The bond floods open—all four threads, all at once—and it hits me so hard my hand goes to the doorframe. Eighteen hours of stretched wire snapping back into place.
Nobody moves. Nobody speaks.
We just look at each other. The four of us. In the porch light. In the dark.
He’s here.
He’s ours.
I’m not letting him out of my sight ever again.
Chapter 18
The fountain is cold under me.
I've been sitting on the stone lip for—I don't know. A long time. Long enough that the cold has soaked through my jeans into my skin and my fingers have gone numb in my jacket pockets and the night has gotten deeper and darker around me. The temperature dropped an hour ago, maybe two. I can see my breath.
I asked Wren to bring me here.
Not to her apartment. Not to a hotel. Here. The estate. The driveway. The gravel and the fountain and the house where everything happened, because when I walked out of the police station and Wren asked mewhere do you want to go, my body answered before my brain did.
Here. Back here. Because this is wheretheyare. Because the bonds in my chest have been pulling in this direction all morning, all day, all night—through the fluorescent lights and the officer's questions and the forms I signed with shaking hands and the long drive back with Wren's hand on my knee. Every thread pointing the same way.
Home.
Except… I can't go inside.
I've been sitting on this fountain trying to make myself stand up and walk to the door and I can't. My legs won't move. My hand won't reach for the knob. Because the last time I was inside that house, Richard's fist connected with my face and Margot screamed and the brothers were pressed against the wall and everything—every single thing I've built in the past year—came apart on the foyer floor.
What if they're angry?
The thought has been circling since the station. What if they read the letters and hate me for leaving? What if Atlas thinks I went behind his back? What if Bane can't forgive me for running again—for runningagain, the same thing I did after the library, the same disappearing act I swore I'd never do? What if Zero's fury on the driveway was the last version of him I'll see and the next time he looks at me it's with the cold distance he uses on strangers?
What if things are too complicated now?
Margot knows. Richard knows. The secret is out and the damage is done and maybe—maybe the brothers look at the wreckage and decide it isn't worth it. Maybe they look at me—black eye, split lip, the omega who brought their world crashing down around their ears—and decide the cost is too high. Maybe Margot and Richard find a way to keep us apart. Lawyers. Court orders. Whatever parents do when they discover their sons have been—
I can't finish the thought.
The cold is in my bones now. I'm shivering—not the dramatic kind, just the slow, steady tremor that comes from sitting still too long in the open air. Wren dropped me at the end of the driveway. Squeezed my hand. Saidcall me if you need anything, you idiotand pulled away and I walked up the gravel and sat down on the fountain because my legs gave out and this is where they stopped and I've been here ever since.
Too scared to go in. Too in love to leave.
The front door opens.
My heart stalls in my chest. I look up.
Three silhouettes in the doorway. Backlit by the overhead foyer light. They're standing there and I can't make out their faces against the light but I don't need to. I know the shape of each of them the way I know the shape of my own hands.
Atlas. Bane. Zero.
They see me.
The bonds go off like a flare—all three threads igniting at once, flooding my chest with heat so sudden it knocks the breath out of me. Not pain. Not fear. Recognition. The deep, cellular, bone-level recognition of three people who belong to me seeing me for the first time in hours and every thread saying the same thing at once:there you are, there you are, there you are.
And Iknow.
I know before they move, before they speak, before any of them takes the first step off the porch. I know the way you know the sun is warm before you step into it—because you can feel it from here, because the light tells you everything the touch hasn't yet.
