That's enough. Ithasto be enough.
I think about Bane's hand on my spine. Atlas's forehead against mine at the pond. Zero's grin in the dark when he called me a liar. The three of them saying liar in unison and Atlas laughing—really laughing.
I think about the letters on the floor behind their doors. The tear stains. The crooked folds. The three times I wroteI love youon cream-colored paper because I couldn't say it to their faces.
Maybe I'll get to say it in person. Maybe I'll come home and they'll be standing in the foyer and I'll say it out loud, all three words, to each of them, and it won't be on paper anymore. It'll be real. It'll be mine.
Or maybe Margot will find out. Maybe the police will call the house. Maybe by tomorrow morning my mother will know what I am and who I've been sleeping with and she'll do exactly what Zero said she'd do—pull me out, burn it down, salt the earth. Maybe the last time I'll ever see the three of them as mine was twenty minutes ago, listening outside the office door.
My hand tightens on the handle.
I pull.
The front door flies open.
The sound cracks across the driveway—the bang of wood against the doorstop, the slap of bare feet on stone, and then the crunch of someone crossing the gravel at a dead sprint.
I turn around.
Zero is halfway across the drive. Barefoot on the gravel—barefoot, the stones must be cutting into his feet and he doesn't care, doesn't slow down, doesn't flinch. Sweatpants, no shirt, his chest heaving, and the letter is in his right hand. Not folded. Not neat. Crushed in his fist so hard his knuckles have gone white around the cream-colored paper, the paper I cried on, the paper where I wroteI love youfor the first time in my life.
He stops ten feet from the car.
His chest is heaving. His jaw is locked. His eyes find mine across the dark and they are blazing—not the sharp, cutting look I know, not the lazy heat or the teasing glint. This is something I've never seen in Zero's face before. Fury so hot it's almost incandescent, and underneath it, cracking through like light through a fracture, the thing he never shows anyone.
Fear.
Zero isafraid.
We lock eyes.
Neither of us moves.
Chapter 14
Zero
I'm sitting on my bed with my head in my hands trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to fix this.
The meeting keeps replaying. Not the threats—I can handle threats. I've made worse. It's the math that won't stop running. Fifteen percent. Charleston gone. Savannah gone. Pittsburgh. Cleveland. Three shells on the eastern seaboard. Twelve weeks to bankruptcy. The number sits in my skull like a clock I can't turn off and every time I try to think around it I end up back in the same place: a back room that smelled like omega heat and bleach, Talbot's warm smile, and the sound my chair made on the concrete when I almost stood up and killed everyone in the room.
Atlas has been in his office for two days staring at a piece of paper like it's going to rearrange itself. Bane's been running numbers that don't run. And me—I've been doingthis. Sitting in the dark doing nothing. Running kill sequences in my head like a psychopath because that's the only math that works out in our favor and it's the one calculation we can't use.
Some fucking family we turned out to be.
I drag my hands down my face. Press my thumbs into my eyes until I see sparks.
Think.
There has to be a move. Atlas always has a move. Atlas is the one who finds the thread nobody else can see, the angle, the play. Except Atlas doesn't have this one. I watched him not have it. I watched his eyes do the scan in that back room—the read, the calculation, the pivot—and nothing came. For the first time in his life, nothing came.
So it's on me. Or Bane. Or—
Something slides under my door.
A whisper of paper on hardwood. Quiet. Deliberate. I look up.
A pale rectangle on the dark floor. Cream-colored. Folded.
