Chapter 18
The fountain is cold under me.
I've been sitting on the stone lip for—I don't know.
A long time. Long enough that the cold has soaked through my jeans into my skin and my fingers have gone numb in my jacket pockets and the night has gotten deeper and darker around me.
The temperature dropped an hour ago, maybe two. I can see my breath.
I asked Wren to bring me here.
Not to her apartment. Not to a hotel. Here. The estate. The driveway. The gravel and the fountain and the house where everything happened, because when I walked out of the police station and Wren asked me where do you want to go, my body answered before my brain did.
Here. Back here. Because this is where they are.
Because the bonds in my chest have been pulling in this direction all morning, all day, all night—through the fluorescent lights and the officer's questions and the forms I signed with shaking hands and the long drive back with Wren's hand on my knee. Every thread pointing the same way.
Home.
Except… I can't go inside.
I've been sitting on this fountain trying to make myself stand up and walk to the door and I can't. My legs won't move.
My hand won't reach for the knob. Because the last time I was inside that house, Richard's fist connected with my face and Margot screamed and the brothers were pressed against the wall and everything—every single thing I've built in the past year—came apart on the foyer floor.
What if they're angry?
The thought has been circling since the station.
What if they read the letters and hate me for leaving?
What if Atlas thinks I went behind his back?
What if Bane can't forgive me for running again—for running again, the same thing I did after the library, the same disappearing act I swore I'd never do?
What if Zero's fury on the driveway was the last version of him I'll see and the next time he looks at me it's with the cold distance he uses on strangers?
What if things are too complicated now?
Margot knows. Richard knows. The secret is out and the damage is done and maybe—maybe the brothers look at the wreckage and decide it isn't worth it.
Maybe they look at me—black eye, split lip, the omega who brought their world crashing down around their ears—and decide the cost is too high.
Maybe Margot and Richard find a way to keep us apart.
Lawyers. Court orders. Whatever parents do when they discover their sons have been—
I can't finish the thought.
The cold is in my bones now. I'm shivering—not the dramatic kind, just the slow, steady tremor that comes from sitting still too long in the open air.
Wren dropped me at the end of the driveway.
Squeezed my hand. Said call me if you need anything, you idiot and pulled away and I walked up the gravel and sat down on the fountain because my legs gave out and this is where they stopped and I've been here ever since.
Too scared to go in. Too in love to leave.
The front door opens.
My heart stalls in my chest. I look up.
Three silhouettes in the doorway. Backlit by the overhead foyer light. They're standing there and I can't make out their faces against the light but I don't need to. I know the shape of each of them the way I know the shape of my own hands.
Atlas. Bane. Zero.
They see me.
The bonds go off like a flare—all three threads igniting at once, flooding my chest with heat so sudden it knocks the breath out of me.
Not pain. Not fear. Recognition. The deep, cellular, bone-level recognition of three people who belong to me seeing me for the first time in hours and every thread saying the same thing at once: there you are, there you are, there you are.
And I know.
I know before they move, before they speak, before any of them takes the first step off the porch. I know the way you know the sun is warm before you step into it—because you can feel it from here, because the light tells you everything the touch hasn't yet.
Nothing has changed.
They're not angry. They're not pulling away.
They're not calculating the cost or measuring the damage or deciding whether I'm worth the wreckage.
They're standing in their own front door looking at me on the fountain the way they've looked at me since the beginning—like I'm the only thing in the frame.
They move.
All three at once. Down the steps, across the gravel. Running. Zero first—always Zero first—in boots he didn't bother to lace, the tongues flapping against his shins. Bane right behind. Atlas last but fastest, his long stride eating the distance.
Zero reaches me and drops to his knees on the gravel, pulling me down with him, and his hands find my face—both of them, palms on my cheeks—and he tilts my head. Looking at the bruise. The swelling. My left eye, still half-shut, the socket purple and tight.
"I'm okay," I say.
His thumbs trace under the bruise. Not pressing. Barely touching. Mapping the damage with his fingertips like he needs to know the exact shape of it.
"Zero. I'm okay."
