Chapter 14
Zero
I'm sitting on my bed with my head in my hands trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to fix this.
The meeting keeps replaying. Not the threats—I can handle threats.
I've made worse. It's the math that won't stop running.
Fifteen percent. Charleston gone. Savannah gone.
Pittsburgh. Cleveland. Three shells on the eastern seaboard.
Twelve weeks to bankruptcy. The number sits in my skull like a clock I can't turn off and every time I try to think around it I end up back in the same place: a back room that smelled like omega heat and bleach, Talbot's warm smile, and the sound my chair made on the concrete when I almost stood up and killed everyone in the room.
Atlas has been in his office for two days staring at a piece of paper like it's going to rearrange itself.
Bane's been running numbers that don't run.
And me—I've been doing this. Sitting in the dark doing nothing.
Running kill sequences in my head like a psychopath because that's the only math that works out in our favor and it's the one calculation we can't use.
Some fucking family we turned out to be.
I drag my hands down my face. Press my thumbs into my eyes until I see sparks.
Think.
There has to be a move. Atlas always has a move.
Atlas is the one who finds the thread nobody else can see, the angle, the play.
Except Atlas doesn't have this one. I watched him not have it.
I watched his eyes do the scan in that back room—the read, the calculation, the pivot—and nothing came.
For the first time in his life, nothing came.
So it's on me. Or Bane. Or—
Something slides under my door.
A whisper of paper on hardwood. Quiet. Deliberate. I look up.
A pale rectangle on the dark floor. Cream-colored. Folded.
I stare at it. My brain takes a second—too long, too slow–processing what the fuck I’m looking at. Then I'm off the bed.
I pick it up. Unfold it. Hold it to the window where the moon is coming through.
Max’s handwriting. Shaking. The letters uneven, pressed too hard in places, light and trailing in others. Tear stains—actual tear stains, dark circles warping the paper, and I can smell him on it. Not his scent. His grief. The salt and skin of a person who cried while they wrote this.
Zero—
You told me I was yours. You were right. I have been since the beginning.
My chest tightens so violently I press the hell of my hand to my sternum.
I love you.
Three words. His handwriting. The ink slightly smeared where his hand dragged across it.
I love you. On paper. In a letter slid under my door in the dark.
Not said to my face, not whispered in my bed, not moaned into my mouth—written down and left behind.
The way a person leaves things behind when they're not planning to come back to say them.
Don't follow me.
I read two more lines. Something about the nine omegas. Something about his voice being the only weapon left.
I stop reading.
My feet hit the hallway floor before the letter is finished.
Max's room—the one he never sleeps in anymore.
I shove the door open. The light is off.
The desk lamp is warm, recently killed. The notebook is open.
Three sheets of the cream paper are missing from the drawer he keeps them in. The pen is on the desk, cap off.
Bane's shirt is folded on the bed. Folded. Not tossed, not dropped—folded, the way you fold something you're giving back.
His jacket is gone. His shoes are gone. His keys are gone.
No.
No, no, no—
I cross the hall. Bane's room—empty. The sheets are cold. He hasn't been in that bed for over an hour.
I take the stairs three at a time. The foyer.
Margot's bags by the door—I nearly trip over the blue carry-on and catch myself on the console table.
The front door is unlocked. He didn't even lock it behind him.
Like he wanted someone to follow. Like he wanted me to follow even as he wrote don't follow me because he knows me, he knows exactly who I am, and the little shit left the door unlocked.
He's at the car.
The gravel hits my feet like broken glass. I don't care. I run. Full sprint, bare soles on stone, because I can’t let him leave. I can't—I can't let it—
Max is standing beside the car, turned toward me, and the moonlight is on his face and he's wearing a jacket and real shoes and he looks like he's already gone.
As if he decided hours ago. Maybe days ago.
Maybe the night Atlas came home and we shut him down in the office and he said okay in the voice that means I'll do it when you're not looking.
He knew he was going to do this…
I stop ten feet from the car.
My chest is heaving. The gravel has cut my left foot—I can feel the blood, warm between my toes—and I don't care.
