Chapter 11 #3
Half an inch. That's what Bane is holding me by. Half an inch and five fingers and the knowledge that if I stand all the way up, two men die and then Talbot dies and then we have a war we can't win instead of a deal we can't stomach.
Talbot watches me. The warm smile hasn't left his face. If anything, it's gotten warmer—the satisfied warmth of a man who just confirmed a theory.
"Interesting," he says. To the room. To no one.
He turns back to Atlas.
"As I was saying. I have buyers who would pay a premium for him.
Private clients. Discreet. The kind who appreciate a rare scent profile and aren't particularly interested in a résumé.
" He picks a piece of lint off his sleeve.
"His evaluation numbers from the facility are still on file, by the way.
Exceptional marks across the board. There was real demand. I had to turn people away."
The bond in my chest goes white-hot. Not a flare—a sustained burn, the filament connecting me to Max lighting up like a wire carrying too much current.
My vision has narrowed to a tunnel with Talbot at the end of it.
I can feel my pulse in my teeth. In my fists.
In the place where Bane's fingers are digging into my forearm hard enough to leave marks that will still be there tomorrow.
"Of course," Talbot says, and his voice shifts—lighter, almost amused, the tone of a man delivering a punchline he's been saving, "judging by the way the three of you just reacted, I'm guessing the product isn't exactly... factory fresh anymore. Is it?"
The air leaves the room.
"Three bonded alphas and one omega under the same roof for—what, nine months now?
More?" He shakes his head. A small, pitying gesture.
"My buyers prefer their acquisitions unclaimed.
Unbonded. Unspoiled." He looks directly at me.
"Ruined goods bring a lower price, Zero. But they still bring a price."
I run it all through in my mind.
The ankle guy first. He's three steps to my right.
I'm out of the chair and on him before his hand reaches his calf—one strike to the throat, crush the trachea, he's down choking on his own cartilage in under two seconds.
The shoulder holster sees me move, reaches for the piece, but he's behind Talbot and Talbot is between us like a wall, and by the time the holster clears the jacket I've already grabbed the water glass off the table and shattered it against the edge and the stem is in his neck before the gun is level.
Three seconds. Four. The associate doesn't move because the associate isn't a fighter—I can see it in his soft hands, his open mouth, the pen dropping—so I take his wrist and snap it sideways on my way past him because I can and because fuck him and his leather notebook.
Then Talbot.
Talbot I take by the jaw. Both hands. I hold his face the way he held that remote when he showed us Max on the cross.
I make him look at me. I make him see the thing he's been poking at all afternoon—the thing behind the chair and the clenched hands and the half-inch scrape on the concrete floor.
I let him see it for exactly one second.
Long enough to understand. Then I put my thumbs on his windpipe and I watch the warm smile disappear into the color his face turns when I press down.
Purple first. Then darker. Then nothing at all.
The whole sequence takes eleven seconds. Maybe twelve. I've done worse in longer rooms with more men and walked out without a scratch.
I can feel it in my hands. The sequence. The weight of his throat. The glass breaking. The wet sound the stem makes going into—
Bane squeezes my arm.
Hard. A second pulse of pressure on top of the grip that's already there, his fingers digging into the bruise he's making, and the room comes back.
The brick walls. The table. The water glasses.
Talbot's face, intact, still wearing the warm smile, still watching me from four feet away with the satisfied patience of a man who knows exactly what I just did behind my eyes and isn't afraid of it.
My ass is in the chair. My hands are on my thighs.
I am shaking. Actually shaking. The kind of full-body tremor I haven't felt since the night we found Max's car empty in that parking lot.
My jaw is locked so tight I can feel the enamel grinding.
A sound is trying to get out of my chest—low, guttural, the sound an alpha makes before it kills something—and I am holding it behind my teeth with everything I have.
Half an inch. Bane's hand. The scrape of the chair.
That's it. That's the margin.
"That sounds," Atlas says—and his voice is level, how his voice is level is a mystery I will take to my grave—"like you're threatening to kidnap and traffic a twenty-year-old civilian. Again."
"I'm telling you what the alternative looks like." Talbot picks up his water. "The deal is generous. The alternative is not. I'd like you to make your decision with the full picture in front of you."
He looks at me one more time. The warm smile. The talk-show-host eyes.
"You can let go of the table now, Zero."
I look down.
My right hand has left my thigh. It's gripping the edge of the table so hard the wood is bending under my fingers. I don't remember putting it there. Bane's hand is still on my other arm. My knuckles are white. Both sets.
I let go of the table. Put my hand back on my thigh. It takes me two tries.
Atlas looks at the paper in his hand. Looks at Talbot. Folds the paper once. Twice. Puts it in his breast pocket. The motion is precise. Mechanical. Atlas on autopilot because the human being behind the machine has gone somewhere I can't reach.
That’s probably a good thing.
"We'll need time."
"A week. My office will send the terms." Talbot stands. Buttons his jacket with one hand. "Gentlemen."
He doesn't tell us to finish anything. There's nothing on the table to finish. No wine, no bread, no folded napkins. Just water glasses and a piece of paper and the faint pulse of pheromones in the brick and a silence so total I can hear my own blood in my ears.
He leaves with his associate and his security men and the back room goes quiet.
Nobody speaks.
Bane's hand is still on my arm. He hasn't let go.
His fingers have loosened but they haven't left, and I can feel the tremor he was hiding from Talbot running through his grip now.