"You're not okay. Your face is—" He stops. Swallows whatever he was going to say. Presses his mouth against my forehead instead. Hard. Long. His breath shaking against my hairline.
And the fear melts.
All of it. The circling thoughts, the what-ifs, the image of Zero looking at me with cold distance—gone.
Dissolved. Burned away by the heat of his mouth on my skin and his hands on my jaw and the bond between us blazing so bright I can feel it in my teeth.
He's here. He's on his knees on the gravel and he's here and he's not angry and he's not pulling away and I am so stupid.
I am so impossibly stupid for sitting on this fountain in the cold for hours thinking he might not want me anymore.
Then Bane is there. He kneels beside me against the fountain lip and his arm goes around my shoulders and pulls me into his side without a word.
His hand finds the back of my head, cradling it against his neck, and I can feel his pulse under my cheek—fast, too fast—and the warmth of him against my frozen body is so sudden it almost hurts.
The shame I've been carrying—the foyer, Margot's scream, the omega of it all, Richard's face—it loosens.
Not gone. But loosened. Because Bane is holding me the way he held me the first time I slept in his bed, like something worth being gentle with, and his bond is steady and warm and it's saying I'm not going anywhere without using a single word.
"We couldn't find you," he says into my hair. Quiet. Wrecked. "We called. Your phone—"
"I left it in my room by accident."
"We called Wren. She didn't pick up."
"She was with me. She turned her phone off while I was giving my statement. She said—" I almost laugh. It comes out wet. "She said no distractions."
"I'm going to kill her," Zero says. Without heat.
"No you're not."
"I'm going to kill her… gently."
Atlas is the last to reach for me. He stands in front of the fountain while Zero kneels and Bane holds me and he looks at my face—the bruise, the split lip, the swelling—and his expression does something I've never seen.
The blank cracks. Not the small fissure.
The whole thing. His face opens and behind it is everything he's been holding since the foyer. Since before the foyer. Since the pond.
He kneels down beside Zero. Takes my hand. Laces his fingers through mine and squeezes once—hard, deliberate.
"You went to the station," he says. Not a question.
"Yeah."
"You gave a statement."
"Full statement. Everything. The facility, the cell, the auctions. They have names. Dates. They're moving on it."
Atlas closes his eyes. One breath. Two. When he opens them they're wet.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you," I say. "I'm sorry I left the way I did. The letters—I should have—"
"Don't apologize," Bane says against my hair. "Don't you dare."
Everything I was carrying—the terror on the fountain, the cold, thinking I'd lost them—it's gone.
It fell off me the second Zero's hands found my face.
I can feel it now, the absence of it, like setting down a bag I didn't know I was holding.
The weight is gone and in its place is this: three men on their knees in front of me.
Three bonds, wide open, humming so loud the whole chest vibrates with it.
I can face whatever comes next. Whatever Margot decides. Whatever Richard does. Whatever the police find at the facility. Whatever the world looks like on the other side of this night. I can face all of it because I’m not alone.
I'm not alone.
Zero's forehead is still pressed against mine. His hands are still on my face. He hasn't let go.
"I love you," I say. To all of them. Not in a letter. Not in ink. Out loud. "I love you. All of you. I should have been saying it for months and I'm not scared anymore. I love you."
Nobody speaks.
“God, I love every single one of you.”
Zero kisses me. Soft—softer than I knew he could be. His mouth barely brushing mine because my lip is split and he knows, he can feel exactly where it hurts through the bond, and he's careful.
Zero is being careful. That alone almost makes me cry.
"We need to go," Atlas says. He stands. The machine clicks back on—not cold this time, just steady. The Atlas who has the next move. "Max isn't staying here. Not another night. Not another fucking hour."
He looks at Zero.
"Go inside. Grab the bag you packed. Then go to Max's room and get everything you can find. Clothes, his notebook, whatever's on his desk. Anything that's his. Meet us at the Ellsworth."
The Ellsworth. The hotel from the night they pulled me out of the facility. The hotel where Atlas and I spent our date night alone.
Zero nods once. Stands. Crosses the gravel toward the front door without looking back—unlaced boots slapping the stone, Atlas's jacket tight across his shoulders.
"Come on," Bane says.