Chapter 15
Margot's scream is still ringing off the stone when Richard appears at the top of the stairs.
I can see him through the open front door—the foyer light catching his silhouette, robe untied, hair flat on one side from the pillow. He looks confused. A confused man pulled from sleep by his wife's voice at a volume he's never heard before.
"Margot? What's—"
"Get down here."
Her hand is over her mouth. She hasn't moved from the doorway. She's standing there in her robe with her bare feet on the threshold and her eyes locked on Zero and me like if she looks away we'll disappear and she can pretend this is a dream.
Zero hasn't moved either. He's beside me on the porch—shirtless, barefoot. As if clothes and shoes could hide what is obvious between us. I can feel his bond in my chest, blazing and sick, like at any moment either of us might double over and vomit right here on the front porch.
Heat creeps up the back of my neck and my stomach lurches with every footstep of Richard’s down the stairs.
He reaches the foyer. Sees Margot in the doorway. Sees the angle of her body, the way she's braced against the frame. Comes up behind her and looks past her shoulder into the dark. “Honey, what’s going on?”
Then he sees us.
Zero. Shirtless. Standing too close to me—not touching anymore, but the distance between us is the distance of lovers, not brothers. Two feet. Maybe less. We could have moved away from each other but what would that solve at this point?
Me. Jacket. Shoes. Tear-streaked face at three in the morning. Standing beside his middle son on the front porch like I was ready to flee.
Richard's face doesn't do what Margot's did. He doesn't go through stages. He goes straight to the end.
"What the hell is this?"
His voice is low. Not loud. His eyes tells me he already knows exactly what the hell this is.
Nobody tells him he's wrong.
"Inside," Margot says. She's shaking. I can see it in her hands, in the way the robe is trembling at her wrists. "Everyone inside. Now."
She steps back from the doorway. Zero and I walk in.
The foyer is too bright after the dark of the driveway—the lamp on the console table, the overhead light Richard must have flicked on coming down.
I blink against it. My eyes are swollen.
My face is still wet. I probably look exactly like what I am: I couldn’t even hide it if I wanted to.
Zero stands beside me. Not touching. Close.
Margot is looking at us the way you look at an accident—unable to stop, unable to process, the brain running laps around a thing it can't absorb.
Richard is behind her. His jaw is set. His arms are crossed.
He hasn't said another word since what the hell is this and the silence is worse than anything he could say.
Then a door opens upstairs.
Two doors.
Atlas comes down first. Dressed. Shirt, trousers—he wasn't sleeping.
He was still in his office, still working, still trying to find the move that doesn't exist. His eyes take in the scene in one sweep: Margot in her robe, Richard behind her, Zero shirtless and bleeding, me in my jacket. His face goes blank.
Bane is behind him. Glasses on. He must have heard Margot's scream from his room.
He stops on the landing, reads the room in two seconds, and I watch his face do something I've never seen it do—collapse.
Just for a beat. The steady, careful, Bane composure crumpling like paper before he pulls it back and comes down the rest of the stairs with his hands at his sides and his jaw tight.
Six people in the foyer. Two parents. Three brothers. One omega.
One family falling apart in real time.
"Someone is going to explain this to me," Margot says. Her voice is thin. Stretched. She's holding herself together with her fingernails. "Right now. Someone is going to tell me what I just saw."
Atlas steps forward. "Margot—"
"Don't." She holds up her hand. "Don't you dare use that voice on me, Atlas. I am not one of your business contacts. I am your stepmother and that is my son and you are going to tell me what is happening in plain English or so help me God—"
"It's not what it looks like," Bane says. Gentle. Careful.
"It looked like your brother was kissing my son on the front porch at three in the morning. Is that not what it is?"
Silence.
"Because if that is what it is," Margot continues, and her voice is rising, losing the thin control she started with, "then I need one of you—any of you—to explain to me how my twenty-year-old son ended up on his stepbrother's mouth in the middle of the night with—with—" She looks at Zero's bare chest. At the blood on the porch steps.
At his feet, cut and bleeding on her clean floor.
"Why are you bleeding? Why is he shirtless? What is happening?"
Nobody answers fast enough.
