Chapter 20 #2
"Then explain it." Atlas. "Explain why our stepbrother—who's clearly going through something, withdrawal or god knows what—can barely function today. Explain why you look like someone punched you in the face. Explain why you've been avoiding this house like it's on fire."
More silence. I press closer to the door. My heart is pounding so hard I'm afraid they'll hear it.
When Zero speaks again, his voice is different. Lower. Rougher. The bravado cracking at the edges.
"He came to me." Almost a whisper. "He came downstairs. I didn't drag him there. He showed up at my door smelling like—" He stops. Starts again. "You don't know what it was like. Having him right there. Wanting it. Wanting me. You don't know what his scent—"
"But I didn't." Each word is a blade. "Because he's vulnerable. Because he's scared. Because he didn't ask for any of this, and the fact that our bodies want him doesn't give us the right to take him."
"Don't act like you're better than me." Zero's voice is rising again. The desperation underneath turning to venom. "Don't stand there with your self-righteous bullshit and pretend you wouldn't have done the same thing if you'd been alone with him when his scent—"
"I know exactly what his scent does." Atlas's voice drops into something dangerous. Intimate. "I've been sleeping in sheets that smell like him for two days. Standing outside his door at night fighting every instinct telling me to go in. You think you're the only one affected?"
"Then you know." Zero's voice rises. Desperate now. "You know what it's like. You know I couldn't—"
"I know you could have." Atlas cuts him off. Cold. Final. "I was alone with him too. He was unconscious in my bed. Burning up. Completely helpless. And I kept my hands to myself because that's what he needed. Not what I wanted. What he needed."
"Don't." Zero's voice is cracking now. Actually cracking. "Don't act like you're better than—"
"Did you even ask him?" Atlas's voice goes quiet. Quieter than the shouting. Worse than the shouting. "Before you—whatever you did down there. Did you stop and ask if he actually wanted it? Or did you just take what you wanted and tell yourself his body meant yes?"
The silence that follows is suffocating. I can feel it through the door. Heavy. Crushing. A held breath.
"He didn't say no." Zero. Barely audible. Wrecked. "He didn't—he wanted—"
"He's twenty years old." Atlas's voice shakes. Actually shakes. "He was probably scared and confused and going through something he doesn't understand, and you—"
"I know." The words rip out of Zero like they're being torn from somewhere deep. "I know, okay? I know I fucked up. I knew it the second it was over and he looked at me like—"
He stops.
The pause is physical. A void.
"Like what?" Bane. Quiet. Almost gentle.
Zero doesn't answer.
I press my hand against my mouth. Hard. Press until my lips hurt against my teeth. Because the sound trying to crawl up my throat—I don't know what it is. A sob. A scream. Something broken and formless that has no name.
They know.
They fucking know.
They don't have the details—not all of them—but they know enough. They've pieced it together from fragments and silences and the way I can't sit down without wincing.
What I am. What Zero did. What I let him do.
The shame hits me so hard my knees almost buckle. White-hot. Blinding. Every word Linda ever said flooding back at once—disgusting, filthy, unnatural—and she was right, she was right, she was always right—
Inside the office, something shatters.
Glass. Loud. The sharp crack of something thrown against a wall or a desk or a body.
Then a thud. Heavy. The sound of a body hitting furniture.
"Don't you fucking touch me—" Zero's voice, but different now. Guttural. The mask fully gone. Just animal underneath.
"Or what?" Atlas. Cold. Lethal. "What are you going to do, Zero? Hit me? Like you hurt him?"
"I didn't hurt—"
"He can barely walk!"
Another crash. Louder. Something heavy toppling—a chair, maybe. Or a body hitting a bookshelf. The sound of books cascading. Glass crunching underfoot.
Then they're moving. Both of them. I hear the scuffle—feet on hardwood, the grunt of impact, the sharp crack of fist meeting bone. The desk scraping across the floor with a screech of wood on wood.
The door explodes open.
They come through it locked together—Zero and Atlas, tangled in a violence that's nothing like the controlled precision they use in their professional lives. This is raw. Primal. Brothers tearing at each other with the same hands that used to hold each other up.
Atlas has Zero by the collar. His fist cocked back.
Blood on his knuckles already—his or Zero's, I can't tell.
His face is barely recognizable. The composure gone.
The CEO gone. The careful, controlled man who speaks in measured sentences and never raises his voice—gone.
What's left is something older and wilder. Like an alpha protecting what's his.
