He has buyers. He knows the coffee shop I go to with Wren. He probably knows where she lives.
I think about Wren at the bookstore. Wren in the apartment Bane set up for her. Wren, who threatened Zero across a dinner table and meant every word, who walks home at night with Reeves ten paces behind her because she finally feels safe enough to.
He knows about Wren.
"I almost killed him." Zero. Quieter now. Raw. "Bane had my arm. I was half an inch out of the chair. Half an inch and five fingers, that's what kept me in that seat. If Bane's hand wasn't onme I would have put the water glass through his throat and taken his security apart with my bare hands."
"And then we'd really be fucked," Atlas says. No heat. Just fact.
"We'realreadyfucked, Atlas. He said all of that to our faces and we sat there. We sat there and nodded and drank his water because we don't have a single card left to play. What are we supposed to do? Accept fifteen percent of our own company and pray he doesn't decide Max is worth more than the deal?"
Nobody says anything for a long time.
"Bankruptcy is twelve weeks out," Bane says. Quieter now. The anger has burned through to something worse underneath—defeat. "Maybe less. Dad's going to see the books eventually, he was already getting suspicious, and when he does—"
"Dad is the least of our problems."
"Dadisa problem because when Dad finds out, Margot finds out, and when Margot finds out about the business she starts asking questions about why, and why leads to Kline, and Kline leads to the facility, and the facility leads to Max, and Max leads to—"
"Us."
Zero. One word. The word that contains everything.
"Margot finds out about us and Max, it's over. She'll pull him out of this house so fast we'll get whiplash. And she'll be right to do it, from her perspective. Her twenty-year-old son in a—what would she call it? Not a relationship. She wouldn't even get that far. She'd see three adult men who are supposed to be his brothers fucking the omega they were supposed to protect. That's what she'd see. And she'd burn this place to the ground. And she'd do it believing she was saving him."
"Would she be wrong?" Bane. Almost a whisper.
My head snaps in the direction of the door. The words sinking in…
Why would he even ask that?
"Yes," Zero says. Immediate. No hesitation. "Yes, she'd be wrong. Because he's not a victim of us. He chose us. He chooses us every single day and I will die on that hill, Bane, I don't care who's standing on the other side of it."
"I'm not questioning that. I'm saying that's not how it looks from the outside. From the outside it looks like—"
"I don't give afuckhow it looks from the outside."
"You need to. Because the outside is about to come inside. Twelve weeks, Zero. Maybe less."
The hallway is very still. My bare feet on the hardwood. Linda's wet hands still on my skin from the dream. The bonds pulling in three directions at once, all of them pointing through that half-inch gap into a room where three men I love are drowning in a mess they made to save me.
A mess they made to save me.
That's the part that won't stop repeating. Every deal they cut. Every concession they handed over. Every route and contact and shell company they traded—they did it forme. They gutted their own empire to get me out of a cell, and now the empire is bleeding to death and Talbot is standing over it with a smile and a list of buyers for the boy they lost everything to save.
I’m shaking, seconds away from losing the ability to breathe, and I can’t stay here and listen any longer.
I go back to my room.
What else can I do?
I can’t go in to the office with them. I can’t just push the door open, say I heard everything, and offer my help.
Because they wouldn’t let me. I know what I have to do–what Ineedto do–but they won’t let me.
I close the door to my room quietly, making sure none of them heard. I sit on the bed—mybed, not Bane's, the one I barely sleep in anymore but that still has my things in it. My desk. My clothes. The pill bottle I haven't opened in months, still in the drawer, still there.
My notebook is on the desk. Open to the page I was writing on yesterday afternoon. I can see my handwriting in the moonlight—a paragraph about the way Atlas's laugh sounded at the pond. How it used his whole chest. How I wanted to live inside that sound.
