Zero's voice from behind Bane. Quiet. The lazy edge gone. Something underneath it that sounds almost fragile, if Zero were capable of fragile.
"Max."
I open my eyes. Barely. He's looking at me over Bane's shoulder. Dark eyes. Unguarded in a way I've never seen.
"I'm here," he says. The same words from the pond. From the hotel. The only words Zero knows how to give. But he says them differently this time—not a statement of fact but a vow.
I'm here. I'm staying. I'm not going to run or break this or burn it down the way I've burned everything else.
My eyes sting. I blink and feel the tears slide down my temples into the pillow.
Three men. Three versions of I love you spoken in three different languages. Atlas's promises. Bane's steadiness. Zero's presence.
I close my eyes.
The bite mark throbs a gentle beat. Atlas's arm is heavy across my waist. Bane's hand is warm in mine. And somewhere behind Bane, Zero is lying on his back, watching me fall asleep with an expression his brothers have never seen on his face.
One bond. One tether humming between my chest and Atlas's, alive and warm and permanent. A third of my heart full in a way it's never been full before.
But two-thirds still waiting. Two brothers who haven't yet put their teeth where their words are. I can feel the empty space where their bonds should be—not painful, not yet. Just incomplete. Like a chord with a missing note. Like a sentence that trails off before the period.
Soon.
Chapter 19
Wren opens the door before I finish knocking. She stopped checking the peephole after the third visit—said my knock has a rhythm she'd recognize through a wall, which makes sense, because the first time she ever heard my voice was through one.
Her apartment smells like lavender and new furniture and the cinnamon candle I brought last Tuesday.
She’s wearing a sweatshirt three sizes too big—Bane's, I realize, from the stack of clothes he donated without being asked—and her face does the thing it does now when she sees me. Not the flinch-smile from the hospital. Not the cautious, searching look from discharge day, when I wheeled her to the car and she gripped the armrest like the world outside might swallow her.
A real smile. Teeth and everything.
"The couch is still ugly," she says, stepping aside to let me in.
"The couch is a statement piece."
"It's a statement, all right. The statement is a rich man with no taste picked this out in under four minutes."
This is our bit now. The couch. She started it the day I helped her move in—carrying boxes up three flights because the elevator was broken, sweating through my shirt, and thenrounding the corner into the living room and seeing it. Olive green. Velvet. Shaped like something from a dentist's waiting room in 1974. Bane's taste in furniture is, apparently, his one fatal flaw.
He’s gorgeous, but don’t ever let him decorate.
"I'm telling you, it's growing on me," I say, dropping onto it. The cushion swallows me whole. "Like a fungus."
"You said that last time."
"It's still accurate."
She laughs. The sound is different than it was in the hospital—fuller, less surprised by itself. Like her body is relearning that laughter doesn't cost anything.
"Coffee?" She's already heading for the kitchen before I answer. I watch her move through the space—easy, familiar, bare feet on the tile—and something warm settles in my chest.
Her kitchen is bigger than her old group home bedroom. She told me that the night I helped her move in, standing in the middle of it with her arms wrapped around herself, turning in a slow circle like she couldn't believe the square footage belonged to her. That same night, I watched her test the lock on the front door four times. The deadbolt, opening, closing, locking again. The fifth time, she pressed her forehead against the wood and stood there breathing, and I didn't say anything because I know exactly what it feels like to lock a door from the inside for the first time.
She makes one strong brew. Figured out my order by the second visit and I always get the blue mug because the handle on the green one is cracked. I drift off the couch and into the kitchen behind her, dropping into what's become my chair—the one by the window, the one with the wobbly leg I keep saying I'll fix.
Let’s be real. Bane will.
