I let myself feel the bond steady and full, all three threads, the one in my chest pressed full of cedar and weight and a man who has just claimed me again in the middle of the night–but even now there’s a distance.
I tell myself, as I drift:He'll tell me when he wants to. I trust that.
And then, the smaller thought sneaking in just as I am going under:
...don't I?
Chapter 6
Bane
It has been a week since we all got back from the beach.
Atlas has been running us ragged. The first night back from the beach house was the last full stop any of us has had. Since then he has put me on inventory two days in a row at warehouses I don’t normally touch, doubled the schedule on three shipping routes up the coast, rerouted a fourth through Pittsburgh of all places, and emailed me at four in the morning Thursday to ask if I had read the report from his guy in Baltimore.
I hadn’t read the report. So instead of going back to sleep and ignoring him, I read the damn report.
Baltimore is a Kline shell. Two layers down. Which means Atlas's PIs are now confident the Kline organization is bleeding harder into our regional territory than we'd thought, and it means whatever Atlas is putting together is bigger than what he has told any of us about. He has a way of being three steps ahead and looking unhurried about it.
I haven’t asked him directly what his plan is.
I will. When I’m ready to know.
For tonight I'm in the upstairs library with a beer I've barely touched and a new inventory report I should be readingand the lamp on low. Old leather couch. Embers in the hearth. Margot's asleep downstairs. Last I saw Dad was reading on the back patio.
Max is safe in his room. Probably writing.
I can’t think about him too long or I’ll give up on being productive at all.
But I'm not reading the inventory report.
I'm reading the file my own private investigator sent me on the facility Max and I were imprisoned in.
It's the third version of the file. He sends me a new one every Friday. Each one tells me roughly the same thing, which is that there are still nine omegas in the Kline facility we pulled Max and Wren out of, that the local PD has at least four officers on the Kline payroll, and that anyone who walks in there with a warrant and a federal jacket in the next ninety days will be walking into a setup. I’ve kept a watch on it because I can’t stop.
Atlas doesn't know I have a guy on the facility.
Zero doesn’t either. But if I know my brothers, I’m sure we’re all chasing the same leads and will discover the truth eventually.
I take a sip of the beer. It's still mostly there. I set it down. I put the file back in its folder and toss it onto the coffee table. I throw a new log into the fire and the embers spark and float upward. I stay standing for a minute with my hands on the mantel and watch it.
A floorboard creaks in the hall.
I know it before I turn.
The thread between his sternum and mine has been telling me for about ninety seconds—getting closer, getting closer, here—and I let myself smile at the fire before I school my face and turn around.
He's leaning in the doorway in soft sleep clothes, hair damp at the ends from a shower, looking at me like he's been looking for me for an hour.
"There you are."
"Max."
"What are you doing in here?"
"What does it look like?"
He drifts in the way he drifts now—easier than he used to drift, less calculation in his shoulders, hands not in his pockets. He walks the perimeter of the room before he comes anywhere near me. Trails a finger along the spine of a book he isn't going to pick up. Examines the chess set on the side table that nobody plays. He hasn't asked me a real question in two minutes and I know exactly what he is doing.
