Chapter 13 #2
"He was smiling when he said it. That fucking talk-show smile.
Asking if we'd damaged the product. Like Max is a car we took off the lot and put too many miles on.
" A sound comes out of Zero that might be a laugh if laughter could bleed.
"Ruined goods bring a lower price. That's what he said. But they still bring a price."
The hallway tilts.
I slide down the wall. My back against the plaster, my ass on the hardwood, my knees pulled up. The bonds in my chest are screaming—not at the brothers, not through them, just screaming, the way an alarm screams when the thing it's been watching for finally arrives.
Talbot said that. In a room with all three of them. To their faces. Factory fresh. Ruined goods. A price.
He has buyers. He knows the coffee shop I go to with Wren. He probably knows where she lives.
I think about Wren at the bookstore. Wren in the apartment Bane set up for her. Wren, who threatened Zero across a dinner table and meant every word, who walks home at night with Reeves ten paces behind her because she finally feels safe enough to.
He knows about Wren.
"I almost killed him." Zero. Quieter now. Raw. "Bane had my arm. I was half an inch out of the chair. Half an inch and five fingers, that's what kept me in that seat. If Bane's hand wasn't on me I would have put the water glass through his throat and taken his security apart with my bare hands."
"And then we'd really be fucked," Atlas says. No heat. Just fact.
"We're already fucked, Atlas. He said all of that to our faces and we sat there.
We sat there and nodded and drank his water because we don't have a single card left to play.
What are we supposed to do? Accept fifteen percent of our own company and pray he doesn't decide Max is worth more than the deal? "
Nobody says anything for a long time.
"Bankruptcy is twelve weeks out," Bane says. Quieter now. The anger has burned through to something worse underneath—defeat. "Maybe less. Dad's going to see the books eventually, he was already getting suspicious, and when he does—"
"Dad is the least of our problems."
"Dad is a problem because when Dad finds out, Margot finds out, and when Margot finds out about the business she starts asking questions about why, and why leads to Kline, and Kline leads to the facility, and the facility leads to Max, and Max leads to—"
"Us."
Zero. One word. The word that contains everything.
"Margot finds out about us and Max, it's over.
She'll pull him out of this house so fast we'll get whiplash.
And she'll be right to do it, from her perspective.
Her twenty-year-old son in a—what would she call it?
Not a relationship. She wouldn't even get that far.
She'd see three adult men who are supposed to be his brothers fucking the omega they were supposed to protect.
That's what she'd see. And she'd burn this place to the ground.
And she'd do it believing she was saving him. "
"Would she be wrong?" Bane. Almost a whisper.
My head snaps in the direction of the door. The words sinking in…
Why would he even ask that?
"Yes," Zero says. Immediate. No hesitation. "Yes, she'd be wrong. Because he's not a victim of us. He chose us. He chooses us every single day and I will die on that hill, Bane, I don't care who's standing on the other side of it."
"I'm not questioning that. I'm saying that's not how it looks from the outside. From the outside it looks like—"
"I don't give a fuck how it looks from the outside."
"You need to. Because the outside is about to come inside. Twelve weeks, Zero. Maybe less."
The hallway is very still. My bare feet on the hardwood. Linda's wet hands still on my skin from the dream. The bonds pulling in three directions at once, all of them pointing through that half-inch gap into a room where three men I love are drowning in a mess they made to save me.
A mess they made to save me.
That's the part that won't stop repeating.
Every deal they cut. Every concession they handed over.
Every route and contact and shell company they traded—they did it for me.
They gutted their own empire to get me out of a cell, and now the empire is bleeding to death and Talbot is standing over it with a smile and a list of buyers for the boy they lost everything to save.
I’m shaking, seconds away from losing the ability to breathe, and I can’t stay here and listen any longer.
I go back to my room.
What else can I do?
I can’t go in to the office with them. I can’t just push the door open, say I heard everything, and offer my help.
Because they wouldn’t let me. I know what I have to do–what I need to do–but they won’t let me.
