Chapter 20
A week since Zero bit me and I can still feel his teeth.
Not the wound—that's healing. Scabbed over, bruising from purple to yellow-green, matching Atlas's mark on the opposite side of my neck like bookends.
Two claiming bites. Two tethers humming in my chest—Atlas's steady and warm, Zero's sharper, rawer, carrying the electric edge of a man who fucks like a fight and bites like a promise.
Two-thirds of my heart full. One space still aching empty.
Bane. Who held me on a concrete floor. Who walked into a cage. Who hasn't bitten me because he's waiting the way he always waits—patient, careful, refusing to take what isn't offered.
And every day the gap where his bond should be pulses louder.
The week at the estate has been a slow unraveling.
Whatever restraint the brothers exercised before the pond, before the claiming, before Zero pinned me against his headboard and sank his teeth into my neck—it's gone.
Burned through. The dam broke and now it's just water everywhere, all the time, and I'm drowning in it.
Atlas's hand on my hip as he passes me in the hallway. Not a brush—a grip. Possessive. Brief. Gone before anyone rounds the corner but the ghost of his fingers stays on my skin for hours.
Zero finding me in the library, shutting the door, pushing me against the shelves and kissing me until my knees give out, then walking away without a word.
Bane pulling me into the laundry room—the laundry room—because it's the only door on the ground floor with a lock, pressing his forehead against mine and whispering I can't stop thinking about you while the dryer hums behind us.
We've been reckless. Stupid. Drunk on the newness of being allowed to want each other and terrible at hiding it.
Margot hasn't noticed—or hasn't wanted to notice, which might be worse.
Richard has been buried in his study, pulling at threads that have nothing to do with this and everything to do with the empire his sons traded away to protect me.
And then, four days ago, Margot came down to breakfast and announced the vacation house was ready a week early. The owners had a cancellation. Did we want to leave Friday instead of next Wednesday?
Richard said wonderful. Margot clapped her hands. And three brothers looked at me across the kitchen table with the shared realization that two weeks of forced proximity in a small house with our parents was about to happen a lot faster than any of us planned for.
The car ride is three hours. Margot drives. Richard navigates from the passenger seat with full confidence that he cannot possibly be wrong about the exit. He is wrong about the exit twice.
I sit in the back with my duffel–the same one I had to fish out from the closet– and my hoodie pulled up to my ears and two bite marks itching under the fabric and watch the highway turn into coastline and think about how many rooms this house has and whether any of them have doors that lock.
The answer, when we pull up the gravel drive, is not enough.
The house is smaller than I expected. Two stories of whitewashed wood and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the coast. Open-plan kitchen and living room.
A deck that wraps around three sides. Four bedrooms down a single hallway upstairs where I can already tell the walls are thin because I can hear the ocean through them from the front door.
Four bedrooms. Six people. One hallway.
This was a terrible idea.
"Isn't it gorgeous?" Margot stands in the living room with her arms spread, turning a slow circle, taking in the view.
The ocean through the windows is absurdly blue.
Postcard blue. The kind of blue that makes you feel like you're inside someone's screensaver.
"Richard, the photos didn't do it justice. "
Richard sets down the bags. He's in khakis and a linen shirt, which is as close to casual as Richard Graves gets. He looks ten years younger away from the estate. Lighter. The empire is two hundred miles behind us and his shoulders have dropped for the first time in months.
"It'll do," he says. Which is Richard for I spent a fortune on this and I'm very pleased with myself.
Margot beams. She hooks her arm through his and pulls him toward the kitchen, already talking about the farmer's market she saw on the drive in, and I stand in the living room with my duffel bag and try to figure out how I'm going to survive two weeks in a house with no hiding places.
The brothers arrive separately. That was the plan—stagger it, make it look organic, don't let Richard wonder why all three of his sons suddenly cleared their schedules for a family vacation they all groaned about months ago.
Atlas first. An hour after us. He pulls up in the black SUV, garment bag over his shoulder even at the beach because Atlas Graves doesn't own clothes that wrinkle.
He walks in, shakes Richard's hand, kisses Margot's cheek, and his eyes find me across the room and hold for exactly one second too long.
