Chapter 16 #2
"Mom." I say it the way Atlas says things.
Quiet. Final. I think I learned it from him.
"I love you. I love you more than I know how to say.
You gave me a life. You gave me this life—the one where I can stand in front of you and argue with you instead of hiding in a closet hoping you don't find me. You did that. Nobody else."
Her chin trembles.
"But you don't get to take it back. You don't get to decide where I go and who I'm near and what I'm allowed to feel.
Linda did that. Every foster parent I ever had did that.
Every social worker who moved me from one house to another did that—decided what I could handle and then handled it for me.
You've never been like them. Please don't start now. "
She is crying. She is crying and I am crying and the hotel room is small and bright with the first grey light of dawn pushing through the curtains, and my lip is throbbing and my chest is being pulled in four directions and I am standing in front of the woman who saved me, telling her I am about to save myself.
And the three alphas I love.
"Where are you going?" she whispers.
"To the police."
The word lands between us like a dropped glass.
Her face changes. I watch it happen—the horror reorganizing itself, clicking into a new shape. A shape that makes sense to her. A shape she has a playbook for.
"Oh God." Her hand goes to her mouth. "Oh God, Max.
They were—they were hurting you. I knew it.
I knew something was—the way you flinched when Atlas touched your shoulder at dinner last month, the way you stopped coming downstairs in the mornings—I thought I was imagining it but I wasn't, was I? They were—"
"Mom, that's not—"
"—they were doing something to you and I didn't see it, I was in that house and I didn't see it, I was sleeping next to their father and my son was down the hall being—"
Her face goes white. Not pale. White. The color leaves her skin like someone pulled a plug.
"I–I'm going to be sick."
She stands. Knocks her phone off the bed. Doesn't pick it up. She makes it three steps toward the bathroom before her hand clamps over her mouth and she's running—the door swings shut behind her and I hear her hit the tile, hear the sound of retching, hear the faucet turn on.
The bathroom door is closed.
The hotel phone is on the nightstand.
I should go to her. I should knock on the door and kneel beside her on the tile and tell her the truth—that they weren't hurting me, that no one was hurting me, that what she saw in the driveway was love, not damage.
I should correct the story she just built in her head because it's wrong and she's in there right now vomiting over a version of events that didn't happen and I am the only person who can fix it.
I pick up the hotel phone.
I am a terrible son.
I dial Wren's number from memory. My hands are shaking. The bathroom faucet is still running. Through the door I can hear Margot coughing, spitting, the sound of a woman trying to pull herself together on her knees on hotel tile.
She’s losing the battle.
The phone rings twice.
"Max?" Sleep in her voice. Alarm underneath it. Wren answers every call, every time, because we made a deal that we would always be there for each other. "Max, it's six in the morning—"
"I need you to come get me. There's a–there’s a gas station on the corner of Ridgeway and Fourth, half a block south. Can you meet me there?"
She goes quiet. One beat. She hears the shake in my voice and the urgency underneath it and she doesn't ask why and she doesn't ask what happened.
"Uh–yeah. Twenty minutes," she says.
"Fifteen. Please."
"Put on shoes. I'm coming."
She hangs up.
The bathroom faucet turns off.
I set the phone down. I look at the bathroom door.
Behind it, Margot is rinsing her mouth. Pressing a wet washcloth to her face.
Rebuilding. Any second she's going to come out and she's going to have a new plan—a plan that involves police reports and restraining orders and the wrong crime, the wrong brothers, the wrong story entirely—and if I'm still standing here when that door opens I will never leave this room.
I grab my jacket. My shoes are already on.
I cross to the desk. The leather folder nobody will ever open. There's a pen inside it. A notepad with the hotel crest.
I write fast. My handwriting is terrible. Zero would make fun of it.
Mom—
They didn't hurt me. I promise. I'll explain everything. Please don't call the police about the brothers. Please. Trust me.
I love you. I'll call you today.
—Max
I leave it on her pillow. On top of her phone.
The bathroom door handle turns.
I am out of the room before it opens.
The hallway is empty. Fluorescent lights.
Carpet that muffles my footsteps. I hear her voice behind me—Max?
—muffled through the door I just pulled shut, and I don't stop.