I close the door to my room quietly, making sure none of them heard. I sit on the bed—my bed, not Bane's, the one I barely sleep in anymore but that still has my things in it. My desk. My clothes. The pill bottle I haven't opened in months, still in the drawer, still there.
My notebook is on the desk. Open to the page I was writing on yesterday afternoon. I can see my handwriting in the moonlight—a paragraph about the way Atlas's laugh sounded at the pond. How it used his whole chest. How I wanted to live inside that sound.
I pick up the pen.
I don't write in the notebook. I pull three sheets of loose paper from the drawer instead.
The good paper—the cream-colored stuff Margot bought me when I told her I wanted to try writing letters by hand, back when she thought I meant letters to professors or thank-you notes or whatever normal people write on good paper.
I'm not writing thank-you notes.
Not even remotely close.
The first letter is to Atlas.
My hand shakes on the first line. I press harder. The ink bleeds a little at the corners of the letters but I keep going because if I stop I won't start again.
Atlas—
You told me at the pond that you love me. You said it like a fact—
I stop. Wipe my eyes with the back of my wrist. The tears are already coming and I haven't even gotten to the hard part yet.
If I do this—if I walk into a police station and put my name on a report—everything changes.
The case opens. Kline falls. Maybe. Probably.
But the truth doesn't come in pieces. It comes in a flood.
What I am. What was done to me. Who I've been sharing a bed with.
Margot will find out. Richard will find out. The world will find out.
And Margot will do exactly what Zero said she'd do. She'll pull me out. She'll burn it down. She'll do it with love and she'll do it believing she's saving me and I will lose them.
I will lose them.
The pen shakes. I keep writing.
—I held your face and I couldn't say it back and I need you to know that wasn't because I don't feel it. I feel it so much it scares me. I have been scared of it every day since Henrik's, since the duck, since you tied my tie in the foyer.
I love you.
The words blur. I blink and two tears land on the paper—small dark circles spreading into the cream, warping the fibers. I don't blot them. Let him see them. Let him know what it cost.
I'm done running.
I put the pen down. Press both hands flat on the desk. Breathe.
This is the price. This is what it costs to be the person who stands up instead of the person who hides.
I save nine people and I lose three. I clear the Graves name and I destroy the only family I've ever had.
I free myself from Talbot and I hand myself over to a system that will put every detail of my body and my bonds and my life into a file that anyone can read.
I stand up. Pull off Bane's shirt. It smells like cedar and him and I press it against my face for three seconds—three, I give myself three—and then I put it on the bed.
I pull on jeans. A real shirt. My jacket. Not pajamas. Not borrowed clothes. The clothes of a person who's going somewhere and isn't coming back to bed.
I sit back down at the desk. The second sheet of paper is waiting. The pen is where I left it.
I pick it back up.
The second letter is to Bane.
Bane—
I love you.
God, I fucking love you.
Just that. Just my heart poured out for him. I stare at the words. They look small on the cream paper. They look like nothing. They're everything I should have said in the library when he handed me the most terrifying sentence anyone has ever spoken to me and I ran. I literally ran out of the room.
I should have said it that night. You deserved better than my back disappearing down a hallway.
My vision blurs again. I'm crying properly now—not sobbing, not dramatic, just leaking.
Steady tears tracking down my cheeks and falling onto the paper and my hands and the desk.
I keep writing through it because the alternative is stopping and if I stop I'll crawl back into Bane's bed and find him and press my face into his chest and never leave.
You told me I wasn't going to be without you again. You were right. Even when I'm not beside you, you're in here. You're not coming out.
I think about his hands on my spine on the dock.
The way he rubbed slow circles through the blanket until my breathing evened out.
The way he always knows when to speak and when to just be there.
The way his shirt smells like cedar and I was just wearing it and now I’m about to walk out of this house and maybe never—
I can't think about that.
I'm reaching for you right now and you're not here and that's the thing that's making me brave enough to do this.
I'm standing up now.
The third letter is the shortest. And the hardest.
My hand won't stop shaking. The tears are falling faster—I can feel them on my jaw, my chin, dropping onto the desk beside the paper. I don't wipe them. There's no point.
Zero—
You told me I was yours. You were right. I have been since the beginning.