Chapter 16
Atlas
It’s been two weeks.
Two weeks of sharing a house with a boy I kissed and kicked out and can't stop thinking about. Two weeks of breakfast with Margot, dinner with Richard, hallways where Max and I pass close enough to touch and don't.
Where I can smell him—vanilla and honey, stronger now—and every molecule of that scent is a reminder that I had my hands on him, he was mine, and then I let him fucking go.
No. I threw him out.
Two weeks of his voice in my head.
You're selfish. And you're fucking cruel.
He's not wrong.
The Kline operation moves slowly. We've placed three assets inside Talbot's distribution chain. Zero's contact in the port authority has been feeding us shipping manifests. Bane's forensic work on the financial architecture has mapped six of Talbot's shell companies and traced two back to the trafficking arm.
Progress. Months from completion, but progress.
The other operation—the one I didn't authorize—is already done. Bane and Zero handled the guards two weeks ago.I don't have details. Don't want them. I know Zero came home with wrapped knuckles and a silence that lasted three days. I know Bane took a long shower and didn't come down for dinner. I know the guards are alive because Zero didn’t go easy on them.
And I know something shifted between my brothers that night—some wall came down or went up, I can't tell which, but they move differently around each other now. Less friction. More awareness.
And then there's Richard.
A thorn in my fucking side.
He catches me in the hallway after dinner.
"Walk with me," he says.
We walk. The back hallway. Past the library, past the wine cellar, the long corridor where the family portraits hang and the light goes amber in the evenings. Richard doesn't rush. Doesn't get to the point. That's how he operates when he's circling something—he lets the silence do the work, lets you fill it with whatever you're afraid he already knows.
"I’ve been looking at Jerry’s report," he says. Casual. Hands in his pockets. "Have you had a chance?”
"I saw his notes. Bane and I are cleaning up some structural issues with the—"
"Atlas." Not sharp. Just my name, spoken with the particular weight of a father who's been running an empire longer than I've been alive. "I didn't build this organization by ignoring things that don't add up. And this doesn’t."
I don't respond. There's no version of a response that helps.
"The numbers are off." He stops walking. Turns to face me. His eyes are calm. Clear. Not accusatory—worse. Patient. "I don't know how, exactly. I don't know why. But they're off. And when numbers are off in our business, it means someone made a decision I wasn't consulted on."
"Dad—"
"I'm not accusing you of anything." He holds up a hand. "I'm telling you what I see. And I'm telling you that if I start to feel like my sons are running this empire into the ground—or into someone else's hands—I will come out of retirement." The words are measured. Quiet. Absolute. "I will come back to that desk and I will go through every account, every shell, every routing number, line by line. And I will find whatever it is you're not telling me."
He lets that sit.
"I don't want to do that," he says. Softer now. "I trust you boys. I want to keep trusting you. But trust requires transparency, and right now—" He looks at me the way he looked at me when I was twelve and lied about breaking a window. Like he already knows the answer and is giving me a chance to arrive at it myself. "Right now, something is opaque."
"Everything's under control," I say.
Richard studies me for a long moment. Then he nods. Pats my shoulder. Walks away.
He doesn't believe me. But he's giving me room—for now.
