I can't.
Margot pulls out of the drive. The gravel crunches under the tires. The estate shrinks in the side mirror—the fountain, the hedges, the porch light, three silhouettes getting smaller.
The bond in my chest is pulling so hard it feels like it's going to tear through my sternum. Three threads, three directions, all of them pointing backward, toward the house, toward them.
I press my hand over my heart. The blood from my lip drips onto my jacket.
Margot is white-knuckled on the wheel. She hasn't said a word since the car started. The tears are still running down her face but she's driving—steady, focused, running on something deeper than thought.
"Mom," I say. My voice is wrecked. Small. "Where are we going?"
She doesn't answer.
"Mom."
"I don't know," she says. So quiet I almost miss it. "I don't know, baby. Just—away. Away from them. Away from where you’ll be in danger. As far as we can fucking get from the Graves."
The estate disappears behind the trees.
The bonds pull.
They tear out my heart one mile at a time.
Chapter 16
The hotel room smells like lavender and strangers.
Margot booked it from the car. One hand on the wheel, the other scrolling her phone, tears running down her face in the pale glow of her screen while I sat in the passenger seat with my lip split open and the taste of regret and so many fuck ups like ash on my tongue.
She didn't ask me which hotel. She didn't ask me anything. She drove and she booked and she parked and she walked me through a lobby where the desk clerk took one look at my face and opened his mouth and Margot saidwe're fine, thank youwith the voice she uses when the conversation is already over.
None of this was my decision. But I wasn’t going to put up a fight against the woman who saved my life.
That was two hours ago.
Now it's almost dawn. The sky through the hotel window has gone from black to that bruised grey-blue that happens right before the sun decides whether it's coming. The room is on the fourth floor. Two queen beds. A desk with a leather folder nobody will ever open. The air conditioning hums a low mechanical drone that fills the silence Margot and I have been sitting in since we got here.
She's on the other bed. Shoes still on. Her phone pressed to her ear. She's been on it for twenty minutes—low, urgent, building an escape route out of this life that has turned sour for her overnight.
"—yes. Yes, Georgia, I know it's early. I know. I wouldn't be calling if it weren't—" She presses her fingers to the bridge of her nose. Breathes. "I need the guest room. For a few days. Maybe longer. I'll explain when I get there but I need you to tell me it's available."
Her sister. Georgia. In Wisconsin. A woman I've met twice at holidays—warm, loud, a little overstimulating but a kind-hearted woman like her sister.
Margot is taking us to Wisconsin.
Both of us. Her and me. She's already decided—we're going together, to a house with plastic-wrapped leftovers and a guest room that smells like cedar sachets and a sister who will ask exactly one question and then make us soup and not push. Margot isn't dropping me off. She's leaving too. Leaving Richard, leaving the estate, leaving the life she built with a man in the blink of an eye.
She is doing what Margot does. She is doing the thing she has done my entire life—seeing a problem, building a solution, putting me inside it, climbing in after me, closing the door.
I press the cold washcloth to my lip. The split is shallow. Richard's ring caught the edge of my mouth when I stepped in front of Atlas. The blood has stopped but the swelling hasn't, and every time I press the cloth against it the sting reminds me of the sound Margot made when I hit the floor.
Not a scream.Worse. A sound like something ripping. Like the part of her that believed this house was safe tore loose from the part that was watching her son bleed on the floor of the foyer.
She hasn't looked at me since we got in the car.
Not because she's angry. Because she's afraid that if she looks at me she'll see something she's not ready to see. Some version of her son that doesn't match the one she's been protecting for four years. The Max who got hit—that Max she can handle. She's handled that Max before. She handled Linda's Max. She handled foster-system Max. She has a whole playbook for the Max who gets hurt by the people who are supposed to love him.
But the Max who was kissing his stepbrother in the moonlight at three in the morning and meant it—that Max is new. That Max breaks the playbook. And Margot can’t operate without a plan, so she's on the phone with Georgia in Wisconsin because Wisconsin is a plan and a plan is how she loves me.
