"Can I help you?" she asks.
I step forward. My hands are at my sides. My cheek and lip throbs. The bonds in my chest are pulling northeast—three threads, three brothers, three men who love me enough to try to keep me from this and who I love enough to do it anyway.
My voice is steady.
"My name is Max Carter. I'm here to report a crime."
Chapter 17
Bane
Ihaven't slept. How fucking could I?
None of us have. It's been—I check my phone—six hours since Margot's taillights disappeared down the drive with Max in the passenger seat, his lip split, his left eye swelling shut, the bond between us stretching like a wire being pulled from a spool. I felt every mile she drove. South. Southeast. Then stationary, somewhere past the edge of what I can read with any precision, just a faint steady pull in my chest that saysalive, far, hurting.
He's hurting and I can't get to him.
That's the thing that's eating me alive. Not Richard—though if I think about Richard for more than ten seconds the thing inside me that broke a man's jaw with zip-tied hands starts pacing its cage. Not Margot, not the horror on her face when she looked at us like we were the monsters in her son's story. It's the bond. It's Max hurting on the other end of it and every cell in my body screaming to go to him and I'm standing in my bedroom doing nothing.
Atlas is downstairs. He's been at the kitchen table since Margot left, running scenarios. I can hear the low murmur of calls he's making—contacts, sources, trying to track Margot's carwithout enough information to do it cleanly. His thread in the bond is locked tight. Controlled. He’s seconds from losing it.
We all are.
Zero is in his room. I heard something break an hour ago—glass, a lamp, something he threw at the wall—and then silence. His thread is the worst. Bright and jagged and vibrating at a frequency that makes my molars ache. Zero doesn't do helpless. Zero has never in his life been in a situation where the answer wasn't violence or speed or sheer force of will, and tonight the answer is wait and it is destroying him.
I've been pacing. Hallway to bedroom to hallway. Checking my phone. Calling Max—voicemail, voicemail, voicemail. Texting Margot. Nothing. The bond pulls southeast and I pace and I check and I pace and the sky outside my window has gone from black to grey to orange to yellow and I still don’t know a thing about the love of my life.
I sit on the edge of my bed. Put my head in my hands. Press the heels of my palms into my eyes until I see sparks.
Fuck me.
His face when Richard hit him. The sound. The way he went down—not a fall, a buckle, his knees giving out, his hand going to his mouth and coming away red. The look in his eyes when he straightened up. Not shock. Not fear. Something worse. Recognition. The face of a boy who has been hit before by people who were supposed to love him and is watching it happen again.
I stood there. I stood in that foyer and watched my father hit the person I love and I didn't move fast enough. Atlas got between them. Atlas. Not me. I was two steps behind and those two steps are going to live in my chest for the rest of my life.
I push off the bed. Pace to the door. Open it.
The letter Max wrote for me is on the floor.
Cream paper. Folded twice. My name on the front in handwriting I'd know from across a room—small, left-leaning,the B slightly too big for the rest of the letters because Max has never figured out how to start a word without overshooting.
I must have stepped right over it when I ran out of my room hours ago. Didn't look down. Didn't see it. It's been here the whole time. He slid it under my door before everything fell apart—before the driveway, before Richard, before Margot's car. He wrote this and put it here and then walked out of this house into the worst night of his life.
I pick it up. My hands are shaking. They haven't stopped shaking in six hours.
I sit back on the bed.
I open it.
Bane—
I don't know how to start this, so I'm just going to start it wrong and keep going, because you're the one who told me that the only way out of something hard is straight through the middle of it.
I love you.
I should have said it that night in the library. You said it into my hair and it went through me like a current and I ran. I got up and I made up something about Wren and I left you on that couch with your hand still in the air where my face had been and I have thought about that every single day since.
I didn't run because I didn't feel it. I ran because I did. Because nobody has ever said that to me except Margot, and she had to—she chose to, but she had to, because that's what mothers do. You didn't have to. You just did. On an exhale, like it cost you nothing, like it was the easiest true thing you'd ever said.
