"I saw it."
Silence.
"I saw pieces of it. I flagged the Charleston contract six months before Max ever set foot in this house. I told Dad something was off. He said I was being paranoid. I let it go because I let him make the call." A pause. Something in Atlas's voice I've never heard before. Not anger. Exhaustion. "I let it go, Bane. That's on me."
"It's not about blame—"
"The hell it isn't. He's been eating us alive for years and I watched it happen because I was too busy managing the family to manage the business. And now he's got us on the ropes, sitting across a table from us in a fucking omega sex club telling us we get fifteen percent of our own operation like he's doing us a favor—"
"The fifteen percent is a joke. He's buying our name and gutting everything behind it and in eighteen months we won't exist. We'll be a logo on his letterhead. That's it. That's what he's offering."
"I know what he's offering." Atlas.
"Then what are we doing? What's the play? Because I've been running the numbers for three days and I can't make them work. We're hemorrhaging. Twelve weeks to bankruptcy, maybe less. The eastern corridor is gone. The port revenue is gone. We're operating on infrastructure he already owns and the second he decides to pull the rug we don't have routes, we don't have contacts, we don't have—"
"I know, Bane."
"—we don't have a fucking thing. We're done. And Dad doesn't know. Dad is going to open those books and see a company that's been hollowed out from the inside and he's going to ask how, and the answer is his sons traded away the keys to get an omega out of a trafficking facility, and that omega is currently sleeping in our beds—"
"Watch it." Zero. The first time I've heard his voice. Low and hard and coming from somewhere near the window. Not a suggestion. A warning.
Bane doesn't back down. "I'm not saying it wrong, Zero. I'm saying it the way Dad will say it. The way Margot will say it. The way anyone outside this house will say it when they find out."
The silence curdles.
"Say the rest of it." Zero again. Harder now. "Stop dancing around what Talbotactuallysaid in that room. Both of you have been tiptoeing around it since the meeting and I'm fucking done. We have to face the rest of the fucking conversation."
Atlas exhales. When he speaks, the control is gone. Not the clinical delivery mode I've heard before—this is Atlas with no audience. Atlas talking to his brothers the way brothers talk when the door is closed and the person they're protecting isn't in earshot.
"We have to move Max. He can’t stay here. He needs a new schedule. He can't keep going to that coffee shop with Wren. Talbot knew the name of it. He knew the cross street. He's had someone on Max for weeks, maybe longer."
My stomach drops.
"And Wren?" Bane asks. "Talbot mentioned her by name. She's on his radar too."
"Wren gets a security detail. Quietly. Have Reeves arrange it."
"A security detail doesn't fix this, Atlas. Talbot isn't surveilling Max because he's curious. He told us to our faces he'd take him again. He has buyers. He's got Max's fucking evaluation numbers from the facility still on file—exceptional marks, real demand, had to turn people away. Those were his words. He sat there and talked about Max like inventory."
"I was in the room, Bane."
"Then act like it. Because right now you're rearranging coffee shop schedules while a man who called our—" Bane stops. Recalibrates. "While a man who described Max as an acquisition is sitting in an office somewhere with a list of clients who'd pay a premium for him."
My knees buckle.
I catch myself on the wall. Both hands flat against the plaster.
"And then there's the other thing he said." Zero. His voice has changed—gone somewhere low and dark. "The part neither of you wants to touch. When he looked at me and asked if Max was stillfactory fresh. If three bonded alphas under the same roof for nine months had—how'd he put it?—ruined the goods."
Nobody speaks.
"He was smiling when he said it. That fucking talk-show smile. Asking if we'd damaged the product. Like Max is a car we took off the lot and put too many miles on." A sound comes out of Zero that might be a laugh if laughter could bleed. "Ruined goods bring a lower price. That's what he said.But they still bring a price."
The hallway tilts.
I slide down the wall. My back against the plaster, my ass on the hardwood, my knees pulled up. The bonds in my chest are screaming—not at the brothers, not through them, just screaming, the way an alarm screams when the thing it's been watching for finally arrives.
Talbot said that. In a room with all three of them. To their faces.Factory fresh. Ruined goods. A price.
