Chapter 14 #2
Not pretty. Not poetic. Not the way Bane said it to him the other night—gentle and so full of emotion that Max nearly cried.
I’m not like my brother–I never will be.
This is the sound of something being ripped out of me whether I want it to or not.
Like I’m being flayed alive and I can’t help but lay bare.
"I love you. I have loved you since you stood on the terrace at the wedding with champagne you didn't want and looked at me like I was the most dangerous thing you'd ever seen.
And you were right. I am dangerous. I am the worst version of everything your life was supposed to protect you from.
I am an alpha with a body count and a temper and no idea how to be in a room with you without wanting to put my hands on you, and I love you, Max.
I love you so much it's ruining me. It has been ruining me for months and I haven’t said it because I didn't—"
My voice breaks. Actually breaks. A crack down the middle of the word, splintering it into pieces.
"I didn't think I was allowed to."
Max is crying.
Not the way he cried writing the letters—quietly, steadily, the kind of crying you can write through.
This is different. His face is open and wrecked and the tears are running down his cheeks into his jaw, catching the moonlight, and his mouth is doing the thing it does when he's trying not to make a sound—pressed shut, trembling, the muscles in his chin working against the sob he's holding in.
He lets go of the car door.
That's it. That's all he does. He takes his hand off the door and he steps away from the car and he's walking toward me and I'm walking toward him and the gravel between us is disappearing under my bleeding feet and his sure steps and the distance is ten feet and then five and then none.
I take his face in both hands.
His skin is wet. His jaw is shaking. He's looking up at me with those eyes—the brown eyes, the ones that saw me on a terrace and didn't run, the ones that have watched me lie and threaten and bare my teeth and never once looked away—and I kiss him.
Not gently. Not the way you're supposed to kiss someone who just told you they're about to walk into a building and dismantle their own life.
I kiss him the way I do everything—too hard, too much, too hungry—and his mouth opens under mine and he makes that sound.
The one I told Atlas about at the pond. The cross between a whimper and a prayer.
The one I've been replaying in my head for days.
My hands are in his hair and his hands are on my chest, on my ribs, fingers digging in like he's trying to hold onto me through the skin.
"You're not going," I say against his mouth. "Not tonight. Not like this."
"Zero—"
"I can't. I can't let you." I pull back far enough to look at him.
His face in my hands. His tears on my thumbs.
"I know what you heard tonight. I know you think this is the only move left.
Maybe you're right. I don't know. But you're not driving to a police station alone at three in the morning. You're not. I won't let it happen."
His mouth trembles. He's searching my face for the angle—the part where I'm managing him, the part where this is strategy instead of desperation. He won't find it. There's nothing left to find. I'm standing in front of him and I’ve never in my life been more naked.
"Come inside," I say. Not a command. Not this time. "Please. Come inside. Just—give me tonight. Give me until morning. Don't leave me standing in this driveway, Max. Not after what you wrote. Not after what I just—"
I can't finish the sentence. My voice is gone. Used up. Burned through.
He looks at me for a long time. The moonlight on his face. The tears drying on his cheeks. The keys still in his hand.
"I'm not giving up," he says. Quiet. Steady. "But I won’t go tonight."
"Okay."
"We're talking about this in the morning. All of us. No more closed doors."
"Okay."
"And you're not going to try to manage me out of it."
"Max—"
"Say it, Zero."
I swallow. The gravel bites into my feet. The truth bites harder.
"I'm not going to manage you out of it."
A sound comes out of him—half laugh, half sob.
He presses his forehead against my chest. I feel his shoulders shaking.
I wrap both arms around him and pull him in and his body fits against mine the way it always fits, like the space was built for him, like every inch of me exists specifically to hold this specific person.
"I love you," he whispers.
Into my chest. Muffled. Almost lost in the skin and the dark and the sound of both our hearts hammering.
But I hear it.
Three words I have never heard from anyone. Not my mother before she died. Not Atlas, not Bane—not like this. Not aimed at me with the full force of a person who means it the way you mean a thing you'd bleed for.
"Say it again."
Max sucks in a deep breath, his shoulders heaving up and down. "I–I love you."
"Again."
"I love you, Zero,” he says, barely above a whisper.
