Chapter 15 #2
"They're not his brothers! They're three grown men who—" He stops. Turns back to his sons. And the look on his face is different now. Worse. Because before he was a father looking at sons who crossed a line. Now he's a father looking at three alphas who had an omega alone in their territory.
The room has shifted. I can feel it. The air itself has changed.
I'm not Max anymore. Not in this room. Not to Richard.
I'm an omega. An omega in a house with three alphas.
And every single thing that's happened between us—the bonds, the bites, the claiming, the love—is being rewritten behind Richard's eyes into something predatory.
Something biological. Something I didn't choose.
Something that was done to me.
I want to scream. I want to say I chose this.
I chose them. I am standing right here and I chose every single moment of it and my designation doesn't make that less true.
But my voice is gone. The shame took it.
The old familiar shame that pills were supposed to fix and distance was supposed to cure and love was supposed to make irrelevant—except it's not irrelevant.
Not here. Not now. Not in a foyer at three in the morning with my mother's secret and my stepfather's disgust and three men I love being rewritten into monsters because of what I am.
"He's not a child, Margot," Zero says. Hard. "He's not a victim. He chose—"
"He's twenty years old for fucks sake!"
I flinch so hard I feel my knees are going to give out. She’s livid, she’s horrified. I can’t catch my breath.
"He's twenty years old and he's been through more than most people survive in a lifetime. He knows what he wants. He's not confused, he's not manipulated, he's—"
"Zero, enough," Atlas says. Not a suggestion.
"No. Not enough. She needs to hear—"
Richard is looking back and forth between his sons, horrified.
"She doesn't need to hear anything from you right now, Zero—"
"The hell she doesn't. Max is standing right here and you're talking about him like he's not in the room—"
"Because every time you open your mouth you make it worse—"
"—he's not broken, Atlas. He doesn't need you to explain him—"
"Stop." Bane. Firmer than I've ever heard him. "Both of you. Stop. Margot—we never meant for anyone to get hurt. Max is safe with us. He's always been safe—"
"Safe?" Margot's voice is barely holding. "You call this safe? My son is standing in your foyer at three in the morning with tears drying on his face and you're telling me he's safe?"
They're all talking. All of them. Talking over each other, talking at Margot, talking about me. Atlas is trying to control the narrative. Bane is trying to soften it. Zero is trying to defend it. Three men, three strategies, all of them about me, none of them from me.
I open my mouth to say something—anything—
Richard covers his eyes.
Both hands. Palms pressing into his eye sockets, fingers digging into his forehead.
He stands there behind Margot with his hands over his face and his chest expanding in slow, massive breaths, and I watch him process.
Watch the information travel through him—three sons, their stepbrother, one house, months of it, all four of us, under his roof.
I can see the moment it lands. The moment the full shape of it clicks into place behind his hands.
He drops his hands.
He picks up the lamp from the console table—the one Margot leaves on, the little brass one with the cream shade—and he hurls it into the wall.
The crash is enormous. Glass and brass and plaster, the shade crumpling, the bulb popping in a bright flash that leaves spots in my vision. Margot screams. I flinch. The foyer goes from argument to violence in the space of a breath and the silence after the crash is worse than the sound.
"Dad—" Bane starts.
"Don't." Richard's voice is something I've never heard. Not the measured baritone. Not the patriarch. This is guttural, shredded, the voice of a man who has ripped something open inside himself and can't close it. "Don't you dare call me that right now."
Bane and Atlas move at the same time. Not toward Richard—toward me. They step in front of me, shoulder to shoulder. Bane on my left, Atlas on my right. A wall. Not the wall that manages me. The wall that protects me. I can feel the difference in their bonds—not control, not strategy. Fear.
Richard is pacing. Three steps one way, three steps back. His hands are shaking. The lamp is in pieces on the floor and he's stepping on the glass and doesn't feel it through his rubber-bottom slippers.
"Under my roof," he says. Pacing. "Under my goddamn roof.
My sons. My—" He whirls on Atlas. "You. You sick son of a bitch.
You're the oldest. You were supposed to—he's a kid, Atlas.
