Chapter 10
I know something is wrong before Atlas walks through the door.
The bond tells me. It's been telling me all day—a low tightening in my chest like a fist closing around something fragile, the thread that points northwest going taut in a way I haven't felt before.
I've been ignoring it. Chalking it up to distance, to the fact that he's been gone nearly two weeks and my body has started keeping count without my permission.
But when the front door opens at ten past seven on a Tuesday evening and Atlas steps into the foyer still in his travel suit, I know.
He doesn't look at me.
He looks at Zero first. Then Bane. A glance that lasts less than a second and carries the weight of something I'm not supposed to understand yet.
"Upstairs," he says. "Now."
Not to me. To them.
The three of them move toward the stairs and I stand in the kitchen doorway with a glass of water in my hand and the bond screaming in my chest and no one has said hello.
No one has said hello.
Margot and Richard are in Connecticut for the week—some anniversary trip Richard planned as a surprise.
The house has been ours for two days. Bane and I made pasta last night while Zero fell asleep on the couch watching something he'd never admit to watching. I wrote in my notebook for about an hour–a complete brain dump that I’ll probably never go back and reread.
But once I was done with that, the words were flowing so well I actually picked up my latest work-in-progress and added four new pages to it.
But the three of us knew we were just killing time, waiting until our fourth member came home. Things felt off without Atlas and I could barely contain my excitement to see him again.
Except, not like this…
Now they’re upstairs in Atlas’ office and I feel like an idiot down here.
I wasn't invited.
I set the glass down on the counter and stand there with my hands braced on the marble and try not to let it sting.
He's been gone thirteen days. Thirteen days of the bond pulling northwest like a compass needle, thirteen days of sleeping in beds that smelled less like him every morning, thirteen days of pretending I wasn't counting—and he walked through the door and looked at his brothers first.
Not me.
Them.
Upstairs. Now. Like I wasn’t standing right there. Like I'm not the one who's been feeling his thread go darker and darker for a week and a half, lying awake at two in the morning with my hand over my sternum trying to press the ache out of it.
I'm being unfair. I know I'm being unfair.
Whatever happened on this trip is family business—Graves business—and I'm not a Graves.
I'm the omega who sleeps in their beds and eats at their table and loves them in the spaces between the parts of their lives I'm not allowed to see.
There are rooms in this house I don't get to enter. I know that.
I should give them space.
I should give them privacy.
I should be the version of Max who understands that Atlas runs an empire and sometimes empires need closed doors and I am not owed every single one of his minutes just because the bond in my chest says mine, mine, mine when he walks into a room.
I wash my glass. I wipe the counter. I open the fridge and close it without taking anything out. I lean against the island and count the threads in my chest: Atlas, tight and dark. Bane, worried. Zero, sharp and still.
I should wait.
I make it eleven minutes.
Then I think—no.
No. Fuck that.
Fuck privacy and fuck distance and fuck the version of me who stands in kitchens waiting to be summoned.
I am not a guest in this relationship. I am not a footnote to whatever's happening behind that door.
If something is wrong—if something is wrong enough to make Atlas's bond go dark for days and make him walk past me without a word—then it's wrong for me too.
It's wrong for us. And I'm done standing in rooms I wasn't told to leave, pretending I don't belong in the ones I wasn't told to enter.
Twelve minutes.
I go upstairs.
The door to Atlas's office is shut. I can hear the low murmur of voices through it—Bane's, mostly. A question. Atlas answering in the clipped tone he uses when he's delivering information and not opinions. Zero silent, which means Zero is probably furious.
I knock.
The voices stop.
"It's me," I say. I cringe internally. Who else would it be? I say it anyway.
A pause. Then Atlas: "Come in, Max."
I push the door open.
Atlas is behind the desk. He hasn't taken his jacket off.
His tie is loosened one inch, which is the Atlas equivalent of screaming.
Bane is in the leather chair to the left, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his glasses on, a sheaf of something in his hands he's gripping too tight.
Zero is standing at the window with his back to the room, arms crossed, looking out at the dark grounds like he's considering setting fire to them.
The room feels tense and stormy but I don’t step out.
I want to be with them, through whatever the hell is going on.
