"I can feel you," Max whispers. "The bond. It's like—" He pauses. Reaching for words the way he does, the writer in him cataloguing even now. "Like a humming. In my chest. Like you're right there."
"I am right there."
"I know." A beat. "It's nice."
Nice. He calls a permanent psychic bond nice. I huff against his skin—something too raw for a laugh—and feel his mouth curve against the pillow.
The knot releases slowly, so slowly. When I can, I slip free and he rolls over—wincing, sore, flushed and open—and looks up at me with those dark eyes. His hand rises. Touches the bite mark. Fingers tracing the swollen edges. Deep. Bruised. The kind that won't fade for weeks.
"It's not subtle," he says.
"No."
"Margot's going to see it."
"Probably."
He should be afraid of that. Maybe he is—the flutter of anxiety hums through the bond, a tremor under the surface. But his mouth twitches. And his hand finds mine and presses my palm back against the mark and holds it there.
Possessive and tender. Both at once.
I look at him. The boy I cornered in stairwells. The boy whose notebooks I read and whose virginity I took on a weight bench. The boy who wrote in handwriting so small in his own journal it was like he was trying to disappear into the page.
He chose me. Not because I earned it. Not because I deserved it. Because somewhere in the wreckage of everything I've done, he found something worth keeping.
I press my lips to the mark one more time. His blood on my mouth. His pulse under my lips. His hand in my hair.
Somewhere in this house, the woman who saved him is sleeping. She doesn't know that the son she rescued has been claimed by one of the men she brought him to. Tomorrow or the next day, she'll see the mark on his neck—deep, dark, unmistakable—and the careful fiction they've been building will crack down the middle.
But that's tomorrow.
Tonight, Max closes his eyes. The bond hums between us—a new frequency alongside whatever Atlas has already given him. Two tethers now. Two anchors. And the most dangerous man in this house is lying in the dark with a boy who turned predator into protector, holding the bite mark like it's the first thing he's ever built instead of broken.
I don't sleep. Don't want to. I watch Max breathe. Count the rise and fall of his chest as it evens out. Memorize the rhythm the way I used to memorize it through his bedroom door—except now I'm not on the outside, yearning to know what it would be like to be in his bed.
Now he’s in mine.
He’s here.
He’s finally here.
Chapter 20
Aweek since Zero bit me and I can still feel his teeth.
Not the wound—that's healing. Scabbed over, bruising from purple to yellow-green, matching Atlas's mark on the opposite side of my neck like bookends. Two claiming bites. Two tethers humming in my chest—Atlas's steady and warm, Zero's sharper, rawer, carrying the electric edge of a man who fucks like a fight and bites like a promise.
Two-thirds of my heart full. One space still aching empty.
Bane. Who held me on a concrete floor. Who walked into a cage. Who hasn't bitten me because he's waiting the way he always waits—patient, careful, refusing to take what isn't offered.
And every day the gap where his bond should be pulses louder.
The week at the estate has been a slow unraveling. Whatever restraint the brothers exercised before the pond, before the claiming, before Zero pinned me against his headboard and sank his teeth into my neck—it's gone. Burned through. The dam broke and now it's just water everywhere, all the time, and I'm drowning in it.
Atlas's hand on my hip as he passes me in the hallway. Not a brush—a grip. Possessive. Brief. Gone before anyonerounds the corner but the ghost of his fingers stays on my skin for hours.
Zero finding me in the library, shutting the door, pushing me against the shelves and kissing me until my knees give out, then walking away without a word.
