"And then I thought:fuck that. I thought—if it disappears tomorrow, at least tonight I'll know what a full fridge feels like. At least tonight I won't go to bed hungry because I was too scared to eat."
She squeezes my hand once. Lets go.
"Eat the food, Max." Her eyes hold mine. Dark and steady and older than nineteen, somehow. "Stop standing in front of the open fridge."
God. How can she be so wise?
She's my best friend. The realization lands without fanfare, without ceremony. Just a fact. Like breathing. Like gravity. She's my best friend and I didn't see it happening because I didn't know what it looked like when it wasn't earned through blood.
"Okay," I say. "Okay."
She nods. Picks up her coffee.
“Okay, now let’s back up," she says, the grin creeping back. "How did this evenstart? You move into a house with three hot stepbrothers and all three of them just—" She waves her hand, mirroring my gesture from earlier. "This is like the setup for a fucked-up Jane Austen novel."
I choke on my coffee. She hands me a napkin. "You've never read Jane Austen," I say, wiping my chin.
"I have now. Reeves left one on the bathroom counter." She shrugs. "Between the towel-folding and the alphabetizing, the woman's running a one-person rehabilitation program."
"Is it working?"
Wren looks at the kitchen around her. The full fridge. The cinnamon candle. The ugly couch in the other room. The door she can lock from the inside.
"Yeah," she says quietly. "I think it is."
∞∞∞
The drive home takes twenty-three minutes. I count the lights.
Red. Green. Green. Red.
The city sliding past in the last orange light of evening, my hands at ten and two because Margot drilled that into me during driving lessons in the Costco parking lot, and some lessons stay in the body even after everything else shifts.
Stop standing in front of the open fridge.
Atlas's bond hums low in my chest. Steady. Constant. A warmth that hasn't faded since the bite—if anything, it's gotten clearer over the past week, like a radio signal locking in. I can feel him right now, somewhere in the house I'm driving toward.
Working. Thinking. He never turns his mind off and he never stops working.
But there's a space beside that hum. An empty frequency. A place where two other bonds should be.
I think about Zero on the balcony last night. Arms crossed. Watching me cross the kitchen to get water. The way his eyes tracked me—not predatory, not the way they used to be. Just there. Present. Patient in a way that looked like it cost him everything.
I said goodnight. He said nothing. Just nodded. And I walked up the stairs feeling the weight of his gaze on my back like a hand he wouldn't let himself extend.
Red light. I press my forehead against the steering wheel.
Wren's right. I know she's right. The wanting is already here—has been here for weeks, months, since before the facility, since the basement, since the first time his scent hit me and my body said yes before my brain could say run. The fear isn't going to disappear. It'll be there when I go to him. It'll be there when he touches me. It'll be there while he does the things I'm terrified to want and desperate to feel.
But I'm done letting the fear make my decisions.
The light turns green. I drive.
The house is quiet when I get back. The settled kind of quiet. Margot and Richard probably turned in an hour ago. I kick my shoes off at the door and climb the stairs.
I know where Zero is and my feet are already taking me there.
The light under Atlas's office door glows warm as I pass—a low murmur of a phone call behind it. He’s still working. Bane's door is closed, the faint amber of his reading lamp bleeding underneath. I keep walking. Past my own room without stopping.
