Chapter 10 #2
But the room is still thick with unanswered questions, unsettled plans. It’s almost choking. And all I want to do is curl up on Atlas’ lap, smell the scent pouring off his pulse point and remind him that he’s home.
"Can we go outside?" I ask.
Three faces turn to me.
"Margot's not here. Richard's not here. Can we just—can we go be us for a while?
I don't want to be in this office. I don't want to talk about Kline or Santos or any of it right now.
I want—" I stop. Start again. "The beach.
The night at the beach. We said we'd do it again.
There's the pond. It's not the ocean but it's water and it's dark and I just—"
Nobody moves.
Atlas is still behind the desk. Bane is looking at his hands. Zero hasn't moved from the window. I'm standing in the doorway asking three men to come play pretend with me while their empire burns, and the silence is starting to feel like an answer.
I’m starting to second guess everything.
"Please," I say. "Just for a little while?"
Zero turns from the window.
He looks at Atlas. Looks at Bane. Some brother thing passes between them—the shorthand I'll never fully crack, the language of three people who've shared blood and a last name and a lifetime of shit I wasn't there for.
Then he crosses the office in four strides.
He doesn't hook his hand around my neck. He doesn't press his mouth to my temple. He bends, gets his shoulder into my stomach, and stands up with me folded over him like a sack of flour.
"Zero—" I grunt.
"You heard him, boys." He's already walking toward the hallway. "He wants to play."
"Put me down—"
"No."
"Zero, I swear to—"
"You're going outside. I'm taking you outside. This is what's happening. Complain louder, it does something for me." He smacks my thigh once and I can hear the grin in his voice even though I'm staring at the back of his shirt and my blood is rushing to my head.
Behind us, I hear Bane huff a laugh—the first real one I've heard from him tonight. Hear Atlas push back from the desk.
They follow.
Zero carries me down the stairs, through the kitchen, out the back door.
He grabs a beer from the fridge without breaking stride or setting me down, which is both impressive and infuriating.
I stop fighting somewhere around the garden path because the blood rushing to my head is making me dizzy and also because his hand is warm on the back of my thigh and I'd rather die than admit how much I don't hate this.
Bane grabs a blanket from the mudroom on the way past. Atlas grabs nothing but sheds his jacket somewhere between the kitchen and the tree line, rolling his sleeves to the elbow as he walks.
Zero sets me down at the edge of the pond.
The pond is at the far edge of the property, past the gardens, past the tree line, where the manicured grounds give way to something wilder.
It's not big—maybe forty feet across—but the water is dark and still and the moon is on it tonight, laying a silver path across the surface the way it did on the ocean at the beach house.
Close enough.
We spread the blanket on the bank. Atlas's hand finds the back of my neck and stays there. The grass is cool. The air smells like cut lawn and pond water and the faint sweetness of Margot's garden thirty yards behind us.
"Remember the chips?" I say.
"The chips Bane doesn't eat," Zero says.
"I don't eat those chips."
"You ate two bags."
"I was being polite."
I laugh. It scrapes against the tightness in my chest but it gets out and Zero grins at me in the gentle dark, and for a second—just a second—the Kline of it all goes quiet.
We sit. Zero opens the beer. Bane leans back on his elbows. Atlas is beside me, close, his thigh against mine, and the bond between us has eased from taut to steady—still carrying the weight of everything he just told me but softer now, here, with the water and the dark and no walls around us.
Nobody talks for a while. We don't need to.
The air is warm and the bugs are loud and Atlas's hand is on my knee, his thumb tracing the same small circle over and over, and I let my head drift sideways until it finds his thigh.
He doesn't stiffen. His hand moves from my knee to my hair.
Fingers threading through, slow, the way he does when he's not thinking about it.
I close my eyes.
The bond hums. Three threads in my chest, all of them softening by degrees. Like a knot being worked loose. Like someone opening a window in a room that's been shut too long.
"You missed the dinner," Bane says after a while. He's talking to Atlas but his hand has found my ankle, his thumb pressed against the bone there, idly stroking. "With Wren."
"Mm. How was she?"
"Good. Nervous. Zero handed her a glass of prosecco like he was presenting her with a small dog."
"It was a generous pour."
"It was theatrical, is what it was. He introduced himself as 'the delightful disappointment.'"
"I was being honest."
"You were being you,” Bane cuts him short.
"She snorted into her drink. That's a win, Bane." Zero lays back, sprawling across as much blanket as he can.