One second. That's all it takes. My bond mark—his bite, the left side of my neck—throbs. The tether between us pulls taut. I feel him in my chest the way I've felt him since the night he bit me—a warm, constant presence, like a second heartbeat slightly out of sync with mine.
I look away. Tug my hoodie higher.
Bane arrives at dinner. Apologetic—traffic, a call that ran long, the usual excuses wrapped in his easy smile. Margot hugs him. Richard claps his shoulder. Bane drops into the chair beside me at the kitchen table and his knee bumps mine under the table and doesn't move away.
The contact sends a jolt up my thigh. Not the bond—Bane hasn't bitten me yet.
There's no tether, no warm presence. Just the raw, biological pull of an alpha I've been intimate with, an alpha whose scent is amber and sandalwood, an alpha whose bond mark is missing from my skin and whose absence I feel like a gap in a fence.
Two marks. One gap. My body knows the difference and won't let me forget it.
Zero arrives last. After dark. No call. No text.
He just materializes in the hallway while Margot and Richard are watching a movie in the living room, and I'm coming out of the bathroom, and he's there, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, and the sight of him in the dim hallway makes my heart slam against my ribs.
"When did you—"
"Just now." His eyes drop to my neck. The hoodie covers the marks but Zero can smell them—both of them. His nostrils flare. His jaw tightens.
"You drove three hours."
"Four. Traffic."
"Why didn't you—"
"Max." His voice quiet. His hand comes up. Tugs the hoodie aside, exposing the marks—Atlas's on the left, his own on the right. Atlas’ healed. His still purple-red against my skin. He looks at them. Touches his with the pad of his thumb. A possessive gesture so casual it might as well be breathing.
"Nice," he says. And walks past me toward the bedrooms.
I stand in the hallway with my pulse hammering and his scent lingering in the air—gunpowder and coffee—and think: This is not going to end well.
The bedroom assignments confirm it.
Richard and Margot in the master. Atlas in the room next to them. Bane and Zero sharing the room at the end of the hall. Me in the smallest room, between Atlas and the bathroom. Every door within ten feet of mine. At the estate, there are wings. Floors. Distance.
Here there's a hallway and drywall.
That first night I lie in bed and listen to the house.
Atlas's mattress creaking when he rolls over.
Zero coughing through the wall at two. Bane's footsteps when he gets up for water at three.
And underneath all of it—three alpha scents seeping under my door, mixing in the hallway, filling my tiny room until I'm breathing them in my sleep.
Cedar. Amber. Gunpowder. Layered over the salt air and the sound of the ocean and the distant murmur of my mother's breathing through the walls.
By morning I'm already on edge. By afternoon I'm vibrating.
By evening I'm white-knuckling the deck railing while Margot asks me why I won't take off the hoodie—it's eighty degrees, sweetheart, you're sweating—and Atlas sips his coffee and I can feel his amusement through the bond like a flicker of warmth in my chest that is entirely unhelpful.
"I run cold," I say.
Margot frowns but doesn’t press.
The days fall into a rhythm that looks like family and feels like a slow-motion car crash. Pancakes on the deck. The beach. Dinner around the small round table. Margot and Richard walking arm in arm in the sand every evening. Normal. Domestic. The vacation she's been wanting.
And underneath it, invisible, escalating—the brothers start testing the limits.
Zero first. Because Zero is the one who likes to watch me squirm.
I'm reaching for a mug in the kitchen cabinet—stretching, my hoodie riding up, a sliver of skin exposed at my waist—when I feel him behind me. Close. Too close. His body radiating heat without touching, his scent flooding my lungs before I can hold my breath.
"Careful." His voice in my ear. Low. Amused. "Your collar's slipping."
I yank the hoodie up. His hand finds my hip—just his fingertips, tracing the strip of bare skin above my waistband. My stomach clenches.
"Zero—Margot's on the deck—"
"I know." His thumb hooks into my waistband. Tugs once. Lets go. "That's what makes it fun."
He reaches past me for a coffee mug, his chest brushing my back, his mouth close enough that I feel his breath on his bite mark—and takes his time selecting a mug like it's the most important decision of his morning.
Then he's gone. Walking toward the deck with his coffee.
Leaving me gripping the counter with white knuckles and a racing pulse.