"Someone talk to me. Right now."
"I kissed him," Zero says. Flat. No performance. No charm. "And he kissed me back."
Margot's face crumples. Not into tears—into something worse. Disbelief. The kind that has teeth.
"How long?" she whispers. "How long has this been going on?"
"Margot, if you'll let me explain—" Atlas starts, stepping between her and Zero. Shielding. Managing. "Max has been through a great deal in the past year. There are things about his situation that you don't know, and the context matters—"
"Context," Margot repeats. The word comes out like she's spitting glass.
"He's been vulnerable," Bane cuts in. I can hear him choosing every word, building the softest possible frame around the ugliest possible truth.
"He came to us from a difficult situation—a dangerous one—and what developed between us—between all of us—grew out of that.
It wasn't predatory. It wasn't calculated.
We care about him deeply and we've been trying to protect—"
"Protect him?" Margot's voice cracks. "You've been protecting him? Is that what you call this? Protecting my son by—by—"
She stops.
Her eyes move. From Zero, still by the door. To Bane, on the landing. To Atlas. Back to Bane. Something he said is catching up to her, replaying behind her eyes the way a sentence replays when you hear it wrong the first time and then hear it right.
Between us. Between all of us.
"All of us," she says. Slowly. Like she's translating from a language she doesn't speak. Her eyes are on Bane now. "You said all of us. What does that mean? What does all of us mean, Bane?"
Bane's jaw tightens. He doesn't answer fast enough.
"It's not just Zero." Not a question. Her voice has gone somewhere new—past anger, past disbelief, into a place I've never heard from her. A place that sounds like the floor dropping out. "It's not just Zero, is it? It's you too."
Her eyes swing to Atlas. She points.
"And you."
Atlas doesn't flinch. He doesn't look away. He stands there in his pressed shirt and takes it the way he takes everything—straight on, unblinking, absorbing.
"All three of you." Margot's hand finds the wall.
She leans against it like the house has tilted.
"All three of my husband's sons. And my boy.
My—" Her voice shatters. Puts itself back together.
Shatters again. "He's your brother. He is your stepbrother and he is an omega and the three of you—all three of you—"
She stops.
The word hangs in the air. Omega. She said it without thinking—the way you say things you've been holding for years when the dam finally breaks. Not a weapon. Not a strategy. Just the truth, ripped out of her in the same breath as everything else.
Richard's head turns.
"What?"
One word. Low. Aimed at Margot.
"What did you just say?"
Margot's hand goes to her mouth. I watch the horror double—the horror of what she saw on the porch colliding with the horror of what just came out of her mouth. She looks at me. Her eyes are the eyes of a woman who just broke a promise she's kept for four years.
"Max is—" She swallows. "He's an omega, Richard. He's been on suppressants since he was fourteen. I've known since the adoption. I never—I didn't tell you because it wasn't mine to—"
"He's an omega?"
The word comes out of Richard's mouth like a diagnosis. Like a verdict. Like the final piece of a puzzle that just made the picture infinitely worse.
I feel it in my skin.
The shame. The old shame—the one I thought I'd buried, the one I took pills to hide, the one that lived in every foster home and every doctor's office and every time someone looked at me and saw something to manage or medicate or sell.
The designation that got me strapped to a cross in a facility while men with clipboards wrote numbers on a page.
The identity I've spent my entire life trying to erase and have only just, in the last few months, started to hold without flinching.
My mother just said it out loud in a room full of people who are looking at me the way people have always looked at omegas when they find out.
Like I'm less.
Like everything I just did tonight—the letters, the car, telling Zero no, standing in this foyer—is rewritten.
Reframed. Not brave. Not chosen. Just an omega doing what omegas do: following the bond.
Obeying the biology. Being pulled along by three alphas who knew exactly what they had under their roof.
Richard is staring at me with new eyes. The fury is still there but it's curdled into something more complex—disgust and pity and a dawning, sickened understanding that rearranges everything he thought he knew about his stepsons and the boy they've been sharing meals with for a year.
"You knew," he says to Margot. Not a question. "You knew what he was and you put him in a house with three unbonded alphas."
"I didn’t know they were alphas! They're his brothers, Richard—"