"She was afraid of you," I say into Atlas's thigh.
"She was charmed. Ask her yourself."
I smile. Atlas's fingers move through my hair and the bond goes warm in a way that has nothing to do with the temperature.
"Richard insulted lemon tarts within ninety seconds," Bane adds.
Atlas makes a sound that might be a laugh. It's so rare from him that I open one eye to confirm. The corner of his mouth is turned up. His head is tipped back. He looks—for the first time since he walked through the front door tonight—like a person instead of a machine.
"To her face?"
"To her face. Called lemon a cleaning product flavor. While Wren was sitting right there telling him it was her favorite."
"Somebody had to step in," Zero says. "Dad went on a whole speech about how literature is a retirement hobby and reading is what you do once you've made your money. To a bookseller. At our dinner table. Not to mention Max was right there."
"That's not—" Bane pauses. "Actually, that's completely accurate."
"And after?" Atlas asks. His voice has dropped half a register. His fingers are still in my hair. "After Wren left?"
The silence changes.
Bane looks at Zero. Zero looks at Bane. Something passes between them—the shorthand again—and Zero's mouth curls.
"After Wren left," Zero says, sitting up on his elbows, "I put Max on the dining table between two place settings and kissed him while the candles were still burning."
"A little dangerous to do that in the dining room, Zero."
"I'm a dangerous man, Atlas. Keep up." He takes a swig of his beer. "Then Bane came back from walking Wren out and got territorial about the sleeping arrangements."
"I wasn't territorial. I'd called it at lunch."
"You'd called it to yourself. That's a prayer, Bane, not a claim."
I can’t help but smile into Atlas’ thigh.
"I called it, and you ignored it, and then you tried to negotiate for the entire night when we'd already agreed you'd get forty minutes."
"Forty minutes is nothing. That's a warm-up. That's foreplay for the foreplay."
"It's what we agreed to. Forty minutes and you wash the wineglasses."
"And did you get your forty minutes?" Atlas asks. I can hear the amusement building in his voice. His fingers haven't stopped moving in my hair.
Silence.
"He got an hour and a half," Bane says, and there's an edge to it—an old bruise, the kind brothers give each other without meaning to. Or meaning to completely in this case. "I had to physically walk into his room and take Max by the hand. Zero was—he wasn't done. He made that very clear."
"I wasn't done because Max wasn't done. Tell him, Max."
I press my face deeper into Atlas's thigh. "I'm not telling him anything."
"He was making this sound," Zero continues, undeterred. "Sort of a—"
"Zero!” I shout.
"—cross between a whimper and a prayer, and I was supposed to just stop? On a timer? Bane's standing in the doorway like a hall monitor with his arms crossed and Max is underneath me saying please and I'm expected to honor a gentleman's agreement about wineglasses?"
"Yes," Bane says. "That is exactly what you were expected to do."
"Well. I didn't."
"No. You didn't. I had to pull the blanket off both of you and practically carry him to my room."
"And I let you," Zero says, "because I'm generous."
"You threw a pillow at my head."
"Generously."
I have my hands over my face. My ears are on fire. Atlas is laughing—actually laughing, his stomach shaking next to my head, his hand still in my hair—and the sound is so unexpected and so warm that I stop trying to die and just listen to it.
I've never heard Atlas laugh like that. Not the controlled exhale. Not the polite acknowledgment. A real laugh. The kind that uses his whole chest. The free kind.
"I hate all of you," I mumble through my fingers.
"Liar," three voices say, nearly in unison, and that sets Atlas off again.
The bond is wide open. All four threads humming, bright and easy.
The dread from the office hasn't disappeared—it's still there, underneath, the way a bruise is still there under clothes—but it's not the loudest thing anymore.
Right now the loudest thing is Atlas's laugh and Zero's smugness and Bane's ankle-grip and the grass under my back under the blanket and the moon over all of us.
This. This is exactly what I wanted.
I look at the pond.
The moonlight shivers on the surface. The water is black underneath it. The dock stretches out over the deeper end, the same dock I've sat on probably a dozen times now, and the light at the end of it is doing its thing—flickering on, off, on, like it can't decide whether it wants to work tonight.
A breeze comes off the water and I shiver. Not dramatic, not a full-body thing, just the kind of chill that reminds you summer is over and fall is here.
"Dock," Zero says, already standing. He nods at it like it's a challenge. "Come on."