My hand is cramping. I don't stop.
I want Bane. Bane is the concrete cell. Bane is fingers laced through mine in the dark and a heartbeat against my spine and the word perfect whispered into my hair like a prayer. He was the first person who touched me and made it feel like I was being given something instead of having something taken. Twenty years of being handled—by Linda, by foster parents, by a system that moved me like cargo—and Bane put his hands on me and I felt them and I thought oh. This is what it's supposed to feel like.
He makes me feel like my body belongs to me. Like it's mine to give instead of mine to protect.
I sit back. Read what I've written. Three entries. Three men. Three different answers to three different hungers I didn't know I had until they fed them.
I can't rank them. I've been trying for days—running the equation, looking for the right answer. If I could figure out which one I could survive losing, I could let the other two go and be the kind of person who makes clean, simple choices.
The answer is none of them.
Every time I try to cut one loose, the part of me that needs what he gives starts screaming. Lose Atlas and the ground goes soft. Lose Zero and I go back to hiding. Lose Bane and I forget that touch can be a gift.
I pick up the pen again.
I want all three. And wanting all three makes me—what? Greedy? Broken? They're brothers. They're mystepbrothers. This isn't how families work. This isn't how anything works.
But I'm tired of how things are supposed to work. Supposed-to kept me in foster homes. Supposed-to kept me on Linda's tile floor. Supposed-to kept me swallowing suppressants and pretending I was something other than what I am.
I'm omega. I'm theirs. And I'm done apologizing for it.
I’m done letting my past steal my future. And my future is with the Graves brothers.
I close the notebook. Set the pen down. My hand is shaking—not from the cramping. From the truth of what I just wrote. The most honest pages I've produced since the facility, and they're not about pain or shame or Linda.
They're about want.
About admitting, in my own handwriting, that I want to be wanted. That I want to belong. That belonging to three people at once might be the only math that's ever made sense to me.
And then…
The warmth starts low in my belly.
The pilot light flickers. A flush climbing my neck. My skin prickling with a sensitivity I recognize—the early warning system, the body's first draft of a demand it hasn't finished writing yet.
Shit.
I need air.
The house is saturated. Cedar and leather from Atlas's office. Gunpowder and coffee drifting from Zero's room. Amber and sandalwood lingering in the hallway where Bane passed. Three alpha scents layered in the ventilation system, in the walls, in the fabric of every surface I touch. My body is tracking all of them without my permission—a compass with three norths, spinning.
I go downstairs. Out the back door. Across the garden, past the raised beds Margot planted, down the slope toward the pond. The evening air hits my skin and I breathe it in—cold, clean, carrying nothing but grass and water and the faint mineral smell of the shore.
The sun is going down. The light on the water is gold bleeding into copper, the kind of evening that feels like a doorway. Between day and night. Between one version of my life and another.
I stand at the edge. Breathe. Try to think clearly while the warmth builds in my belly and my skin hums and my body does its slow, patient work of betraying me.
The suppressants are in my dresser. I know exactly where they are. I took the first dose the morning after Zero brought them—swallowed the pill with water from the bathroom sink and felt the chemical wall rise up between my biology and the world.
Ninety days. Three months of normalcy.
Except, I haven’t touched the bottle since then.
I don't know why.
That's a fucking lie—I do know why.
I stopped because the wall was too high. Because the suppressants don't just suppress the heat. They suppress everything—the scent, the awareness, the way my body orients toward theirs like a plant toward light. They flatten the thing I am. And I spent twenty years being flattened by a world that wanted me to be smaller, quieter, less, and I'm tired of it.
