Epilogue
One year later.
I wake up in my nest.
Not theirs. Mine. The one I built with my own hands over the first three weeks we lived here—layering blankets and pillows and stolen shirts until the whole thing smelled right.
Bane's flannel at the base because it holds his scent longest. One of Atlas's undershirts tucked near the headboard.
Zero's hoodie balled up in the corner where I press my face when I sleep on my side.
They're not here right now. I can feel them in the house—three threads in my chest, each one a different texture, a different temperature.
Atlas is downstairs. Coffee and emails, probably.
Bane is somewhere outside—the thread has the loose, easy quality it gets when he's in the yard or the garage.
Zero is still asleep. His thread is heavy and still and warm.
Zero sleeps like he fights: totally committed, impossible to interrupt.
I stretch. The morning light comes through the window I picked because it faces east and I wanted to wake up to this exact thing—sun across the sheets, the room warm, the house quiet except for the sounds of three men who love me existing in it.
I don't take pills anymore.
The suppressants are gone. Have been for months.
Threw the ones Atlas kept in my dresser drawer in case I wanted them away one morning without ceremony—just opened the bottle over the bathroom trash and let them fall.
Zero found the bottle later and kept it.
Put it on a shelf in his room like a trophy.
I told him that was weird. He told me everything about us is weird.
He's not wrong.
I pull on a t-shirt and shorts and pad downstairs barefoot.
Atlas is at the kitchen island. Suit pants, no jacket. Sleeves rolled. Reading something on his phone with a cup of coffee in his other hand. He doesn't look up when I come in but his hand reaches out—automatic, not even a thought—and catches my hip as I pass. Pulls me in. I go.
"Morning," he says. Into my hair. His mouth is warm.
"Morning."
His hand slides from my hip to my lower back. Stays there. His thumb traces a slow circle against my spine through the cotton and I feel my body soften into him, the way it always does, the way it's been doing for a year now without any part of me flinching or bracing or running.
"You have class at ten?" he asks.
"Eleven."
"Good." He sets his phone down. His hand moves from my back to the side of my neck. Tilts my face up. Kisses me—slow, coffee-warm, the Atlas kiss that doesn't demand anything but takes everything anyway. I make a sound against his mouth and he smiles into it.
"Go eat," he says. "You're thin."
"I'm not thin."
"You're thin and you skip meals when you're writing."
"I don't skip—"
"You ate a granola bar for dinner last night. That's not dinner, Max."
I steal his coffee on the way to the fridge. He lets me. He always lets me.
∞∞∞
The house is ours. Bought it six months ago—Atlas found it, Bane negotiated it, Zero walked through the front door once and said this one and that was that.
Not the estate. Not Richard's name on anything.
Four names on a deed, a kitchen with a table big enough for all of us, and the dent in the wall where Zero threw a pan during the Great Risotto Incident in March.
Each of them has a room. I have mine—the nest, the east-facing window, the desk where I write. They come in on my terms. Knock first, always. Even Zero, who knocks the way he does everything—once, hard, not really a question though.
Bane comes in most often. He shows up in the doorway around nine at night, every night, and waits until I look up from whatever I'm writing.
"You coming to bed?"
"In a minute."
"You said that an hour ago."
"I mean it this time."
He crosses the room. Stands behind my chair. His hands come down on my shoulders and his thumbs dig into the knots at the base of my neck and my head drops back against his stomach.
"You work too hard," he says. Low. His hands sliding forward, down my chest, his mouth at my ear.
"You're distracting me."
"That's the idea."
Some nights I let him distract me. Some nights the notebook can wait.
Bane lifts me out of the chair like I weigh nothing—I don't, to him—and carries me to his room, where the sheets smell like cedar and clean laundry, and he takes his time.
Bane always takes his time. Slow hands. Slow mouth.
Every part of me cataloged and accounted for like an inventory he's memorized but still checks every night because Bane doesn't trust the world not to take things from him.
Afterward he holds me with one arm across my chest and his nose in my hair and says nothing. He doesn't need to. The bond says it for him—steady, warm, certain. The Bane thread. The one that never wavers.
And if his brothers get to me first, Bane makes a habit of needling his way into whoever’s bed I happen to be in for the night.