"Sit down, sweetheart," Atlas says.
I don't sit down.
"What happened?"
A lump forms in my throat and I swallow around it, desperate for someone to fill the silence.
Atlas watches me for a beat. His eyes do the thing—the quick assessment, the read. He's deciding how much to tell me.
"Don't," I say. "Don't do the math on what I can handle. Just tell me."
Bane looks up from the papers. His eyes meet mine and the bond between us pulses once—warm, sorry, bracing.
Atlas exhales.
"Santos pulled out."
Santos. The name Bane said on the phone the night of Wren's dinner—tell Santos, get back here—when he didn't know I was in the hallway.
I filed it then. I don't know who Santos is.
I've never been told. Atlas has been very careful about what goes in my head and what doesn't, and names are the first thing he keeps behind the wall.
But tonight the wall isn't there.
I can see it in his face. He's too angry, too hollowed out, too thirteen-days-gone to do the math he always does—what Max can carry, what Max should know, what to say and what to swallow.
He's just talking. Dumping it. Like a man who's been holding a bag of rocks for a week and doesn't have the strength to sort through them anymore.
"Santos is the federal prosecutor I've been building the case with.
DC. Chicago. Boston. He's been the whole thing—the warrant, the subpoenas, the coordination with the other jurisdictions.
Everything ran through him." Atlas's jaw works once.
"He got a call from someone above him. Kline's lawyers reached the deputy AG's office.
Santos was told to stand down. The warrant request was pulled before it even reached a fucking judge. "
I'm hearing things Atlas would never have told me a month ago. Names. Titles. The architecture of something he's been building in the dark this whole time, laid out in front of me because he's too wrecked to remember he's supposed to be protecting me from it.
"That's—"
"The case is dead, Max. The federal angle is gone. Hwang can still subpoena at the state level but without Santos backing it, no state attorney is going to touch Kline with a ten-foot pole. Everyone who was willing to move is now looking over their shoulder."
I'm still standing just inside the doorway. My hand is on the frame, gripping like it’s going to keep my upright.
"What about the nine omegas?" I ask. "The ones still inside."
Zero turns from the window.
His face is the answer.
"We're working on it," Bane says. Careful. "We have options—"
"What options?" My voice is doing something I don't authorize. Going thin. Going high. "You just said the federal case is dead. You said no one's going to touch it. What options, Bane?"
"Maxie—"
"No. What options? Because I have one." I swallow.
My throat clicks. "Me. I go to the police.
I tell them what happened to me—the facility, the cell, the auctions, all of it.
I put my name on a report and I give them a reason to open a case that doesn't need Santos or Hwang or anyone else. I'm a victim. I'm a witness. I can—"
"No."
Zero. One word. No inflection. No room.
"Zero—"
"No, Max."
"That's not your—"
"Half the cops in that precinct are on Kline's payroll." Bane this time, standing now, his voice low and careful. "If you walk into a station and put your name on a report, Kline knows within the hour. You become a target. Again. Not a theoretical threat—an active witness they have to deal with."
"I'm already a target. Talbot knows who I am. He's always known—"
"There's a difference between knowing and having a signed police report with your name and address on it sitting in a database his people have access to.
We did what we could to get you and Wren out, wash you clean of his list. This would drag you back in all over again.
" Atlas. Quiet. Final. "The answer is no. "
The three of them are looking at me.
United.
A wall.
I've seen this wall before. I've been managed by this wall—by foster parents who knew better, by social workers who meant well, by Margot who loved me so hard she forgot to ask me what I wanted.
By these three, who have been deciding what I'm ready for since the day I moved into their father's house.
My jaw works. I feel the argument building behind my teeth—hot, furious, righteous—and I swallow it.
Not because they're right.
Because fighting about it now, in this room, with Atlas still in his travel suit and Zero a lit fuse at the window, isn't going to change anything. And I'm learning—slowly, painfully—that there are times to push and times to let the push sit and grow roots.
This conversation isn’t over. But it is paused.
"Okay," I say.
Bane's shoulders drop a fraction. Atlas nods once. Zero turns back to the window, and I can feel his relief in the bond—bright, sharp, gone in a blink.