Zero breaks free. Stumbles back. His lip is split—blood running down his chin, dripping onto his black shirt. His eyes are blazing. Not cold anymore. Not ice. Something molten and desperate and furious.
He swings.
His fist connects with Atlas's jaw. The sound is sickening—wet, meaty, the crunch of bone on bone. Atlas's head snaps to the side. He doesn't go down. Just turns his face back slowly. Deliberately. Like the hit was nothing. Like it was a gnat.
And lunges.
They hit the hallway wall so hard the sconce rattles. The lightbulb flickers. Picture frames shake. Plaster dust rains down.
Atlas pins Zero against the wall. Forearm across his throat. Not choking. Containing. His face inches from Zero's.
"You don't touch him again." Atlas's voice is barely human. A growl. A command from somewhere ancient and absolute. "Not until he asks. Not until he chooses. You understand me?"
Zero's hand comes up. Grabs Atlas's wrist. Not pulling. Just holding.
"Get off me," he says. Quiet. Strained. Bleeding.
"Say you understand."
"Get off me."
Atlas presses harder. I see Zero's feet shift. See him struggling for air.
"Atlas—" Bane appears in the office doorway. Face white. Eyes wide. "Atlas, that's enough."
He doesn't seem to hear.
"Atlas!"
Bane moves. Grabs Atlas's shoulder. Tries to pull him off.
Atlas shrugs him off without looking. A casual movement. Like swatting a fly. The strength behind it sends Bane stumbling back a step.
I don't think.
Don't plan. Don't calculate risk or consequence.
"Stop!"
The word tears out of me. Raw. Loud. My voice cracking on the single syllable.
Everyone freezes.
Atlas. Zero. Bane.
Three sets of eyes snap to me. Three alphas, mid-violence, suddenly locked onto the omega standing in the hallway in sock feet and an oversized hoodie with tears running down his face.
Shit.
I didn't mean to cry. Didn't mean to be here at all. But my cheeks are wet and my voice is wrecked and I'm standing here in the wreckage of their fight like the cause of a disaster surveying the damage.
Atlas's arm drops from Zero's throat. Immediate. Like someone cut the power. His expression transforms in real time—rage draining out, replaced by something that looks horrifyingly like guilt.
"Max—" he starts.
"Don't." I hold up a hand. It's shaking. "Just—don't."
Zero slides down the wall. Not collapsing—just folding. His back against the plaster, knees coming up, head dropping forward. Blood drips from his chin onto his jeans. He doesn't wipe it.
He doesn't look at me.
Won't look at me.
That hurts more than it should.
"How much did you hear?" Atlas asks. His voice is rough. Wrecked. Nothing like the man I've come to know—the measured, precise, in-control Atlas Graves. He sounds stripped. Raw. Like someone reached inside him and pulled everything out.
"Enough." The word tastes like copper. Like blood. Like shame.
"Max, listen—"
"You were fighting about me." Not a question. "About what I am."
The hallway goes silent. The kind of silence that has weight. That presses against your eardrums.
Atlas doesn't deny it. Doesn't try to spin it. He just stands there, bleeding from the knuckles, his shirt torn at the collar, looking at me with those gray eyes that see too much and feeling—what? Guilt? Pity? That possessive, primal thing I heard in his voice through the door?
I open my mouth to say something—I don't know what, something angry, something defensive, something that will put the walls back up—
"What the hell is going on up here?"
Richard's voice booms up the staircase like a cannon shot. Authoritative. Furious. The voice of a man who's walked into his home and found chaos where there should be order.
Footsteps on the stairs. Two sets. Fast. Heavy.
Richard appears at the top of the landing. Margot right behind him. Her hand on the railing, her face already tight with worry.
They take in the scene.
The busted office door, hanging wrong on its hinges.
The broken glass on the hallway floor—bourbon, from the smell, the Blanton's bottle in amber shards.
Atlas with blood on his hands and murder still fading from his expression.
Zero on the floor with a split lip and the look of someone who's been caught doing something unforgivable.
Bane pressed against the wall, pale, frozen.
Picture frames crooked. Plaster dust on the carpet.
And me. Standing in the middle of it. Crying.
"Jesus Christ." Richard's face goes from confused to furious in the space of a heartbeat.
His jaw sets. A vein pulses at his temple.
I've never seen him angry before—really angry—and it transforms him.
The warm, affable man who makes Margot laugh disappears, replaced by someone harder.
