Chapter 17
Bane
I haven't slept. How fucking could I?
None of us have. It's been—I check my phone—six hours since Margot's taillights disappeared down the drive with Max in the passenger seat, his lip split, his left eye swelling shut, the bond between us stretching like a wire being pulled from a spool.
I felt every mile she drove. South. Southeast. Then stationary, somewhere past the edge of what I can read with any precision, just a faint steady pull in my chest that says alive, far, hurting.
He's hurting and I can't get to him.
That's the thing that's eating me alive.
Not Richard—though if I think about Richard for more than ten seconds the thing inside me that broke a man's jaw with zip-tied hands starts pacing its cage.
Not Margot, not the horror on her face when she looked at us like we were the monsters in her son's story.
It's the bond. It's Max hurting on the other end of it and every cell in my body screaming to go to him and I'm standing in my bedroom doing nothing.
Atlas is downstairs. He's been at the kitchen table since Margot left, running scenarios.
I can hear the low murmur of calls he's making—contacts, sources, trying to track Margot's car without enough information to do it cleanly. His thread in the bond is locked tight. Controlled. He’s seconds from losing it.
We all are.
Zero is in his room. I heard something break an hour ago—glass, a lamp, something he threw at the wall—and then silence.
His thread is the worst. Bright and jagged and vibrating at a frequency that makes my molars ache.
Zero doesn't do helpless. Zero has never in his life been in a situation where the answer wasn't violence or speed or sheer force of will, and tonight the answer is wait and it is destroying him.
I've been pacing. Hallway to bedroom to hallway. Checking my phone. Calling Max—voicemail, voicemail, voicemail. Texting Margot. Nothing. The bond pulls southeast and I pace and I check and I pace and the sky outside my window has gone from black to grey to orange to yellow and I still don’t know a thing about the love of my life.
I sit on the edge of my bed. Put my head in my hands. Press the heels of my palms into my eyes until I see sparks.
Fuck me.
His face when Richard hit him. The sound.
The way he went down—not a fall, a buckle, his knees giving out, his hand going to his mouth and coming away red.
The look in his eyes when he straightened up.
Not shock. Not fear. Something worse. Recognition.
The face of a boy who has been hit before by people who were supposed to love him and is watching it happen again.
I stood there. I stood in that foyer and watched my father hit the person I love and I didn't move fast enough. Atlas got between them. Atlas. Not me. I was two steps behind and those two steps are going to live in my chest for the rest of my life.
I push off the bed. Pace to the door. Open it.
The letter Max wrote for me is on the floor.
Cream paper. Folded twice. My name on the front in handwriting I'd know from across a room—small, left-leaning, the B slightly too big for the rest of the letters because Max has never figured out how to start a word without overshooting.
I must have stepped right over it when I ran out of my room hours ago.
Didn't look down. Didn't see it. It's been here the whole time.
He slid it under my door before everything fell apart—before the driveway, before Richard, before Margot's car.
He wrote this and put it here and then walked out of this house into the worst night of his life.
I pick it up. My hands are shaking. They haven't stopped shaking in six hours.
I sit back on the bed.
I open it.
Bane—
I don't know how to start this, so I'm just going to start it wrong and keep going, because you're the one who told me that the only way out of something hard is straight through the middle of it.
I love you.
I should have said it that night in the library.
You said it into my hair and it went through me like a current and I ran.
I got up and I made up something about Wren and I left you on that couch with your hand still in the air where my face had been and I have thought about that every single day since.
I didn't run because I didn't feel it. I ran because I did.
Because nobody has ever said that to me except Margot, and she had to—she chose to, but she had to, because that's what mothers do.
You didn't have to. You just did. On an exhale, like it cost you nothing, like it was the easiest true thing you'd ever said.
It wasn't easy for me. It still isn't. I am writing it down because my mouth won't make the shape of it when you're in front of me and I owe you better than silence.
I love you, Bane. I love you the way you love—steady, certain, without asking for anything back.
I love that you paid Wren's rent for two years and told me like it was nothing.
I love that you check on Zero when he goes dark.