I don't care about anything except the twenty-year-old omega standing in front of an open car door at three in the morning looking at me like he's already sorry for what he's about to do.
"Get away from the car." My voice comes out raw. Shredded. Not the voice I planned to use—I had the words lined up, furious and precise, the kind of words that make people obey. "Step away from the car and come back inside. Now, Max."
"Zero—"
"Now."
"No."
"That wasn't a request."
"Good. Because my answer isn't up for negotiation," he says.
His voice is steady. How is his voice steady? Mine is shaking and I'm the one with the training and the body count and the reputation, and this kid—this omega who weighs a buck forty soaking wet—is standing in front of me with his chin up and his keys in his hand and his voice doesn't crack.
"I'm going to the police. I'm going to tell them everything. About the facility. About what was done to me. About the nine people still inside. You can go back inside and go to sleep or you can stand here and watch me drive away but you are not going to stop me."
"The fuck I'm not."
"You're not, Zero. You don't get to decide this for me."
"Decide this for you? Max, half those cops—"
"Then I'll go to a different precinct."
"Kline has people everywhere—"
"Then I'll go to the FBI! The state police!
I'll drive to fucking DC and knock on Santos's door myself if I have to.
But I am done sitting in that house while Talbot sells pieces of your family and stockpiles buyers for me like I'm livestock.
" He takes a breath. One. Sharp. "I heard everything tonight.
Through the door. Fifteen percent. The bankruptcy.
What Talbot said he'd do to me. The ruined goods line—yeah, I heard that too.
All of it. Every word you've been carrying since you got home from that meeting. "
The ground shifts under me.
He heard.
He was in the hallway. While we—while I was talking about factory fresh and ruined goods and Bane was talking about twelve weeks and Atlas was saying—
He heard all of it.
"You should have come in," I say. Low. Not angry. Something worse than angry. "You should have opened that door and—"
"And what? Let you shut me down again? Let Atlas say the answer is no again?
Let the three of you stand in a room deciding what I'm allowed to know and what I'm allowed to do about it?
" His jaw works. His eyes are wet. "I've been managed my whole life, Zero.
By foster parents. By social workers. By Margot.
By you. All of you. Everyone who's ever loved me has decided what I can handle and then handled it for me, and I am telling you right now–I am done being handled. "
The words land somewhere behind my sternum. Somewhere I don't have armor.
"This is my fault, Zero." His voice drops.
Not angry anymore—worse. Certain. "I broke this.
When I ran the first time. When I didn't fight back.
When I sat in that cell and waited for someone else to come save me instead of standing up and screaming until somebody with a badge heard me.
Everything that's happening to your family—the business, the bankruptcy, Talbot—that's the mess I left behind.
And I'm the only one who can clean it up. "
"You didn't break anything." The words come out of me harder than I mean them to.
Because it breaks my fucking heart that he truly believes this.
"Max. Listen to me. You didn't break a goddamn thing.
Kline was inside our operation before you ever set foot in this house.
Talbot said it himself—years. This isn't your mess. This was never your mess."
"It became my mess when your family traded everything to get me out."
"That was our choice—"
"And this is mine."
He says it like Atlas. Quiet. Final. The end of a negotiation.
I stare at him across ten feet of gravel.
My foot is bleeding. The letter is in my fist. The cream paper is destroyed—crumpled, torn at one edge, the tear stains smeared beyond reading.
I've ruined the first love letter anyone has ever written me and I'm standing in a driveway trying to keep its author from driving into the most dangerous thing he's ever done and I am losing.
I am losing this argument the way I've lost every argument with Max since the day I met him: completely, furiously, without a single valid counter.
Because he's right.
He's fucking right and I know he's right and the knowledge is a knife I can't pull out because it's the only thing keeping me from bleeding out entirely.
"You want to know why I can't let you go?
" My voice is doing something. Breaking.
Bending. Going to a place I've never taken it with anyone—not Atlas, not Bane, not the dark rooms I used to walk into when I wanted to forget what I was.
"You want to know why I would throw myself in front of your fucking car and let you run over me to try and stop you? "
"Zero—"
"Because I love you."
The words come out like I'm being fucking gutted.