She's standing in the doorway in the same housedress she wore the day I left—yellow flowers, a stain near the hem thatmight be coffee or might be something else. Her hair is pulled back. Her hands are wet.
Her hands are always wet.
"Come here, Max," she says. Sweet. The sweet voice. The one she used before the bathtub, before the locked closet, before the time with the burner on the stove. The voice that meantI love youthe way a trap means welcome.
I can't move. My legs won't work. I'm eleven and I'm twenty and I'm both at once and neither, and she's crossing the cell toward me with her wet hands reaching and the facility door is closing behind her and—
I wake up.
Gasping. Sheets tangled around my legs, sweat cold on my neck, heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my wrists. The room is dark. Bane's room. The cedar smell of his sheets, the weight of his duvet, the particular way the moonlight comes through his curtains and makes a stripe across the ceiling.
I reach for him.
My hand crosses the mattress, finds the sheets bunched and cool. I spread my fingers wider. Nothing. The pillow still has the dent from his head but the warmth is gone—he's been up for a while.
I lie there. Breathing. Counting.
The bonds are awake. All three of them. Atlas—tight, dark, the same taut wire he's been since the Talbot meeting two days ago. Bane—focused, strained, somewhere close. Zero—sharp and restless. They're all up. All somewhere in this house at—I check the clock on Bane's nightstand—2:47 in the morning.
All of them awake. None of themhere.
I sit up. Peel the sheets off. My hands are still shaking from Linda's wet fingers reaching for me in a cell that doesn't exist, and I need water and I need air and I need to not be alone in a dark room right now.
I pad downstairs in bare feet, one of Bane's t-shirts hanging past my thighs. The house is quiet the way the Graves estate is quiet at night. The grandfather clock in the hall. The refrigerator hum. The creak of the house settling into itself.
The foyer light is on.
Dim—the small lamp on the console table, the one Margot leaves on when she wants Richard to find his way to the kitchen without waking anyone. I round the corner toward the kitchen and stop.
Two suitcases. A garment bag. Richard's leather weekender. Margot's blue carry-on with the monogrammed tag she got for Christmas.
They're home.
Shit they must have gotten home after I fell asleep.
My stomach drops. Not because I don't want them here—I do, I always want Margot here—but because their presence changes the math on everything. The house isn'toursanymore. The bonds have to go back underground. Every touch, every look, every time Zero's hand finds the back of my neck or Bane pulls me into his lap has to be swallowed, hidden, filed away behind the performance of stepbrothers who are friendly but appropriate.
ThankGodMargot didn’t come check on me and find an empty, unmade bed in my room. She would have lost her mind.
I fill a glass at the kitchen sink. Drink it standing up, looking out the window at the dark grounds. The pond is out there somewhere. The dock. The water that tried to eat me three nights ago.
I set the glass down. Head back upstairs.
That's when I hear them.
Atlas's office. The door is almost closed—not latched, just pulled to, a half-inch gap between the door and the frame. Light leaking through. And voices, low and tight and layered overeach other the way the brothers' voices get when they're arguing without raising the volume.
I stop in the hallway. I don't mean to eavesdrop. I'm not being strategic about it. I'm just standing in the hall in Bane's shirt with bare feet and wet eyes from a nightmare I can still taste, and their voices pull me the way the bonds pull me—involuntary,total.
"—fifteen percent, Atlas. He's offering us fifteen percent of what's already ours—"
Bane. Low. Not the Bane I know—not the steady, careful, choose-every-word Bane. This is Bane behind the wall. Bane when he thinks I can't hear him.
"I know what he offered."
Atlas. Flat. Hollow.
"Do you? Because you've been sitting in this chair for two days looking at that piece of paper like it's going to rearrange itself and it's not going to fucking rearrange itself, Atlas. The numbers are the numbers. He's taken Charleston. Savannah. Pittsburgh. Cleveland. The three shells on the eastern seaboard are his. Two of our suppliers flipped without us even knowing. He's been inside our operation for years and we didn't see it and then we were too busy trying to get Max out of a goddamn cage—"