I love that you read the inventory reports even when Atlas emails you at four in the morning.
I love that you held me in a cell and made it feel safe.
I should have stayed that night. I should have said it back.
I'm saying it now because I might not get to say it in person, and you deserve to have it from me even if it's late. Even if it's on paper. Even if my handwriting is terrible and Zero would make fun of me for the tear stains.
You told me once that you're not going anywhere. That you've got me. That's the order.
Here's mine: I've got you too. I have had you since the facility. I didn't know what to call it then. I do now.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
I'm sorry it took me this long.
—Max
I read it three times.
The first time my eyes move across the words and my brain processes them as language and my body doesn’t react because it is holding itself very still. My heart doesn’t process his words yet.
The second time the bracing fails.
The third time I am sitting on the edge of my bed with the letter in both hands and my elbows on my knees and my head bowed and something in my chest has cracked open like a dam giving way—a release. My heart is torn apart, shreds inside me and I can barely breathe though the bittersweet ache.
He loves me.
He has loved me since the facility.
He ran from the couch that night because no one had ever said it to him without obligation. He sat in his room afterward with the bond humming between us and tried to find the words and couldn't and carried that failure around for weeks like a stone in his pocket.
My sweet, tortured, gentle Max. FUCK!
And then he wrote it down. Three times on the page, because once wasn't enough. Because Max is a writer and he knows that repetition is emphasis and he wanted me to understand that this was not a slip or a concession or a thing he was saying because the moment demanded it.
He meant it.
He loves me.
I fold the letter. I put it in my back pocket. I press my hand flat against it.
I go find my brothers because if I sit in my room without doing anything for a minute longer I’m going to lose my fucking mind.
Atlas is where I left him. Kitchen table. Phone face-down. His hands flat on the granite. But something has changed—his letter is open in front of him. Cream paper, same as mine. He found his.
He looks up when I come in. His eyes are red. Whatever Max wrote to him has gotten past the processing and into the part of him that still bleeds.
"You got one too," he says. Not a question.
"Yeah."
His eyes drop to my pocket. To the hand still pressed against it. He doesn't ask what mine said. I don't ask what his said. Somehow we both already know.
"He wrote these before." Atlas's voice is careful.
Measured. Holding something back. "Before the driveway.
Before Margot. He planned something, Bane.
He slid these under our doors and then he walked out of the house.
Whatever happened after—Margot, Richard—that wasn't his plan. He had something else in mind."
The realization settles into me. Cold. Heavy.
"Where's Zero?"
Atlas's jaw tightens. "Upstairs. Packing."
I'm up the stairs before he can say anything else.
Zero's door is open. He's standing at his bed with a black duffel half-full of clothes. His letter is on the nightstand after he picked it up off the front drive, the edges crumpled where his hand has been gripping it for hours. He’s throwing shirts into the bag like he’s sick of this place and won’t stand to stay here a minute longer.
"No," I say. From the doorway.
"Don't," he hisses.
"Zero. No."
"He hit him." Zero's voice is flat. Emptied out. The voice he uses when the feeling is too big for tone. "Our father put his hands on Max and split his face open and Max is gone and I am not staying in this house."
"Where are you going?"
"I don't know. Anywhere. A hotel. The car. I'll sleep in the fucking parking lot. I am not spending another night under a roof that man owns."
"Zero—"
"He hit him, Bane!" He stops packing. Looks at me.
His eyes are bright and wild and the thing living behind them is the thing I have spent a decade monitoring—the Zero who goes past the line and doesn't come back.
"He hit Max. In the face. Max, the last person in the fucking world who deserves that shit. My own father–"
He rolls his neck, his eyes going wide as if the world is crumbling around him and he’s seeing it for the first time.
He’s losing it.
"I know." It’s all I can say. I can’t excuse what Richard did either. I want to kill him with my bare hands.
Zero’s eyes meet mine. His are blazing and somehow I can feel through the bond that his entire body is on fire. He’s burning himself out like the last light before a battle. He feels nothing but pain. "Then you know why I'm leaving."
"I know why you want to. I'm telling you not to."