somehow. "Stop standing in front of the open fridge."
God. How can she be so wise?
She's my best friend. The realization lands without fanfare, without ceremony. Just a fact. Like breathing. Like gravity. She's my best friend and I didn't see it happening because I didn't know what it looked like when it wasn't earned through blood.
"Okay," I say. "Okay."
She nods. Picks up her coffee.
“Okay, now let’s back up," she says, the grin creeping back. "How did this even start? You move into a house with three hot stepbrothers and all three of them just—" She waves her hand, mirroring my gesture from earlier. "This is like the setup for a fucked-up Jane Austen novel."
I choke on my coffee. She hands me a napkin. "You've never read Jane Austen," I say, wiping my chin.
"I have now. Reeves left one on the bathroom counter." She shrugs. "Between the towel-folding and the alphabetizing, the woman's running a one-person rehabilitation program."
"Is it working?"
Wren looks at the kitchen around her. The full fridge. The cinnamon candle. The ugly couch in the other room. The door she can lock from the inside.
"Yeah," she says quietly. "I think it is."
∞∞∞
The drive home takes twenty-three minutes. I count the lights.
Red. Green. Green. Red.
The city sliding past in the last orange light of evening, my hands at ten and two because Margot drilled that into me during driving lessons in the Costco parking lot, and some lessons stay in the body even after everything else shifts.
Stop standing in front of the open fridge.
Atlas's bond hums low in my chest. Steady. Constant. A warmth that hasn't faded since the bite—if anything, it's gotten clearer over the past week, like a radio signal locking in. I can feel him right now, somewhere in the house I'm driving toward.
Working. Thinking. He never turns his mind off and he never stops working.
But there's a space beside that hum. An empty frequency. A place where two other bonds should be.
I think about Zero on the balcony last night. Arms crossed. Watching me cross the kitchen to get water. The way his eyes tracked me—not predatory, not the way they used to be. Just there. Present. Patient in a way that looked like it cost him everything.
I said goodnight. He said nothing. Just nodded. And I walked up the stairs feeling the weight of his gaze on my back like a hand he wouldn't let himself extend.
Red light. I press my forehead against the steering wheel.
Wren's right. I know she's right. The wanting is already here—has been here for weeks, months, since before the facility, since the basement, since the first time his scent hit me and my body said yes before my brain could say run.
The fear isn't going to disappear. It'll be there when I go to him.
It'll be there when he touches me. It'll be there while he does the things I'm terrified to want and desperate to feel.
But I'm done letting the fear make my decisions.
The light turns green. I drive.
The house is quiet when I get back. The settled kind of quiet. Margot and Richard probably turned in an hour ago. I kick my shoes off at the door and climb the stairs.
I know where Zero is and my feet are already taking me there.
The light under Atlas's office door glows warm as I pass—a low murmur of a phone call behind it. He’s still working. Bane's door is closed, the faint amber of his reading lamp bleeding underneath. I keep walking. Past my own room without stopping.
The balcony at the end of the hall. The one overlooking the back grounds, the slope down to the pond where I stood a week ago and said I want all of you and meant it so completely I thought my ribs would crack.
Zero is there.
Shirtless. Sweatpants low on his hips. A cigarette between his fingers that he's not smoking—just holding, letting the ash grow long, the ember pulsing in the dark like a slow heartbeat.
The tattoos on his left arm catch the moonlight.
His hair is pushed back, falling forward, messy in the way that looks deliberate but isn't.
He hears me before I reach the door. Of course he does.
"Can't sleep?" he asks without turning.
"Just got home." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "I was looking for you."
Zero goes still. Not the performative stillness he uses to intimidate—the real kind. The kind that means I've said something he wasn't expecting. His cigarette hand lowers an inch.
I step onto the balcony. The night air cools my arms. I'm still in the t-shirt and jeans I wore to Wren's, barefoot, and I feel stripped in a way that has nothing to do with clothing.
He turns. Looks at me. One glance—two seconds, maybe less—and I watch him read everything. My pulse. My breathing. The flush building at my collarbones. The fact that I came to him. Walked past every other door in this hallway and stopped at his.
Zero's eyes go dark. His jaw locks.
"Max—"
"Your turn."
The cigarette burns between his fingers. The ash falls. Neither of us watches it go.
"You said when you're ready." I hold his gaze. "I'm… I’m ready."
He doesn't ask if I'm sure. Doesn't check. Doesn't do the careful, deliberate thing Atlas would do—the tell me to stop, at any point, any moment. He doesn't need to. Because Zero reads me the way he reads everything—with terrifying accuracy—and what he sees on my face right now isn't uncertainty.
The cigarette drops. His bare foot crushes it against the concrete.
He crosses the distance in two strides.
His hands find my jaw—both hands, fingers gripping, tilting my face up—and his mouth crashes into mine and it is nothing like Atlas or Bane.
Atlas kisses like he's solving an equation. Deliberate. Precise. Every angle calculated.
Bane kisses like he's asking a question—is this okay? Can I have this? Will you stay?
Zero kisses like he's starving.
His mouth opens against mine—hot, demanding, tongue sliding in without invitation because he doesn't need one.
My back hits the railing and his body pins me there—chest to chest, hips to hips, the full length of him pressed against me, and he's hard already, straining against the thin sweatpants.
The sound that comes out of him—low, rough, desperate—vibrates through my teeth.
I grab his shoulders. Pull him closer. Not close enough.
"Inside," I gasp against his mouth.
His hands drop to my thighs—grip, lift. My legs wrap around his waist as he carries me through the door.
My back hits the hallway wall. A picture frame rattles.
He holds me there for three seconds, mouth on my throat, teeth dragging across my pulse, and the sound I make is loud enough to be dangerous.
"Quiet," he growls against my skin. "Unless you want your mother to hear what I'm about to do to you."
His room. He kicks the door shut and the lock clicks and then I'm on his bed—dropped, not placed, my back hitting the mattress hard enough to bounce.
He's over me in a second. Knees on either side of my hips.
Hands pinning my wrists above my head. His face inches from mine, breathing hard, pupils so blown there's no dark amber left. Just black. Just want.
"I'm going to wreck you," he says. Low. A promise. "Not because I'm angry. Not because you're omega. Because I've been standing behind that line for weeks watching my brothers put their hands on you while I couldn't, and I am losing my fucking mind."
I arch up against him. Feel the length of him press against my hip.
“I told you I wasn’t patient,” he almost growls it. “And you still made me wait. You must want this one to hurt.”
"Then stop talking and hurt me."
Something breaks behind his eyes. The last thread of the leash he's been holding since the hotel room—the restraint built from guilt and apology and I won't touch you again—it snaps. I watch it go. Watch the careful Zero dissolve and the real one surface—raw, feral, ravenous.