I collapse on top of him, my heart hammering against his ribs. We’re both panting, slick with sweat, tangled together in a mess of limbs and sheets.
The room is cool now. The adrenaline has faded, leaving a heavy, exhausted silence in its wake. The city lights of Manhattan cast long, shifting shadows across the duvet, painting us in shades of gray and blue.
Max is asleep. Deeply asleep. He is curled into my side, his head resting heavily on my chest, his breathing slow and rhythmic against my skin. His hand is still gripping my forearm, a subconscious anchor even in his dreams, his fingers twitching occasionally as if checking the data one last time.
I stroke his hair, brushing the sweat-damp strands off his forehead. He looks younger like this. The lines of tensionaround his eyes—the ones that have been there since the moment I met him—are finally gone. The tremor is gone. The calculation is gone.
He looks peaceful.
But I am not peaceful.
I stare up at the ceiling, and the anger I pushed down on the boat, the anger I set aside to take care of him, comes rushing back. It’s not the hot, reactive adrenaline of the moment. It’s cold. It’s a slow-burning, corrosive sludge in my gut.
Broken.
She called him broken.
I replay the scene in my head. The way she stood there, in her Chanel suit and her pearls, and talked about her own son like he was a defective appliance she had to pay to refurbish. She didn't speak about him with love. She didn't speak about his brilliance, or the way he saves lives every day, or the way he memorizes the specific hydration needs of my plants because he knows I forget.
She spoke about him like a bad investment.
Fifty thousand dollars.
She paid a doctor to hide him. To erase him. To force him into a box that was too small, too tight, too painful, just so she could present a "palatable" heir to the Board.
My hand tightens in Max’s hair, and I have to force myself to relax so I don't wake him.
I think about the years he must have spent trying to be what she wanted. The masking. The exhaustion. The constant, crushing pressure to "calibrate" himself, to edit out the glitches, to be perfect.
I think about the fact that she looked atthisman—this incredible, complex, beautiful genius lying in my arms—and saw something that needed to be fixed.
I want to scream. I want to go back to that boat and set it on fire. I want to find Catherine York and scream until my throat bleeds, until she understands thatsheis the one who is broken. She is the one missing the parts that matter.
"I hate her," I whisper into the dark.
It feels good to say it. I don't just dislike her. I don't just find her difficult. I hate her for what she did to him.
I look down at Max. He shifts, letting out a soft, contented sigh, nuzzling his face into the crook of my neck. He trusts me. He let go. He finally stopped running the numbers and just let himselfbe.
And I swear, right then and there, that I will never let her make him feel like a project again.
I will be the wall. I will be the filter. If she wants to get to him, she has to go through the Trauma Cowboy first. And unlike Max, I don't have a politeness protocol. I have a darker set of skills, and I am perfectly willing to use them.
Let her have her yachts. Let her have her Plaza rehearsals. Let her have her cold, calibrated, empty world.
I have this.
I have the guy who eats pineapple pizza and calculates the structural integrity of pretzels. I have the man who stood up to a hurricane to defend me, who loves me enough to rewrite his entire life, and who trusts me enough to fall apart in my arms.
She lost him. And she doesn't even realize the value of what she threw away.
"Goodnight, Max," I whisper, kissing the top of his head, pulling the duvet tighter around his shoulders to block out the chill. "You’re safe. I’ve got the watch."
He shifts again, his breathing hitching for a second as he drifts into a deeper cycle. He mumbles something incomprehensible into my skin.
"Statistically..."
I freeze. Then, a small, genuine laugh bubbles up in my chest, cracking the shell of my anger.
