Epilogue #2
She's working on it. I can hear it in her voice—the gap between the son she imagined and the son she got.
Four men in a house. A bond she still doesn't fully understand.
A life that looks nothing like the one she planned when she drove three hours to a foster home in a car she couldn't afford to fill with gas and took my hand and said you're coming with me now.
She calls every day. She’s putting her life back together. That's enough for now.
∞∞∞
The business is clean.
That's Bane's word for it—clean. What he means is legitimate.
What he means is the thing he's been working toward since before I met any of them: the Graves operation running on a product people actually want, sold through channels that don't involve Talbot Kline or offshore accounts or men in suits who never give their real names.
The knot suppressant and deflater—the one Atlas used that night in the hotel, the one I didn't have a name for until Bane explained it to me with a straight face and a PowerPoint presentation that I will never let him live down—is a hit.
Massive. The adult entertainment industry can't get enough of it.
The medical applications alone are worth more than everything Kline's operation ever generated.
After the raid, after Kline's lieutenants went down and Kline himself was picked up trying to cross into Canada in the trunk of a rented Audi, the Graves stock rebounded so hard that Atlas actually laughed. He was so elated he looked a little manic.
They bought Richard out. Bane handled the paperwork. Atlas handled the numbers. Zero sat in the room during the meeting and said nothing and didn't need to, because Richard took one look at his sons’ faces and signed everything Atlas put in front of him without reading it.
They haven't spoken to their father since.
Zero said he'd kill him if he ever had to look at him again. I don't think he's joking. I also don't think he'd actually do it. But I'm not going to test it.
∞∞∞
I get back to the house late after a full day on campus.
I'm on the couch with the notebook in my lap—the same one I started a year ago, the one I wrote the letters in, the one that has held every thought I couldn't say out loud until I could.
It's almost full. The pages are soft at the edges from handling, the spine cracked, the cover stained with coffee rings and one smear of Bane's engine grease from the time he picked it up to see what I was writing and I all but tackled him.
Atlas is reading in the armchair across from me.
Actual reading—a book, paper, not a screen.
He does this more often these days. Takes off the suit.
Puts on clothes that make him look like a person instead of a corporation.
I caught him in sweatpants once at four in the afternoon and almost called 911.
Bane is in the kitchen making something that smells like garlic and butter and fresh herbs.
He cooks now. Not just cooks—he's good at it.
Terrifyingly good. The man who spent years reading inventory reports and managing logistics picked up a knife six months ago and turned out to have the hands for it.
He makes his own pasta. He braises things.
He made a lemon tart from scratch last week that was so good Zero ate three slices and then denied it.
The irony of the lemon tart still makes me giggle.
Atlas asked him where he'd been hiding this and Bane just shrugged and said he likes following a process.
Of course he does. Bane has always been the one who finds the system in the chaos and makes it work.
He’s like his oldest brother that way.
Zero is on the floor at my feet. His back against the couch. My fingers in his hair. He's on his phone, scrolling something, and every few minutes he tilts his head back into my hand like a cat demanding more pressure.
I give it. He hums.
This is what it looks like. The four of us. On any given night. In a house with our names on it.
No one is hiding. No one is locked in a room down the hall hoping no one notices them. No one is counting pills or tracking the days until the next heat or rehearsing lies about why they flinch when someone gets too close.
Atlas looks up from his book. Catches me staring.
"What?" he says.
"Nothing."
"You're staring."
My lips pull wide into a smile. "I'm appreciating."
The corner of his mouth lifts. He goes back to his book. But his foot extends across the gap between the armchair and the couch and rests against mine. The bond hums.
Zero tilts his head back again. Looks up at me from the floor with those dark eyes and that mouth and the expression that is either about to start something or finish it.
"You're thinking too loud," he says.
"I'm always thinking too loud."
"Come down here."
"I'm writing."
"You're staring at Atlas and pretending to write. Come down here."
I put the notebook on the arm of the couch. I slide down to the floor beside him. He pulls me into his lap in one motion and his mouth finds my neck and I tip my head back and let him.
"Get a room," Bane calls from the kitchen.
"Get over yourself, Ramsay," Zero calls back, his lips against my throat.
"I heard that."
"You were meant to."
Atlas turns a page. Doesn't look up. "He's making the lemon tart again. Be nice or he won't save you a slice."
"He'll save me a slice," Zero says. "He always saves me a slice."
From the kitchen, quieter: "No I don't."
He does.
I laugh. Zero's arms tighten around me. Bane swears from the kitchen. Atlas smiles behind his book.
My phone buzzes. Zero groans but lets me reach for it over his head.
Wren: new kid at group tomorrow. 14. Just a damn baby.
I type back: be gentle.
Wren: always am. you bringing the good coffee or the shit coffee tomorrow?
the good.
Wren: that's why you're my favorite.
I set the phone down. Zero's mouth is still at my neck. His hand is under my shirt, flat against my stomach, warm. The bond between the four of us hums low and wide and full—no thread pulled tight, no distance, no one missing, no one hiding.
I think about the boy who showed up at the Graves estate with two duffel bags and a bottle of suppressants and a plan to disappear.
Who counted the days until he could leave.
Who swallowed pills every morning to make himself smaller, quieter, less.
Who had never been touched without flinching.
Who had never been looked at without calculating the cost.
That boy is gone.
I still carry him with me the way I carry the facility and the foster homes and Linda and the bathtub and every locked room I've ever been inside. He's part of the story. But he's not the ending.
Later, after dinner—Bane's garlic butter chicken, which is perfect like everything he makes now, which Zero acknowledges only by eating twice as much as everyone else—I go back to my room. The nest. The east-facing window, dark now. The desk.
The notebook is almost full. One page left.
I open it. I pick up the pen.
I think about what to write. The last line of the last page of the book that started with I shouldn't be here and ended with me here. In a house with three men who love me. In a life I chose. In a body I stopped hiding in.
I write one line. Close the notebook.
Set the pen down.
From down the hall, I can hear them. Atlas's low murmur. Zero's laugh—the real one, the rare one. Bane's voice underneath it all, steady, the baseline, the thread that holds.
I know which footstep is whose. Atlas: measured, even. Zero: fast, light, barely there. Bane: heavy, unhurried, certain.
They're coming down the hall.
Bane knocks once. Hard. Not really a question.
I open the door.
The notebook is closed on my desk. The last line is for me. But if it were for anyone—if the boy who planned to disappear could say one thing to the man who refused to—it would be this:
I'm here. I'm not hiding. And I'm not going anywhere.
All three of my alphas join me, making a mess of my nest but I’ll fix it tomorrow.
I can handle anything these days.
And though I would never say it out loud–my space isn’t truly comfortable unless the three of them are invading it anyways.
Thank you so much for going on this ride with me.