And for the first time in my life, my eldest brother doesn't have the next move. He's not computing. He's not pivoting. He's sitting in the back room of an omega club with a folded piece of paper in his pocket that says everything our family built is already gone, and his face is the face of a man who has run out of time.
That scares me more than Talbot.
More than the facility. More than the cell. More than the night I stood in Margot's kitchen lying about a midnight swim while my brother knotted the boy I love upstairs. Those things had answers. Those things had moves. Even in the worst of it there was always Atlas in a room somewhere, computing, finding the thread.
There is no thread.
Bane drops his hand from my arm. Stands. His chair scrapes the concrete floor and the sound is ugly in the dead room.
"We should go."
Atlas blinks. Looks at Bane. Looks at me. His eyes pass over me like furniture and I don't take it personally because I can see what's behind them and it isn't dismissal. It's vacancy. A man trying to find the floor in a room where the floor just left.
"Yeah." He stands. Pulls his jacket straight. The autopilot holds. "Let's go."
We walk back through the main floor. Past the stage. Past the pole with the body glitter. Past the woman in yellow gloves who doesn't look up, and the chairs being restacked, and the bar smelling like lemon and bleach and the ghost of every drink that was poured last night to make someone brave enough to do something they'd regret.
The daylight is fading when we hit the door. Late afternoon bleeding into early evening, the sun low and orange over the parking lot. The kind of light that makes everything look like a photograph someone took on purpose. It has no business shining on three men walking out of a place like this with faces like ours.
The drive home is silent.
Bane drives. Atlas rides shotgun. I'm in the back. Nobody turns the radio on. The highway unspools in the last of the day's light and the car is a box of everything we won't say.
I watch Atlas in the rearview. Hand at his jaw. Thumb and forefinger. The gesture. Still wrong. Still too still. He's holding himself the way you hold a glass you've already cracked—careful, delicate, knowing it's only a matter of time before it cuts.
Bane drives five under. He does that when he's processing. Goes slow. Goes careful. Like the car will tell him something the room didn't.
I crack my knuckles. One hand, then the other. The sound is too loud in the quiet. Neither of them looks at me.
The club smell is still on my clothes. Alpha musk and foreign omega sweetness and bleach, all of it ground into the fibers of my jacket, and I want to burn the jacket, I want to pull it off and throw it out the window at seventy miles an hour because the smell is a room and the room is a world and Max exists in that world whether he knows it or not.
Nobody sayswe're losing.
Nobody sayshe threatened Max.
Nobody asks the obvious question:what do we do?
The gravel of our driveway crunches under the tires. The fountain. The hedges. The door.
Bane pulls around to the side and kills the engine.
Nobody moves.
Then I see him.
Second floor. The lounge. The floor-to-ceiling window that faces the side of the house, the one that catches the last of the light in the evenings and turns the whole room gold. The lamp behind him is on—warm against the dusk—and he's a silhouette and a shape and then, as my eyes adjust, he's Max.
He's curled into the window seat with his knees pulled up and his back against the frame. Bare feet. One of Bane's shirts—I can tell from the way the collar sits too wide on his shoulder. The notebook is open against his thighs and his hand is moving across the page, slow and steady, and he's chewing the end of the pen the way he chews everything—absently, completely, like he doesn't even know his mouth is busy.
He looks small up there. Small and warm and tucked into himself the way he used to tuck into himself when he first moved in—except this isn't hiding. This is choosing. He chose that window. He chose the lounge. He's sitting in the mine and my brothers’ territory like he belongs in it, because he does, becausewe put him there, and the sight of him curled into our space like it was built around him hits me somewhere I don't have armor for.
He doesn't know.
Doesn't know that the man who strapped him to a cross just said the shape of his name in a room that smells like every nightmare he's ever had. Doesn't know that I am watching him through a car window with the stench of that club still on my skin and a single thought in my head that won't stop repeating.
I will burn Talbot Kline alive before I let him anywhere near Max again.
That isn't a strategy. Atlas would hate it. Bane would call it reckless. It isn't a plan. It's the only thing I have and it's sitting in my chest next to the bond like a second heartbeat—steady, certain, mine.
