Bane goes quiet. Stares at his bourbon. The amber liquid catches the lamplight, throwing tiny golden reflections across his fingers.
"An omega," he says again. Like saying it twice might make it feel less impossible. "In our house. Living on our floor. Sleeping twenty feet from three unbonded alphas."
"Yes."
"And you weren't going to tell us."
The accusation stings. More than it should.
"I was still—"
"If you sayassessing the situationI'm going to throw this glass at your head."
Fair enough.
"I didn't know how to have this conversation," I admit. The honesty costs me something. Some piece of the armor I wear even around my brothers. "I didn't know how to sayour stepbrother is an omega and I can't stop thinking about him without it sounding like—"
I stop.
Bane stares at me. His expression shifts. Recalibrates.
"Like what?" he asks quietly.
I don't answer. Take another sip instead. The bourbon burns all the way down.
Bane reads my silence the way only a brother can. With perfect, devastating accuracy.
"You want him," Bane says. Not accusatory. Almost wondering. Like he's discovering something unexpected and isn't sure if it changes everything or nothing.
"It doesn't matter what I want."
"It does if all three of us want the same thing."
The words hit harder than they should. Because he's right. And we both know it. Whatever Max's scent does—whatever biological alchemy is at work here—it's not selective. It's not choosing one of us. It's pulling all three.
Gravity toward a center. Planets orbiting a sun.
"There's something else," Bane says.
His voice changes. Goes darker. Harder. The raw emotion from a moment ago crystallizes into something colder. The agitation that drove him in here returns, but sharper now. More focused. More dangerous.
I set down my glass. "What?"
"Max was in the kitchen this morning." Bane's knee has stopped bouncing. He's gone very still. The kind of still that means he's controlling something volatile. "He could barely sit down. Wincing every time he shifted his weight. Perched on one hip like putting pressure on—" He swallows. The muscle in his jaw jumps. "He was in pain, Atlas. Real pain. Not his head. Not the flu. He was moving like someone who got—"
He stops.
The silence between us becomes a living thing. Thick. Oppressive.
"Like someone who gotwhat, Bane?"
He meets my eyes. "Hurt. By someone bigger and stronger who didn't give a shit whether he was okay when it was over."
The bourbon in my stomach turns to battery acid.
I set the glass down very carefully. Very deliberately. Place it precisely in the center of the coaster. Line up the edges. Square. Neat. Perfect.
Control. I need control right now. Because what's building behind my sternum is not controlled. What's rising through my bloodstream—hot and violent and consuming—is the opposite of everything I've spent twenty-nine years building myself into.