His breathing is wrong—too measured, too controlled, the breathing of a man keeping himself together by counting inhales.
I look at Atlas.
He's staring at the place where Talbot sat. Not at the chair. Through it. His hand is at his jaw—thumb and forefinger bracketing his chin—the gesture he makes when he's computing. But the gesture is wrong. The thumb isn't moving. He's holding his own face like he's afraid it'll come apart.
And for the first time in my life, my eldest brother doesn't have the next move.
He's not computing. He's not pivoting. He's sitting in the back room of an omega club with a folded piece of paper in his pocket that says everything our family built is already gone, and his face is the face of a man who has run out of time.
That scares me more than Talbot.
More than the facility. More than the cell.
More than the night I stood in Margot's kitchen lying about a midnight swim while my brother knotted the boy I love upstairs.
Those things had answers. Those things had moves.
Even in the worst of it there was always Atlas in a room somewhere, computing, finding the thread.
There is no thread.
Bane drops his hand from my arm. Stands. His chair scrapes the concrete floor and the sound is ugly in the dead room.
"We should go."
Atlas blinks. Looks at Bane. Looks at me. His eyes pass over me like furniture and I don't take it personally because I can see what's behind them and it isn't dismissal. It's vacancy. A man trying to find the floor in a room where the floor just left.
"Yeah." He stands. Pulls his jacket straight. The autopilot holds. "Let's go."
We walk back through the main floor. Past the stage.
Past the pole with the body glitter. Past the woman in yellow gloves who doesn't look up, and the chairs being restacked, and the bar smelling like lemon and bleach and the ghost of every drink that was poured last night to make someone brave enough to do something they'd regret.
The daylight is fading when we hit the door.
Late afternoon bleeding into early evening, the sun low and orange over the parking lot.
The kind of light that makes everything look like a photograph someone took on purpose.
It has no business shining on three men walking out of a place like this with faces like ours.
The drive home is silent.
Bane drives. Atlas rides shotgun. I'm in the back. Nobody turns the radio on. The highway unspools in the last of the day's light and the car is a box of everything we won't say.
I watch Atlas in the rearview. Hand at his jaw. Thumb and forefinger. The gesture. Still wrong. Still too still. He's holding himself the way you hold a glass you've already cracked—careful, delicate, knowing it's only a matter of time before it cuts.
Bane drives five under. He does that when he's processing. Goes slow. Goes careful. Like the car will tell him something the room didn't.
I crack my knuckles. One hand, then the other. The sound is too loud in the quiet. Neither of them looks at me.
The club smell is still on my clothes. Alpha musk and foreign omega sweetness and bleach, all of it ground into the fibers of my jacket, and I want to burn the jacket, I want to pull it off and throw it out the window at seventy miles an hour because the smell is a room and the room is a world and Max exists in that world whether he knows it or not.
Nobody says we're losing.
Nobody says he threatened Max.
Nobody asks the obvious question: what do we do?
The gravel of our driveway crunches under the tires. The fountain. The hedges. The door.
Bane pulls around to the side and kills the engine.
Nobody moves.
Then I see him.
Second floor. The lounge. The floor-to-ceiling window that faces the side of the house, the one that catches the last of the light in the evenings and turns the whole room gold. The lamp behind him is on—warm against the dusk—and he's a silhouette and a shape and then, as my eyes adjust, he's Max.
He's curled into the window seat with his knees pulled up and his back against the frame.
Bare feet. One of Bane's shirts—I can tell from the way the collar sits too wide on his shoulder.
The notebook is open against his thighs and his hand is moving across the page, slow and steady, and he's chewing the end of the pen the way he chews everything—absently, completely, like he doesn't even know his mouth is busy.
He looks small up there. Small and warm and tucked into himself the way he used to tuck into himself when he first moved in—except this isn't hiding.
This is choosing. He chose that window. He chose the lounge.
He's sitting in the mine and my brothers’ territory like he belongs in it, because he does, because we put him there, and the sight of him curled into our space like it was built around him hits me somewhere I don't have armor for.
He doesn't know.
Doesn't know that the man who strapped him to a cross just said the shape of his name in a room that smells like every nightmare he's ever had.
Doesn't know that I am watching him through a car window with the stench of that club still on my skin and a single thought in my head that won't stop repeating.
I will burn Talbot Kline alive before I let him anywhere near Max again.
That isn't a strategy. Atlas would hate it. Bane would call it reckless. It isn't a plan. It's the only thing I have and it's sitting in my chest next to the bond like a second heartbeat—steady, certain, mine.
Max looks up from the notebook.
He looks toward the window. Can't see us—the lamp has turned the glass into a mirror on his side, the dusk on ours making us invisible. But the bond catches. I feel it. The filament goes taut for half a second. His head tilts. His pen stops.
Then he smiles at something he just wrote. Goes back to the page.
The smile cracks me open.
I sit in the back seat of my brother's car with my fists in my lap and I watch the only person I have ever loved write in a notebook in a window two floors above me, and I don't go in, and I don't say anything to anyone, because the truth is I don't know how to walk up those stairs and sit down next to him and not tell him everything.
And if I tell him everything, he'll do the thing we're all afraid of.
He'll try to fix it himself.
The lamp light catches the edge of his jaw. He turns a page.
Bane's hands are still on the wheel.
Atlas hasn't moved.
I don't move either.