THIRTY-FOUR #2
A bandage half-fastened around his ribs where he tore away from the people trying to help him.
He’s not the brother who left.
He’s not the boy who promised only two days.
Three max.
This is what came back when the world was finally done chewing him up before spitting him back out. And I don’t know what the hell to do with that.
My hands are empty, and that feels especially dangerous.
Maine’s gaze drops to them, then to my nails.
Black.
Chipped.
Half-ruined from blood, dirt, and violence.
His face falls, but not fully. Only enough that the first tear slips free before he can stop it.
And that’s what does it.
Not the name.
Not the eyes.
And not the smell of fresh-cut grass under the blood and antiseptic.
It’s the tear.
Maine cries, and something inside me suddenly stops pretending it’s made of razor blades and spikes.
I make a sound.
A small sound.
Broken.
Animal.
Then I move.
I don’t even decide to move, but I crawl into him before my brain can fully process the movement.
There’s no grace, no dignity, and not a single plan.
One second I’m pressed against Kaito’s leg, and the next I’m scrambling across the tile and crashing into Maine hard enough that one of the medics curses again, my arms banding around his shoulders so tight that he makes a wounded sound.
His arms close around me anyway. Instantly. Like they’ve been waiting those six years for an instruction. Like no time has passed at all. Like all of it did.
The hat comes off. I don’t even know if I knock it loose or if his hand catches the brim by accident when he reaches for me. Either way, it falls free and drops next to us on the tile, forgotten for the first time in six long, nightmarish years.
My bandana slips next. Not all the way, but just enough to bare my mouth, my chin, and the shape of my face I’ve spent years turning into someone else’s shadow.
The room sees.
Hale sees.
The fucking guards see.
I simply don’t have it in me to care. Let them see. Let the whole compound take a look. Maine is alive, and I don’t have a disguise big enough for it to matter anymore.
My hair spills free next, too pale and too long. Too me.
The room reacts then. It’s a tiny ripple through the guards and medics and Hale and whoever else is there to witness the small Beta boy become something else entirely.
And you know what? They can choke on it. Because I don’t care. I do not fucking care.
Maine’s hand goes to the back of my head, not holding me down but holding me tighter. Holding me together. His fingers shake through my hair in such a familiar way that it feels foreign.
“Kota,” he whispers again, but there’s no strength left in it. It’s loaded with grief and horror. It’s my brother.
My arms tighten over his shoulders, clutching him like I can hold him in place by sheer force alone. My chin lands on his shoulder, and I still can’t seem to get my lungs to work as they should. I can’t breathe.
He smells wrong.
He smells right.
He smells like blood and infection risk and six years of pure nightmares. He smells like fresh-cut grass under all of it, faint and battered but there. Somehow, still there, and my body breaks so hard that I feel it happen.
It’s not pretty.
It’s not neat.
There is no graceful sob tucked into his shirt. There’s only a horrendous sound that claws its way out of my chest, too sharp to be considered crying and way too wet to be anything else. My hands fist tightly into his ruined jacket, gripping hard enough that my knuckles ache with it.
He’s alive.
He left.
He’s alive.
He didn’t come back.
Maine’s arms tighten around me, and he makes another sound that might be my name if names could be crushed into tiny, pointed pieces before they leave the mouth.
“I looked,” he says roughly. The words shudder close to my ear. “Kota, I looked for you.”
I go still. It’s only for a second, but I feel it. And so does he.
His arms loosen, not letting go, just giving me space to breathe if I need it. I don’t take the space. I can’t. Not yet. But the words do lodge somewhere ugly.
I looked for you.
Good for him. I spent six fucking years surviving the aftermath.
My chin remains hooked over his shoulder, eyes wide open.
Over him, I can see the room. The red alarm continues to pulse over the white walls.
A medic stands frozen with gauze in one hand.
Valeria is watching from near the door, expression unreadable but not completely untouched.
Mercer looks as if he’s suddenly aged ten years in the last ten minutes.
Hale is staring at me.
At my hair.
At the hat on the floor.
At the shape I’ve stopped hiding.
Let him. Let him add it to his little internal report. Let him underline Omega or daughter or problem or whatever hell word makes men like him feel in control and organized.
Fletcher stands between Hale and us without making a whole show of it. Xeon has shifted to block the closest guard’s line of sight. Ewan’s face has gone pale, humor nonexistent and his headphones hanging uselessly from one hand.
Kaito is closest, still close to where I shoved away from him. Still not touching. Still watching me like he understands that the world just handed back a door and I don’t trust it not to slam on my fingers.
Maine’s chest hitches against mine.
He’s crying.
Quietly.
Badly.
Trying not to because he’s always been weird and stupid about being the older one of the two of us.
I remember him at nineteen, shoving his cap onto my head and telling me to keep my hair covered, scent dead, and doors locked.
I remember his mouth trembling when he thought I wasn’t looking.
I remember the door closing after him. I remember hating the sound of it more than I hated anything for years after.
Now that door is open, and I hate that too.
My hands tighten in his jacket and he winces. I should let go, but I don’t. He doesn’t ask me to, either.
“I thought you were dead,” I say so quietly that it’ll be a miracle if he hears it. The words come muffled against his shoulder. Not dramatically, and not accusing, just scraped from the deepest part of my soul and wiped clean.
Maine’s arms shake. “I know.”
No. No, he doesn’t get to say that, because he doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know the townhouse that was left behind after him.
He doesn't know Mom’s body in the bathroom hanging in a noose while she watched with cloudy eyes and a hungry jaw snapping for flesh to eat.
He doesn’t know the sound she made when she turned against that rope.
He doesn’t know the first night I slept under the kitchen table with a knife clutched in my hands and his hat tucked over my hair because those were the only instructions I had left.
He doesn’t know.
My throat closes, but the anger isn’t big yet. It’s not louder than the relief. It’s not stronger than the part of me that is currently trying to crawl inside his ribs and hide there.
It’s just a thin red crack under the flood, waiting for its moment.
Maine’s hand strokes once over my hair, then stops as if he remembers he has no right to soothe what he had a hand in breaking.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers brokenly.
That tiny crack widens and I squeeze my eyes closed.
Do not.
Don’t say that.
Don’t make it smaller with sorries.
Don’t make it bigger either.
I can’t handle bigger right now.
So, instead, I say absolutely nothing. I only clutch him harder, staring over his shoulder at the wall like a lost little girl who has finally found the door home and doesn’t have enough trust that it’ll stay open.
Maine holds me, and I let him. For now.
Around us, the room remains too quiet.
Someone eventually moves. A medic, maybe. A guard, possibly. I don’t look.
Maine’s breath catches again, pain finally dragging him back to his broken and bleeding body.
Good.
Bad.
I pull back by half an inch. Only half, just enough to see his face. Enough to prove that he’s still there.
His gray eyes are wet, red-rimmed, and fixed on me like looking away might actually kill him. Then he says, “Kota.”
My name sounds like a prayer in his mouth.
I fucking hate prayers, because they’re literally just hopes wearing that long-forgotten thing called manners.
My fingers drag across the tile next to us until they find the fallen hat. The brim is slightly bent and the fabric is damp, but it’s still his. It’s still mine. It’s still the only thing that survived when everything else didn’t.
I press it against my chest, and his hand covers mine over it. Neither one of us speaks, because there’s just too much. There’s not enough. Because this reunion doesn’t fix the wounds left behind. It only gives them a brand new shape.
And somewhere under my ribs, under all the relief and the impossible warmth of his hand over mine, the first clean spark of anger waits perfectly for the air that will fan it into a raging inferno.