Zero doesn't move. Doesn't blink. But his hands come out of his pockets. Slowly. Like he's deciding what to do with them.
"Bane." My voice cracks on his name. "You made me feel like I was worth being gentle with. Nobody ever—" I shake my head. Can't finish that sentence. Don't need to.
“Maybe it's fucked up—itisfucked up. You're brothers. You're my stepbrothers. This isn't how any of this is supposed to work and I know that." My voice is climbing, getting ragged, the careful control I've spent my whole life building coming apart at the seams. "But I don't care. I don't care because you came for me. All of you. Different ways, different reasons, but all of you came. And I've spent my entire life being nobody's."
My hands are shaking. I bite the inside of my cheek. The light is dying. Three men I'm terrified of losing.
"I want all of you. Not because I'm omega. Not because of biology or heat or scent. Because you chose me. Before any ofthat. Before you knew what I was, I think. You all felt the same pull I did.”
The words leave my body and I feel them go—feel the weight lift and the terror rush in to fill the space.
Three brothers. Three stepbrothers. Standing at a pond while their stepbrother tells them he wants all of them. The wrongness of it should be enough to stop me. The sheer, obvious, undeniable wrongness.
Breathe.
My hands are fists at my sides and my eyes are wet and I can feel the warmth in my belly and the cold air on my skin and the weight of three gazes.
"I know what this sounds like. I know what this is. You're brothers. We're family. This is—" I laugh, and it comes out broken. "This is so fucked up. I get it. But I want to belong to all three of you"
Nobody speaks. Nobody moves. The evening cooling around us.
"But I need to know." My voice drops. Steadies. The part underneath the panic, the bedrock part, the part that survived Linda and foster homes and a concrete cell. "If this isn't—if you can't—if this is too much or too wrong or too complicated, I need you to tell me now. Because I can't keep living in this house pretending I don't feel what I feel. I can't do the dinners and the loaded glances and the almost-touches anymore. It's killing me."
Bane hasn't moved from the tree line. Atlas hasn't moved from the path. Zero on the hill.
I swallow. Look at each of them in turn.
"So either this is real. All of it, with all of you. Or I need to know it's not, and I need to figure out how to live with that."
The pond shines behind me. The last of the light on the water. My heart in my throat.
"Do you..." My voice falters. I swallow. Force it out. "Do all of you still want me?"
The silence holds.
And holds.
And holds.
Chapter 18
Nobody moves for a long time.
My words hang in the air—I want to belong to all three of you—and three brothers standing in the grass, silent.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand. My cheeks are wet and I'm suddenly aware of how I must look—a pathetic fool at the edge of a pond with snot on his upper lip and his heart in his hands, asking three grown men to love him in a way that goes against all of our instincts.
Pathetic. Linda's voice. Always Linda's voice when I'm lowest.Begging people to want you.
I'm opening my mouth to take it back—forget it, I don't know what I was thinking—
Atlas moves first. He closes the last few feet of distance. His hands find my face—both palms, lifting my head, thumbs near my cheekbones. The gesture so familiar it aches.
"Okay," he says.
My breath catches. "Okay?"
"Okay." His thumbs trace my cheekbones. "I'm done saying no to you."
