Her eyes move. From Zero, still by the door. To Bane, on the landing. To Atlas. Back to Bane. Something he said is catching up to her, replaying behind her eyes the way a sentence replays when you hear it wrong the first time and then hear it right.
Between us. Between all of us.
"All of us," she says. Slowly. Like she's translating from a language she doesn't speak. Her eyes are on Bane now. "You said all of us. What does that mean? What does all of us mean, Bane?"
Bane's jaw tightens. He doesn't answer fast enough.
"It's not just Zero." Not a question. Her voice has gone somewhere new—past anger, past disbelief, into a place I've never heard from her. A place that sounds like the floor dropping out. "It's not just Zero, is it? It's you too."
Her eyes swing to Atlas. She points.
"And you."
Atlas doesn't flinch. He doesn't look away. He stands there in his pressed shirt and takes it the way he takes everything—straight on, unblinking, absorbing.
"All three of you." Margot's hand finds the wall. She leans against it like the house has tilted. "All three of my husband's sons. And my boy. My—" Her voice shatters. Puts itself back together. Shatters again. "He's your brother. He is your stepbrother and he is an omega and the three of you—all three of you—"
She stops.
The word hangs in the air.Omega. She said it without thinking—the way you say things you've been holding for years when the dam finally breaks. Not a weapon. Not a strategy. Just the truth, ripped out of her in the same breath as everything else.
Richard's head turns.
"What?"
One word. Low. Aimed at Margot.
"What did you just say?"
Margot's hand goes to her mouth. I watch the horror double—the horror of what she saw on the porch colliding with the horror of what just came out of her mouth. She looks at me.Her eyes are the eyes of a woman who just broke a promise she's kept for four years.
"Max is—" She swallows. "He's an omega, Richard. He's been on suppressants since he was fourteen. I've known since the adoption. I never—I didn't tell you because it wasn't mine to—"
"He's an omega?"
The word comes out of Richard's mouth like a diagnosis. Like a verdict. Like the final piece of a puzzle that just made the picture infinitely worse.
I feel it in my skin.
The shame. The old shame—the one I thought I'd buried, the one I took pills to hide, the one that lived in every foster home and every doctor's office and every time someone looked at me and saw something to manage or medicate or sell. The designation that got me strapped to a cross in a facility while men with clipboards wrote numbers on a page. The identity I've spent my entire life trying to erase and have only just, in the last few months, started to hold without flinching.
My mother just said it out loud in a room full of people who are looking at me the way people have always looked at omegas when they find out.
Like I'mless.
Like everything I just did tonight—the letters, the car, telling Zero no, standing in this foyer—is rewritten. Reframed. Not brave. Not chosen. Just an omega doing what omegas do: following the bond. Obeying the biology. Being pulled along by three alphas who knew exactly what they had under their roof.
Richard is staring at me with new eyes. The fury is still there but it's curdled into something more complex—disgust and pity and a dawning, sickened understanding that rearranges everything he thought he knew about his stepsons and the boy they've been sharing meals with for a year.
"You knew," he says to Margot. Not a question. "You knew what he was and you put him in a house with three unbonded alphas."
"I didn’t know they were alphas! They're his brothers, Richard—"
"They'renothis brothers! They're three grown men who—" He stops. Turns back to his sons. And the look on his face is different now. Worse. Because before he was a father looking at sons who crossed a line. Now he's a father looking at three alphas who had an omega alone in their territory.
The room has shifted. I can feel it. The air itself has changed. I'm not Max anymore. Not in this room. Not to Richard. I'm an omega. An omega in a house with three alphas. And every single thing that's happened between us—the bonds, the bites, the claiming, the love—is being rewritten behind Richard's eyes into something predatory. Something biological. Something I didn't choose.
Something that was donetome.
