Then he crosses the office in four strides.
He doesn't hook his hand around my neck. He doesn't press his mouth to my temple. He bends, gets his shoulder into my stomach, and stands up with me folded over him like a sack of flour.
"Zero—" I grunt.
"You heard him, boys." He's already walking toward the hallway. "He wants to play."
"Put me down—"
"No."
"Zero, I swear to—"
"You're going outside. I'm taking you outside. This is what's happening. Complain louder, it does something for me." He smacks my thigh once and I can hear the grin in his voice even though I'm staring at the back of his shirt and my blood is rushing to my head.
Behind us, I hear Bane huff a laugh—the first real one I've heard from him tonight. Hear Atlas push back from the desk.
They follow.
Zero carries me down the stairs, through the kitchen, out the back door. He grabs a beer from the fridge without breakingstride or setting me down, which is both impressive and infuriating. I stop fighting somewhere around the garden path because the blood rushing to my head is making me dizzy and also because his hand is warm on the back of my thigh and I'd rather die than admit how much I don't hate this. Bane grabs a blanket from the mudroom on the way past. Atlas grabs nothing but sheds his jacket somewhere between the kitchen and the tree line, rolling his sleeves to the elbow as he walks.
Zero sets me down at the edge of the pond.
The pond is at the far edge of the property, past the gardens, past the tree line, where the manicured grounds give way to something wilder. It's not big—maybe forty feet across—but the water is dark and still and the moon is on it tonight, laying a silver path across the surface the way it did on the ocean at the beach house.
Close enough.
We spread the blanket on the bank. Atlas's hand finds the back of my neck and stays there. The grass is cool. The air smells like cut lawn and pond water and the faint sweetness of Margot's garden thirty yards behind us.
"Remember the chips?" I say.
"The chips Banedoesn'teat," Zero says.
"Idon'teat those chips."
"You ate two bags."
"I was being polite."
I laugh. It scrapes against the tightness in my chest but it gets out and Zero grins at me in the gentle dark, and for a second—just a second—the Kline of it all goes quiet.
We sit. Zero opens the beer. Bane leans back on his elbows. Atlas is beside me, close, his thigh against mine, and the bond between us has eased from taut to steady—still carrying the weight of everything he just told me but softer now, here, with the water and the dark and no walls around us.
Nobody talks for a while. We don't need to. The air is warm and the bugs are loud and Atlas's hand is on my knee, his thumb tracing the same small circle over and over, and I let my head drift sideways until it finds his thigh. He doesn't stiffen. His hand moves from my knee to my hair. Fingers threading through, slow, the way he does when he's not thinking about it.
I close my eyes.
The bond hums. Three threads in my chest, all of them softening by degrees. Like a knot being worked loose. Like someone opening a window in a room that's been shut too long.
"You missed the dinner," Bane says after a while. He's talking to Atlas but his hand has found my ankle, his thumb pressed against the bone there, idly stroking. "With Wren."
"Mm. How was she?"
"Good. Nervous. Zero handed her a glass of prosecco like he was presenting her with a small dog."
"It was a generous pour."
"It was theatrical, is what it was. He introduced himself as 'the delightful disappointment.'"