He's a fucking kid and he's your brother and you—the three of you—you've been, what? Taking turns? Passing him around like—"
"That's enough." Atlas. His voice is sharp like I've never heard from him—cold. Blade-cold. "You don't know what you're talking about. You don't know anything about what's happened in this house and you will not stand here and reduce him to—"
"Reduce HIM?" Richard's face has gone purple.
"I'm reducing—YOU reduced him! The three of you—" He's tripping over the words, the new information crashing into the old fury, rearranging everything as it goes.
"She didn't know. Margot didn't know you three were—she couldn't have known.
And I didn't know about him. We brought a boy into this house and we thought he was safe because we trusted our sons and none of us—" He stops.
Swallows. Starts again, worse. "But you three knew.
You figured out what he was. You smelled it or sensed it or whatever the hell it is—and you didn't tell us.
You didn't come to me. You didn't protect him.
You just—took him. While we were sleeping down the hall thinking he was safe. "
"He's not—"
"—you took a boy who trusted this family and you—all three of you—"
"—he is NOT a victim of us—"
"THEN WHAT IS HE?"
Richard is in Atlas's face. Inches apart.
Bane has his arm out, trying to create space, and Zero is somewhere behind me, coiled, and I can feel his bond vibrating at a frequency that means someone is about to lose teeth, and I have to stop this.
I have to stop this before Zero does something that can't be undone.
I push past Bane's arm. I step around Atlas.
"Stop—Richard, stop. Please. It's not what you think. They didn't—please listen to me, they didn't hurt me, I'm the one who—"
Richard whirls.
His fist is already moving when he turns—the momentum of a man mid-argument whose body is ahead of his brain, who was winding up for Atlas and pivoted into me instead.
It's not aimed. It's not calculated. It's a blind, furious swing that meets my face because my face is where Atlas's was a half-second ago.
It catches me square.
Left cheekbone. Full force. Pain flares bright. The impact is—
Everything stops.
Not slows down. Stops. The sound cuts out. The light goes wrong. My vision fractures into pieces—the foyer ceiling, the chandelier, the brass remains of the lamp on the floor, all of it tilting sideways as my legs disappear and the ground comes up fast.
I hit the hardwood.
The back of my skull bounces once off the floor and the world goes white. Not black—white. A bright, ringing, total white, and inside it there is a sound like a tuning fork being struck inside my head, one continuous note that drowns out everything else.
Stars. Actual stars. The kind you see in cartoons, except they're real and they're everywhere and my left eye isn't working right—swelling already, the socket hot and tight—and I can taste copper flooding my mouth and I can't hear anything except the ringing.
Shapes above me.
Zero. He's there first. On his knees, his hands on my face, his mouth moving. He's saying something—saying my name, maybe—but the sound is gone. Just the ringing. His eyes are wide and wet and terrified and his fingers are shaking against my jaw.
Bane. Behind Zero. His glasses are crooked. His hand on my chest, feeling for—I don't know. Breathing. Heartbeat. Something medical, something Bane would know to check. His mouth is moving too. Words I can't hear.
Atlas. Standing above all of us. Not kneeling.
Looking at his father. And whatever is on Atlas's face, whatever his body is doing, I can't see it because the stars are in the way—but I can feel the bond.
His bond. And it is no longer volcanic. It is no longer still.
It is the thing that comes after the eruption.
The ash. The silence. The landscape that will never look the same.
Muffled sounds start bleeding through the ringing.
Shouts. Margot's voice—high, shattered, somewhere above me.
Richard's voice—lower, broken in a different way.
Words I can't make out. The shapes above me shift—Zero is jerked backward.
Someone's hand on his shoulder, pulling him off me.
Richard's hand. Zero rips free, comes back.
Is pulled again. Bane is yanked sideways by—Margot?
Someone is pulling the brothers away from me and I'm on the floor with blood in my mouth and stars in my eyes and the ringing is fading just enough that I can hear—
"—off him! Get OFF him! Don't TOUCH him—"
Margot.
She's on the floor beside me. Her knees on the hardwood, her robe pooling around her.
Her hands find my face—gentle, so gentle, the opposite of the fist—and she's turning my head, looking at the swelling, looking at the blood, and she's crying so hard she can barely see me but she's here. She's right here.
"Baby. Baby, look at me. Max. Look at me, sweetheart."
I look at her.