Someone who built an empire from nothing and doesn't tolerate disorder.
"Somebody better start talking. Right now. "
Margot pushes past him. Her eyes find me immediately—mother's instinct, zeroing in on the one who looks most broken. She crosses the hallway in three quick strides, her hands reaching for my face, my shoulders, checking me for damage.
"Are you hurt?" she asks. Her voice is steady but her hands are shaking. "Max, are you hurt?"
"I'm fine." The lie is automatic. Practiced. The same lie I've been telling since I was nine years old. "I'm okay. I wasn't—it wasn't about me."
"Then what the hell was it about?" Richard demands. He's looking at Atlas now. The eldest. The responsible one. The one who's supposed to keep this house running when Dad's away.
Atlas straightens. I watch it happen in real time—the mask reassembling. Piece by piece. The bleeding knuckles tucked casually behind his back. The torn collar smoothed. The expression settling into something calm and controlled and absolutely, convincingly false.
"Business disagreement," Atlas says. His voice is steady.
Level. Like he didn't just have his brother pinned to a wall by the throat.
"Zero and I have different opinions on how to handle the Tacoma distribution issue.
It got heated. I'd been drinking." He pauses.
Lets the words land. "It was stupid. I'm sorry. "
He's lying.
Lying so smoothly, so effortlessly, that if I hadn't heard the real argument through the door I would believe every word.
Richard stares at him. Reading him. Searching for cracks.
"A business disagreement," Richard repeats. Flat. Skeptical.
"Yes."
"A business disagreement that put a hole in my wall." Richard gestures at the dented plaster behind Zero. The impression of a body. "And broke a bottle on my hallway floor."
"I'll replace the bourbon." Atlas doesn't flinch. "And the wall."
"That's not the goddamn point, Atlas."
"I know." Atlas holds his father's gaze. Doesn't waver. "It won't happen again."
Richard's jaw works. The vein at his temple is still pulsing. His eyes sweep the hallway again—Zero still on the floor, Bane still frozen, me still standing there with Margot's hands on my shoulders.
Zero hasn't said a word. Hasn't moved. Just sits there against the wall with blood drying on his chin and his eyes fixed on the carpet. Whatever fight was in him is gone. He looks—
Hollow.
Like someone scooped out everything inside him and left the shell.
"Zero." Richard's voice is sharp. "Get up."
Zero doesn't move.
"Get up."
Slowly—so slowly it hurts to watch—Zero stands. Pushes himself up the wall. He's unsteady. Catches himself with one hand on the wainscoting. His other hand hangs at his side, knuckles split and swelling.
He still won't look at me.
"Downstairs," Richard says. The word is iron.
"All four of you. Living room. Now." He holds up a hand when Atlas opens his mouth.
"Not a discussion. Not a request. You're going to sit down like adults and we're going to have a conversation about what the hell is happening in this house.
Because this—" He gestures broadly at the destruction. "—is not what this family does."
He turns and starts down the stairs. His footsteps are heavy. Measured. The footsteps of a man holding his temper by a thread.
Margot's hand squeezes my shoulder. I look at her.
Her eyes are searching. Worried. That look she gets when she knows there's something I'm not telling her—something bigger than what's on the surface, something that lives underneath the easy lies and the practiced smiles.
"It's okay," I say quietly. "Really. I–I wasn't part of it."
Another lie. The biggest one yet. Because I am the center of it. The cause. The fault line that's cracking this family apart.
She doesn't look convinced. But she nods. Squeezes once more. Lets go.
"Come on," she says softly. "Let's go downstairs."
She goes ahead of me. Down the stairs. Following Richard.
I stand in the hallway for a moment. Just a moment.
Zero moves first.
He shoves off the wall and his shoulder slams past me without a word.
Hard. Deliberate. The kind of hit that says get out of my way and fuck you and this isn't over all at once.
I stumble back a step, catch myself on the wainscoting, but he's already gone—taking the stairs two at a time, jaw tight, hands clenched into fists at his sides.
Pissed. Furious in a way that's looking for a target, and right now that target is anyone in his path.
I swallow hard. My throat clicks.
Downstairs, Richard is waiting. Margot is waiting. They're going to sit us down and demand answers, and I don't know what Atlas's lie will hold. Don't know if Zero will sell me out. Don't know if Bane will stay silent or if the guilt in his eyes means he's about to confess everything he suspects.
My secret is a grenade with the pin half-pulled, and I'm about to walk into a room full of people who could set it off without even trying.