Chapter 1
Heat. The heat is spiking and it’s all consuming.
Atlas's arms.
Bane's palm on my mouth.
Zero in the doorway.
The front door is open downstairs.
"Boys? Max? We're back!"
Margot's voice. Warm, tired, a little loose—the tone she uses when she's had one glass of wine and the sunset was good and Richard is still holding her waist. Normal. Domestic. One floor below me, on the other side of a hallway and a flight of stairs and a door that probably doesn't lock properly after Zero all but broke it down. And I am up here in biology that's screaming so loud I can feel it in my teeth.
Bane's hand tightens over my mouth.
"Shh."
I can't. I can'tshh. My spine is arched against Atlas's chest and his arm is a band across my stomach holding me up because my legs won't and there's slick soaking through my shorts and I cansmellmyself, I can smell exactly what this is, and Margot is fifty feet away and I'm a—
"Look at me."
Zero. Low, steady, cutting through the roar. Not a touch. Not coming closer. Just the voice, finding me through the fog.
I look at him.
He's leaning one shoulder against the doorframe. All black. Hair still damp from the pool earlier. His jaw is set in the specific way I've learned to read—the way that means he's already decided something and the rest of us are catching up. His pupils are blown wide. His scent is thick in the small bathroom, stacked on top of Atlas's and Bane's, and my body reads all three of them as a pack arranging itself around me and the relief is obscene. Every nerve in my back is pressed into Atlas's sternum and every breath I take has Bane's palm against my lips and Zero's gunpowder in the middle of it, and it should not be this—it should not be a comfort.
It shouldn't. And it is.
"I'm going down," Zero says. "Give me ten minutes."
Atlas's arm tightens across my stomach. I feel him want to argue before I hear it.
"Zero—"
"Trust me."
Two words.
The Zero who would have fought that thirty seconds ago isn't here right now. This one is looking at me instead of at his brother, at the way I'm shaking against Atlas's chest, at Bane's hand clamped over a sound I can't hold in. He's taking stock.
"She already thinks something's wrong." Bane. Quiet. His face pressed to my temple. "She saw him at dinner. If Max isn't there to say goodnight and none of us goes down, she comes up."
"I know." Zero. Flat. "That's why I go. I look the least fucked up. You two are wrecked. I grab her at the landing before she gets any ideas about checking on him."
Atlas does the still thing he does when he's running probabilities. I feel it in his body. The quick rebalance. The math.
"She reads you," Atlas says to Zero as I nod against Bane’s lips on my temple. "You can't be short with her."
"I won't be."
"If she asks about Max—"
"He went up with a migraine. He's asleep. I'll check on him in an hour if it makes her feel better, and then I'll lie about that too." His eyes are still on me. "I've got this."
Atlas exhales.
