Chapter 13
Twenty four hours later…
I'm dreaming. I know I'm dreaming because the cell is wrong.
The proportions are off—ceiling too low, walls too close, the concrete sweating in a way I don't remember.
The cot is there. The drain in the floor.
The camera in the corner with its dead red eye.
But the light is different. Yellower. Warmer.
The light from a kitchen I haven't stood in since I was eleven years old.
I'm sitting on the cot with my knees pulled up and my arms around them and I know what's coming because my body knows before my brain does—the tightening in my chest, the way my skin goes cold, the specific quality of silence that comes right before a door opens.
The lock on the massive door buzzes and clicks.
The door swings inward. Slow. The way the facility doors opened—mechanical, hydraulic, the hiss of the seal releasing.
But it's not a guard.
It's not Talbot's men in their black shirts with their clipboards and their latex gloves.
It's Linda.
She's standing in the doorway in the same housedress she wore the day I left—yellow flowers, a stain near the hem that might be coffee or might be something else. Her hair is pulled back. Her hands are wet.
Her hands are always wet.
"Come here, Max," she says. Sweet. The sweet voice. The one she used before the bathtub, before the locked closet, before the time with the burner on the stove. The voice that meant I love you the way a trap means welcome.
I can't move. My legs won't work. I'm eleven and I'm twenty and I'm both at once and neither, and she's crossing the cell toward me with her wet hands reaching and the facility door is closing behind her and—
I wake up.
Gasping. Sheets tangled around my legs, sweat cold on my neck, heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my wrists. The room is dark. Bane's room. The cedar smell of his sheets, the weight of his duvet, the particular way the moonlight comes through his curtains and makes a stripe across the ceiling.
I reach for him.
My hand crosses the mattress, finds the sheets bunched and cool. I spread my fingers wider. Nothing. The pillow still has the dent from his head but the warmth is gone—he's been up for a while.
I lie there. Breathing. Counting.
The bonds are awake. All three of them. Atlas—tight, dark, the same taut wire he's been since the Talbot meeting two days ago. Bane—focused, strained, somewhere close. Zero—sharp and restless. They're all up. All somewhere in this house at—I check the clock on Bane's nightstand—2:47 in the morning.
All of them awake. None of them here.
I sit up. Peel the sheets off. My hands are still shaking from Linda's wet fingers reaching for me in a cell that doesn't exist, and I need water and I need air and I need to not be alone in a dark room right now.
I pad downstairs in bare feet, one of Bane's t-shirts hanging past my thighs. The house is quiet the way the Graves estate is quiet at night. The grandfather clock in the hall. The refrigerator hum. The creak of the house settling into itself.
The foyer light is on.
Dim—the small lamp on the console table, the one Margot leaves on when she wants Richard to find his way to the kitchen without waking anyone. I round the corner toward the kitchen and stop.
Two suitcases. A garment bag. Richard's leather weekender. Margot's blue carry-on with the monogrammed tag she got for Christmas.
They're home.
Shit they must have gotten home after I fell asleep.
My stomach drops. Not because I don't want them here—I do, I always want Margot here—but because their presence changes the math on everything.
The house isn't ours anymore. The bonds have to go back underground.
Every touch, every look, every time Zero's hand finds the back of my neck or Bane pulls me into his lap has to be swallowed, hidden, filed away behind the performance of stepbrothers who are friendly but appropriate.
Thank God Margot didn’t come check on me and find an empty, unmade bed in my room. She would have lost her mind.
I fill a glass at the kitchen sink. Drink it standing up, looking out the window at the dark grounds. The pond is out there somewhere. The dock. The water that tried to eat me three nights ago.
I set the glass down. Head back upstairs.
That's when I hear them.
Atlas's office. The door is almost closed—not latched, just pulled to, a half-inch gap between the door and the frame. Light leaking through. And voices, low and tight and layered over each other the way the brothers' voices get when they're arguing without raising the volume.
I stop in the hallway. I don't mean to eavesdrop. I'm not being strategic about it. I'm just standing in the hall in Bane's shirt with bare feet and wet eyes from a nightmare I can still taste, and their voices pull me the way the bonds pull me—involuntary, total.