The elevator is at the end of the hall and I walk toward it with my split lip and swollen shut eye and my jacket and the bond in my chest pulling three directions at once, and I don't look back.
I can’t look back.
I can’t let anything stop me.
Not again.
∞∞∞
Wren's car is idling at the gas station on the corner of Ridgeway and Fourth when I round the block.
The fluorescent canopy light turns everything the color of old paper.
She's in the driver's seat. Boots on. Hair pulled back.
The engine running, the headlights cutting through the last of the dark.
She sees me crossing the lot and her face does the thing—the quick inventory, the assessment.
My lip. My eyes. The way I'm walking. She reads me the way I read rooms: fast, total, silent.
I get in the passenger side. Pull the door shut.
She doesn't say anything for a beat. Lets me settle. Lets the car hold both of us.
"What the hell happened? You look like shit," she says. Soft.
"Thank you."
"Your eye, your lip—"
"It's nothing."
"That's not nothing, Max. Did Zero–"
"It's nothing I want to talk about right now."
She looks at me for one more second. Then she nods. Puts the car in drive.
"Where are we going? I gave Reeves the slip when I left, she’s going to be livid." she smirks.
I've been thinking about this since the driveway.
Since Zero's face in the moonlight and the letters under three doors and the sound of Bane's voice through the office wall saying twelve weeks like a death sentence.
I've been thinking about which precinct, which station, which desk I'm going to walk up to and put my name on a piece of paper that cannot be taken back.
"The Seventh Precinct."
The car swerves. Not much—an inch, maybe two—but enough that I feel it. Wren corrects, her knuckles going white on the wheel.
"The police?" She looks at me. Quick. Back to the road. "Max, what the hell happened? Who did that to your face?"
"It's not about my face."
"Then what is it about? You call me at five in the morning, you're standing at a random gas station with your face split open, and now you want me to drive you to a police station—"
"The facility, Wren."
She goes quiet. The word does what it always does between us—drops the temperature, strips the air, puts us both back in a hallway with concrete walls and locks that cycle at three in the morning.
"I'm going on record," I say. "Everything.
What they did to us. What Kline is still doing to the omegas in that building.
There was a federal case—Atlas was building it—but it fell apart.
The prosecutor got pulled. Kline's lawyers got to the deputy AG and it's dead.
" I swallow. "But there's a detective at the Seventh who's been working a state-level case for months.
He lost his federal backing but he doesn't have a victim willing to testify. He doesn't have a name on a report."
More information I overheard and filed, as if I knew days ago–weeks ago–that this was always how it was going to end.
"And you're the name."
"I'm the name."
She drives. Her jaw is working. Her thumb has started pressing the slow circle into the wheel—the tell, the nervous one. She's not processing the idea. She's processing the cost.
"That station is twenty-five minutes," she says finally. "There are closer stations."
"The closest one has four officers on Kline's payroll. Atlas told me. The Seventh is clean. Or–cleaner."
Wren is quiet for a block. The streetlights pass in slow orange pulses across her face.
"You've been planning this," she says.
"For a while."
"How long is a while?"
"I don’t really know actually.” I roll my neck. “I guess since the night Atlas told me the federal case died. I just—I couldn't find another alternative. Everyone I love was suffering and I couldn’t just let it be their problem."
She drives. The city is waking up around us—delivery trucks, the first joggers, a man in a bathrobe picking up his newspaper from a damp driveway. The world going about its morning like nothing is about to change.
"Max?"
"Yeah."
"You know what happens when you walk in there."
"Yes."
"Everything comes out. The facility. What they did to you. Your designation. The bonds. The brothers." She swallows. "Margot finds out. Everyone finds out."
"Margot already knows about the brothers. She saw us tonight. She saw me kissing Zero."
Wren processes this in three seconds flat. Her face doesn't change.
"Okay. Then everyone else finds out. The police. The press, eventually. Kline's lawyers. Richard."
"Yeah but then it won’t just be you and me who got out of there alive. I’ll be saving more."
She nods like she finally understands.
We're quiet for a few blocks. The sky has gone from grey to pale gold at the edges. Dawn. Everything looks a little too bright, like a photograph with the exposure too high.