"There's lasagna in the fridge—just heat it at 350 for twenty minutes, don't microwave it, it makes the cheese rubbery." She studies me. Thumbs on my cheekbones. The scan. "You look tired, sweetheart."
"I'm fine."
"You're alwaysfine. That's what worries me." She kisses my forehead. Holds it for a beat longer than normal, her lips warm against my skin, and I let her because I've learned that pushing Margot away takes more energy than letting her love you. "Call me if you need anything. We'll be home by midnight."
Richard appears behind her. Sport coat, pressed shirt, ready to take my mother out for a night on the town. He kisses her cheek. Settles a hand on the small of her back.
"Don't burn the house down," he says to the room. To the four of us—me on the stairs, Atlas in the hallway, Bane leaning against the kitchen doorframe, Zero somewhere upstairs, a presence felt but not seen.
"No promises," Bane says. The charming smile.
The door closes. The car starts. Gravel crunches. Fades.
The house changes.
Nothing physical shifts. But the tension—the live wire that runs between the four of us, muted by parents and performance and the careful choreography of family dinners—snaps taut.
Three alphas and one omega. No audience. No buffer. Just the static charge of people who've been dancing around each other for weeks, held in check by nothing except choices nobody's made yet.
I wait for it. The closing in. The way they've been circling me—each of them close enough to touch but never making the first move. The tight lipped conversations. The careful distance.
The gravitational pull that tightens every time Margot and Richard leave and the house becomes ours.
But it doesn't come.
Atlas nods to me. Goes upstairs and I hear the door to his office click shut.
Bane pushes off the doorframe. "I'll be in the library if you need me." Walks away. Doesn't look back.
Upstairs, a door shuts. Zero's room.
I stand on the stairs alone. The house settling around me. Three brothers in three separate rooms, giving me exactly what I never asked for.
Space.
The absence of pressure is disorienting. I've been bracing for weeks—reading the room, cataloging exits, tracking their movements the way I've tracked every threat in every home I've ever lived in. And now they've pulled back and the room is empty and I don't know what to do with my hands.
So I scrub my face and try not to scream.
This is exhausting. All three of them.
I go to my room and I try to read. Sit on my bed with a novel open on my knees and read the same page four times. The words blur. My mind keeps slipping sideways—to Atlas's handon my cock in is room, to Zero's breath on my nape at the dinner table, to Bane's voice in my ear as he fucked me.
I close the book. Reach for my notebook instead. The current one. I've been trying to write for two weeks—opening it, staring at the page, closing it. The words won't come. Every time I pick up the pen, the page just stares back and I stare at it and we have nothing to say to each other.
Tonight is different. Tonight the house is quiet and the brothers are behind closed doors and the pen feels warm in my hand and the words are already forming before the tip touches paper.
I want—
I write it. Don't stop.
I want Atlas. I want the way he holds my face like he's checking that I'm real. The way he said breathe with me when I was drowning and I did and the drowning stopped. He keeps trying to build that stupid cage and calls it safety and I should hate him for it but I can’t because inside the cage the floor is solid. The ground doesn't move when Atlas is holding it. I've never had that. I've never had a person who made the floor feel permanent.
The pen moves faster. My handwriting is getting messier, the letters running together the way they always do when I'm writing the real things.
I want Zero. This one scares me the most. He pinned me to a bench and didn't ask. He read my journals and knows every shameful thought I've had since I was thirteen. He's seen me at my worst—not the version I perform for the world but the version I write in notebooks and hide under textbooks. The one who thinks the lowest of himself. Zero saw that kid and instead of walking away he sat on my bed and put his thumb on my lip and said you belong to me. The most fucked up part is I felt it. In my chest. Like a key turning in a lock I didn't know I had.
He terrifies me. And the terror is part of it. Because Zero doesn't want the version of me that smiles at dinner tables. He wants the version that breaks. And some deep, starving part of me wants to be broken by someone who'll stay to see what's underneath.
