They left. And then the others followed. One by one, the brothers filed out of the basement, their boots echoing on the stairs, until only three of us remained.
Me. Nano. Morpheus.
The silence was suffocating.
Morpheus walked over and squatted down next to me, his expression unreadable. For a moment, he just looked at me. Then he sighed, the sound almost... disappointed. “The Brotherhood doesn’t do second chances, Alexandra,” he said quietly. “So you better be damn sure before you say something you can’t take back.”
With that, he stood and walked away, his boots heavy against the concrete. The door at the top of the stairs opened, then closed, and the sound of the lock sliding into place echoed through the basement.
And then it was just us.
Me and Nano.
I crawled toward him, my hands slipping on the blood-slicked floor. My knees screamed in protest, the cold concrete biting into my skin, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything except getting to him. “Please, Nano,” I whispered, my voice breaking. “Please look at me.”
He didn’t move. Didn’t turn around. Didn’t even acknowledge that I had spoken.
I reached him, my hands trembling as I kneeled at his feet. “Please,” I begged, tears streaming down my face. “Please, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
But he still didn’t turn around, and I realized, with a sickening, hollowing clarity, that this was my punishment. Not the beating. Not the torture. Not the knife in his thigh or the blood on the floor.
This. His silence. His refusal to look at me. His complete and utter withdrawal.
I had given Morpheus everything. Had confessed Michael’s location, his name, and the ledger. Had surrendered the only leverage I had, but it didn’t matter.
Because Nano wouldn’t look at me. And without that, without his eyes on me, without his acknowledgment, without the twisted, desperate connection that had bound us together, I was nothing as I kneeled there on the cold concrete, staring at his back, and felt the last piece of myself crumble into dust.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Nano
It had been two days since I turned my back on Alexandra.
Two days of sitting in this goddamn church, nursing a sore fucking leg, and refusing to speak to anyone as I connected the webcams so Morpheus could talk with Zeus, Reaper, and King.
The knife wound in my thigh throbbed with every movement. A constant, vicious reminder of what had happened in that basement. Scythe had driven the blade deep, and even though Carver had stitched it up, the pain lingered. Sharp and insistent. Like my body was punishing me for what I had done.
Good. You deserve worse.
I adjusted the camera angle, making sure the feed was clear. The church was empty except for me and the ghosts of every decision I had ever made in the last seventy-two hours. The heavy wooden table. The leather chairs. The Brotherhood insignia carved into the walls. This room had witnessed a lot of shit over the years. But nothing quite like what I had done to Alex.
Stop thinking about her.
I couldn’t. No matter how hard I tried, my mind kept circling back to that moment in the basement. The moment I turned my back on her. The moment I walked away and left her kneeling on the cold concrete, broken and desperate and begging me to look at her. And I didn’t. Because Morpheus was right. Because sheneeded to understand that defiance had consequences. Because I needed to prove to the club, and to myself, that I could still be the man they needed me to be.
But all I had proven was that I was a fucking coward.
Brothers filtered into church just as the screens flickered to life and the connections started coming through. Zeus appeared first, his face filling the monitor from the Gods of Mayhem clubhouse in Athens. Then Reaper from the Golden Skulls. Then King from the Silver Shadows.
“Jesus fuck,” Zeus gasped as the screens connected. “What the fuck happened?”
Poseidon groaned as he held an ice pack to his face. “My sister happened.”
Kraken, another brother in the Gods of Mayhem, snickered. “Hurricane Alex reared her ugly head, Prez, and it wasn’t pretty.”
“Do we even want to know?” Hades, the V.P. for the Gods of Mayhem, groaned as I stared at the big screen on the wall.
“She stole seventy-five million from my club.” Morpheus sighed, shaking his head, as Reaper and King both threw their heads back and laughed.
