Like someone scooped out everything inside him and left the shell.
"Zero." Richard's voice is sharp. "Get up."
Zero doesn't move.
"Get up."
Slowly—so slowly it hurts to watch—Zero stands. Pushes himself up the wall. He's unsteady. Catches himself with one hand on the wainscoting. His other hand hangs at his side, knuckles split and swelling.
He still won't look at me.
"Downstairs," Richard says. The word is iron. "All four of you. Living room.Now." He holds up a hand when Atlas opens his mouth. "Not a discussion. Not a request. You're going to sit down like adults and we're going to have a conversation about what the hell is happening in this house. Because this—" He gestures broadly at the destruction. "—is not what this family does."
He turns and starts down the stairs. His footsteps are heavy. Measured. The footsteps of a man holding his temper by a thread.
Margot's hand squeezes my shoulder. I look at her.
Her eyes are searching. Worried. That look she gets when she knows there's something I'm not telling her—something bigger than what's on the surface, something that lives underneath the easy lies and the practiced smiles.
"It's okay," I say quietly. "Really. I–I wasn't part of it."
Another lie. The biggest one yet. Because I am the center of it. The cause. The fault line that's cracking this family apart.
She doesn't look convinced. But she nods. Squeezes once more.Lets go.
"Come on," she says softly. "Let's go downstairs."
She goes ahead of me. Down the stairs. Following Richard.
I stand in the hallway for a moment. Just a moment.
Zero moves first.
He shoves off the wall and his shoulder slams past me without a word. Hard. Deliberate. The kind of hit that saysget out of my wayandfuck you and this isn't overall at once. I stumble back a step, catch myself on the wainscoting, but he's already gone—taking the stairs two at a time, jaw tight, hands clenched into fists at his sides.
Pissed. Furious in a way that's looking for a target, and right now that target is anyone in his path.
I swallow hard. My throat clicks.
Downstairs, Richard is waiting. Margot is waiting. They're going to sit us down and demand answers, and I don't know what Atlas's lie will hold. Don't know if Zero will sell me out. Don't know if Bane will stay silent or if the guilt in his eyes means he's about to confess everything he suspects.
My secret is a grenade with the pin half-pulled, and I'm about to walk into a room full of people who could set it off without even trying.
Chapter 21
The living room has never felt smaller.
Richard stands in front of the fireplace, arms crossed, face carved from stone. He hasn't sat down. Won't sit down. It's a power move—I recognize it from every meeting I've ever watched through cracked doors, every confrontation Linda staged in our kitchen when I was small. The person standing has the power. The people sitting are already on the defensive.
We're all sitting.
Atlas takes the armchair by the window. Composed. Controlled. His bloodied knuckles rest on the armrest like they belong there, like he didn't just use them to split his brother's lip open. Bane is on the far end of the couch, pressed against the arm, making himself as small as someone his size can manage. He hasn't looked at me since we came downstairs.
Zero is on the other end of the couch.
And I'm in the middle.
I don't know if this was intentional—if Richard arranged us this way on purpose, putting me between them like some kind of buffer—or if it just happened. Either way, I can feel Zero's fury radiating off him like heat from a furnace. He hasn't moved.Hasn't spoken. Just sits there with his jaw locked and his hands flat on his thighs, staring down at the couch between us.