Zero can’t stand it.
I love it.
∞∞∞
Once I’ve finished Atlas’ coffee, I start getting ready for class. Zero finds me in the shower .
I don't hear the bathroom door open over the water. I don't hear him undress. I just feel the cold air when the glass door swings wide and then he's behind me, hands on my hips, mouth on the back of my neck.
"Jesus—Zero—"
"You left the door unlocked."
"That's not an invitation."
"Everything about you is an invitation." His teeth graze the bond mark on my neck—the one he put there, the one that makes my knees buckle every single time he touches it, and he knows that, and he does it anyway because Zero has never once in his life played fair.
I brace one hand against the tile. The water runs between us. His hands move from my hips to my stomach, pulling me back against him.
"I have class in an hour," I manage.
"You'll make it."
"Zero—"
"Forty-five minutes." His mouth at my ear. "I only need twenty."
He doesn't need twenty. He needs the whole forty-five and I'm late to class and I walk into the lecture hall with wet hair and a bite mark below my collar that I spend the entire session trying to cover with my hand.
Wren sees it at the coffee shop after. She doesn't say anything. She just looks at my neck and then looks at me and raises one eyebrow.
"Don't," I say.
"I didn't say a word." She throws her hands up like she’s surrendering.
"Your eyebrow said it."
"My eyebrow has opinions." She sips her latte. "Which one?"
"I'm not answering that."
"It's Zero. It's always Zero with the biting."
"I hate you."
"You love me."
I do.
The university accepted me in the spring.
Full admission. Creative writing program.
I sit in workshops and I can't believe I'm here.
Every week. A room full of people who care about sentences the way I care about sentences—arguing about structure and voice and whether the second act earns the ending.
I stay after class to talk to my professor about point of view.
I read my classmates' stories and mark them up with notes in the margins because I can't help it, because this is the thing I've wanted since I was fifteen and writing in notebooks I hid under mattresses.
I'm doing it. I'm actually doing it. And the stuff I write—about locked rooms, about the feeling of counting meals, about a boy who learned to disappear—it's finding its way onto the page in shapes I didn't know I had in me.
My professor pulled me aside after the third workshop. Said my writing had a quality she couldn't put her finger on—an urgency, she called it. Like the narrator was always on the verge of something. Running toward or running from, she couldn't tell which.
Both, I told her. Sometimes at the same time.
Wren and I started a group. Not a therapy group—we don't have the credentials for that, though Wren is working on hers. A support group. For foster kids, former and current. Omega or not. Designation has nothing to do with it.
We meet Tuesday nights at a community center that smells like floor wax and donated coffee.
Eight regulars. Sometimes ten. Kids who aged out of the system and don't know how to fill out a lease application.
Kids who flinch when someone raises their voice.
Kids who sit in the circle and say nothing for three weeks straight and then one night say everything.
I know those kids. I was those kids.
Wren runs the meetings. I bring the coffee and sit in the circle and listen and sometimes, when someone can't find the words, I say I know and I mean it in a way that doesn't require explanation.
She texts me after every meeting.
You good?
I'm good.
Liar.
I'm working on it.
Same. See you Thursday.
∞∞∞
Margot calls every day.
Not at a set time—she's not that organized, never has been. She calls when she thinks of me, which means I get calls at seven in the morning and eleven at night and once, memorably, during a lecture on Flannery O'Connor while I fumbled to silence my phone and mouthed sorry to my professor.
She went to Wisconsin. Georgia's guest room, the cedar sachets, the soup. She stayed six months. Dodged Richard's calls for the first three. I don't know what changed—maybe Georgia talked her into listening, maybe she just ran out of reasons not to—but eventually she picked up.
Eventually she heard what he had to say.
She's back with him now. Slowly. Carefully. The way you walk back into a house after a fire—checking every room before you sit down.
I told her I don't want her to not live her truth if he's who she wants. She got quiet on the phone when I said that. Quiet in the Margot way—the silence that means she's trying not to cry.
"He's been going to therapy," she said. "Anger management. He's not the same man, Max."
"Okay."
"He's mortified. About what happened. He—"
"Mom. You don't have to convince me. If you're happy, I'm happy."