"—fifteen percent, Atlas. He's offering us fifteen percent of what's already ours—"
Bane. Low. Not the Bane I know—not the steady, careful, choose-every-word Bane. This is Bane behind the wall. Bane when he thinks I can't hear him.
"I know what he offered."
Atlas. Flat. Hollow.
"Do you? Because you've been sitting in this chair for two days looking at that piece of paper like it's going to rearrange itself and it's not going to fucking rearrange itself, Atlas.
The numbers are the numbers. He's taken Charleston.
Savannah. Pittsburgh. Cleveland. The three shells on the eastern seaboard are his.
Two of our suppliers flipped without us even knowing.
He's been inside our operation for years and we didn't see it and then we were too busy trying to get Max out of a goddamn cage—"
"I saw it."
Silence.
"I saw pieces of it. I flagged the Charleston contract six months before Max ever set foot in this house.
I told Dad something was off. He said I was being paranoid.
I let it go because I let him make the call.
" A pause. Something in Atlas's voice I've never heard before.
Not anger. Exhaustion. "I let it go, Bane. That's on me."
"It's not about blame—"
"The hell it isn't. He's been eating us alive for years and I watched it happen because I was too busy managing the family to manage the business.
And now he's got us on the ropes, sitting across a table from us in a fucking omega sex club telling us we get fifteen percent of our own operation like he's doing us a favor—"
"The fifteen percent is a joke. He's buying our name and gutting everything behind it and in eighteen months we won't exist. We'll be a logo on his letterhead. That's it. That's what he's offering."
"I know what he's offering." Atlas.
"Then what are we doing? What's the play?
Because I've been running the numbers for three days and I can't make them work.
We're hemorrhaging. Twelve weeks to bankruptcy, maybe less.
The eastern corridor is gone. The port revenue is gone.
We're operating on infrastructure he already owns and the second he decides to pull the rug we don't have routes, we don't have contacts, we don't have—"
"I know, Bane."
"—we don't have a fucking thing. We're done.
And Dad doesn't know. Dad is going to open those books and see a company that's been hollowed out from the inside and he's going to ask how, and the answer is his sons traded away the keys to get an omega out of a trafficking facility, and that omega is currently sleeping in our beds—"
"Watch it." Zero. The first time I've heard his voice. Low and hard and coming from somewhere near the window. Not a suggestion. A warning.
Bane doesn't back down. "I'm not saying it wrong, Zero. I'm saying it the way Dad will say it. The way Margot will say it. The way anyone outside this house will say it when they find out."
The silence curdles.
"Say the rest of it." Zero again. Harder now. "Stop dancing around what Talbot actually said in that room. Both of you have been tiptoeing around it since the meeting and I'm fucking done. We have to face the rest of the fucking conversation."
Atlas exhales. When he speaks, the control is gone. Not the clinical delivery mode I've heard before—this is Atlas with no audience. Atlas talking to his brothers the way brothers talk when the door is closed and the person they're protecting isn't in earshot.
"We have to move Max. He can’t stay here. He needs a new schedule. He can't keep going to that coffee shop with Wren. Talbot knew the name of it. He knew the cross street. He's had someone on Max for weeks, maybe longer."
My stomach drops.
"And Wren?" Bane asks. "Talbot mentioned her by name. She's on his radar too."
"Wren gets a security detail. Quietly. Have Reeves arrange it."
"A security detail doesn't fix this, Atlas.
Talbot isn't surveilling Max because he's curious.
He told us to our faces he'd take him again.
He has buyers. He's got Max's fucking evaluation numbers from the facility still on file—exceptional marks, real demand, had to turn people away.
Those were his words. He sat there and talked about Max like inventory. "
"I was in the room, Bane."
"Then act like it. Because right now you're rearranging coffee shop schedules while a man who called our—" Bane stops. Recalibrates. "While a man who described Max as an acquisition is sitting in an office somewhere with a list of clients who'd pay a premium for him."
My knees buckle.
I catch myself on the wall. Both hands flat against the plaster.
"And then there's the other thing he said.
" Zero. His voice has changed—gone somewhere low and dark.
"The part neither of you wants to touch.
When he looked at me and asked if Max was still factory fresh.
If three bonded alphas under the same roof for nine months had—how'd he put it? —ruined the goods."
Nobody speaks.