"Max and I knotted. In the facility. During his heat."
The car doesn't swerve. Zero's hands don't tighten on the wheel. He just drives. Takes a turn. Checks his mirror. And the absence of reaction is its own kind of violence—Zero deciding how he feels before he lets me see any of it.
"I didn't bite him. I wanted to. More than anything I've ever wanted." The words come out steady. I've been rehearsing them for days. "But I didn't. That's his choice to make. Not mine."
Silence.
A red light. Zero stops.
His thumb taps the steering wheel. Once. Twice. Processing. I can almost hear the gears turning—knotted means Alpha recognition, means his body accepted Bane, means the bond is biological even without the bite.
Zero knows what all of that means. He's an alpha too.
"I want him, Zero." I turn to face my brother. His profile is sharp against the streetlight—the angular jaw, the straight nose, the dark hair falling across his forehead. The blood on his hands catching the red light from the signal. "I'm going to claim him. When he's ready. I'm not asking permission and I'm not backing off."
I brace. For the explosion. The territorial rage.
The Zero I’ve grown up watching. Who is a live wire ready to explode into a rage at any given second. The unhinged one.
That Zero would put me through this windshield for what I just said.
The light turns green. Zero drives.
"You and Atlas." His voice is quiet but there's an edge underneath. Frustration, not anger—the frustration of watching two people miss the point and not being able to hit them hard enough to make them see it. "You both do this. Act like it's a fucking race. Like whoever gets there first plants a flag and the rest of us go home."
"That's not what I—"
"Have you thought about what Max wants?"
The question fills the car.
"What he actuallyneeds? Not what your biology is telling you to do. Not what your knot is telling you he is. What the actual person wants."
I open my mouth. Close it.
"Because you don't know him." Zero takes a left turn. His voice drops into a register I've rarely heard from him—not the sharp, not the cruel, but the one that lives underneath all of it. The one that costs him. "You think you do. You held him through a heat and now you think you understand what he is, who he is. But you don't know the half of it."
He takes another turn. His jaw tight. His eyes on the road.
"That kid kept a bag packed by the door since he was thirteen, Bane. Six foster homes in four years. His last placement—the one before Margot—she was fucked. He’s been through some shit." He lets that sit. I feel it land in my chest like a brick. "Nobody once—not once—asked him what he wanted. They moved him. Placed him. Used him. And when they were done, they sent him back."
I don't ask how he knows this. Zero has always had a way of knowing things he shouldn't—reading people, reading rooms, finding the information that gives him leverage. But this doesn't sound like leverage.
It sounds like something that's been eating him alive.
"And now three alphas are circling him like wolves at a carcass, and nobody's stopped to wonder if the reason he flinches isn't because he's afraid of us. Or me." His grip tightens on the wheel. "It's because he's fucking been here before. We just dress better than the foster homes did."
I stare at my brother. My jaw is working and I can feel the defensive justification climbing my throat—I'm not like them,I'm different, I knotted him gently, I asked, I didn't bite—but the words die before they reach my mouth.
Because maybe Zero isn't wrong. My warning—I'm going to claim him—echoes back at me and it sounds different now. Sounds like every alpha who ever looked at an omega and saw property.
Sounds like the guard I just put on the floor.
"I'm not fighting you for him." Zero's eyes stay on the road. "Not fighting Atlas either. Max wants all three of us? Fine. He wants one? The other two shut up and deal." He stops at another light. Turns to look at me for the first time since the car started moving. "But I'm done deciding for him. I tried that. Iwantthat. But, I think, it’s the reason he packed a bag and ran in the first place."
The light from a passing car washes across his face and for a second I don't recognize him. Same features—the jaw, the dark eyes, the scar on his cheekbone from a fight when he was seventeen. But the person behind them has changed.
Or maybe he hasn’t completely changed–he’s just decided to keep his intensity in check.