I'm going to die. I'm going to die right here on this driveway with this boy in my arms saying my name like it's something holy and I am going to die happy, which is not a thing I ever planned on.
I kiss him again. Slower this time. Deeper.
His hands slide up my chest to my shoulders and mine are at the small of his back, pulling him closer, and the bond between us is—I don't have the vocabulary for what the bond between us is.
It's not a thread anymore. It's a wire. A live one.
Humming so loud it drowns out the night and the gravel and the blood and the letters and every ugly thing waiting for us on the other side of sunrise.
"Inside," I murmur against his mouth.
"Zero—"
"Inside. Now. We'll figure it out in the morning. I promise you. I swear it, Max."
I keep one arm around him. Turn us toward the house. We walk—me limping slightly, the gravel finding every cut on my feet, and Max tucked under my arm with his face still wet and his hand gripping the back of my waistband like I'm going to disappear.
We're halfway up the drive. His mouth finds my jaw.
I turn my head and catch his lips and we're kissing again—walking and kissing, stumbling, his back against my arm, my foot leaving a bloody print on the stone—and I can feel the bond singing between us, wide and loud and unguarded, and for exactly eleven seconds I forget that the house we're walking toward has other people in it.
The porch light comes on.
I don't register it immediately. I'm kissing Max. His hand is on the back of my neck and my hand is on his hip and we're three steps from the front door and the light is just—light. Porch light. Motion sensor, probably.
Not a motion sensor.
The front door opens.
Margot is standing in the doorway.
Robe. Bare feet. Hair down. The face of a woman who heard a door slam and came downstairs to check and found—
Us.
Her son. Her stepson. My mouth on her baby. My arms around her boy. No shirt. No shoes. Max's face wet with tears and pressed against the bare chest of a man who is supposed to be his brother.
Her face does something I will remember for the rest of my life.
It goes through confusion first. The half-second of what am I looking at—the brain trying to arrange the information into something that makes sense. Zero is shirtless. Max is crying. They're close. Maybe it's a fight. Maybe Max is upset. Maybe Zero is comforting him.
Then her eyes find our hands.
Mine on Max's hip. Possessive. Not brotherly. The grip of a man holding someone who belongs to him.
Max's hand on the back of my neck. Fingers in my hair. The touch of a lover, not a sibling.
Her face completes its journey.
Confusion to recognition. Recognition to understanding. Understanding to horror.
"Max?" Her voice is small. Smaller than I've ever heard it. As if what she just saw has punched all the air from her and she doesn’t know what to do next. "What—what is this?"
Max whirls around to look at her, realizing she’s there.
His hand is still on my neck. He doesn't drop it.
Doesn't flinch. Doesn't jump away from me the way I expect him to—the way I would, the way anyone would when their mother appears in a doorway and catches them kissing their stepbrother at three in the morning.
He just turns. And looks at her. And doesn't let go of me.
"Mom," he says. Like a murmur, like he doesn’t even believes she’s really there.
Margot's eyes move from Max to me. To my bare chest. To the letter crushed in the gravel where I dropped it. To the blood on the porch. Back to Max. Back to my hand on his hip.
"What is going on?" she whispers.
Max opens his mouth.
"RICHARD!"
The name shatters the night. Margot's voice—not small anymore, not a whisper. A scream. The full-throated, terrified scream of a mother who has just seen something she can't unsee and needs someone, anyone, to come stand beside her while the world ends.
"RICHARD! Come down here! NOW!"
A light goes on upstairs. Second floor. The master bedroom.
Max's hand drops from my neck.
My heart drops out of my chest.
I think about what I said three days ago in Atlas's office—Margot finds out about us and Max, it's over.
She'll burn this place to the ground. I said it.
I fucking predicted it. I knew exactly how this story ended, and I kissed him on the front porch anyway, because I have never in my life been able to stop myself from doing the thing that destroys me.
Footsteps on the stairs.
Richard is coming.
Margot is in the doorway with her hand over her mouth and her eyes full of something I can't fix and Max is standing beside me, not touching me anymore, and the space where his hand was on my neck is the coldest place on my body.
"Zero," Max says. Barely audible. "Zero, it's—"
I know what it is.
It's exactly what I said it would be.
It's over.