"Let me see—"
"Mom. I'm fine."
She pulls her hand back. Hurt flickers across her face—quick, suppressed—and the guilt hits me like a wave. She's been so happy this trip. Lighter than I've seen her in months. Cooking and laughing and holding Richard's hand on the beach and finally getting the family vacation she's been wanting. And I'm flinching away from her because her fingers got too close to the evidence of what her stepsons have been doing to her son.
"More wine?" Bane asks her. Smooth. Redirecting. Drawing Margot's attention toward the bottle he's already pouring.
"Thank you, Bane." She smiles. The hurt fading. "You know, I'm so glad all of you came. I know it's not easy to get away from work, especially—" She looks around the table. Her eyes bright. "This is all I wanted. Just this. Everyone together."
Richard raises his glass. "To family."
"To family," Margot echoes.
The brothers raise their glasses. I raise my water. We drink. And underneath the table, Atlas's hand finds my knee and squeezes once and the bond hums and I smile at my mother and lie with every muscle in my face.
After dinner, Margot and Richard take their walk on the beach—post-dinner, arm in arm, barefoot in the sand. I watch them from the kitchen window while I dry dishes and the brothers clean up around me and the domestic choreography of it is so painfully normal that it makes my throat tight.
"We should call it a night," Atlas says. The responsible eldest brother. Always managing.
"One sec." I set the last dish in the rack. Dry my hands.
And then it hits me like a freight train.
Not a cramp. Not a slow build. One second I'm standing at the counter with a dish towel in my hand, and the next my entire body flashes hot—scalding, instantaneous, like someone poured boiling water through my veins. My vision swims. The kitchen tilts. All the blood in my body drops south in one dizzying rush and I'm hard—achingly, obscenely hard—in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
I grip the counter. "Hold on—I just—"
My legs aren't working right. I push off the counter and rush up the stairs. One hand on the wall, my gait wrong, my head spinning. The bathroom. I need the bathroom. I need cold water and a locked door and I need to be away from them because their scents are hitting me like a wall—cedar and amber and gunpowder—and my body is responding to all three simultaneously, my cock throbbing, slick gathering between my thighs, and if I don't get out of this kitchen in the next five seconds—
The bathroom door. I get inside. Lock it. Twist the faucet. Splash cold water on my face. My hands are shaking so badly the water goes everywhere—on the mirror, the counter, down the front of my shirt.
Breathe. Just breathe. It's just a spike, it'll pass, it's just—
The clench hits.
Deep in my abdomen. Not a cramp—a seizure. My muscles locking, my body doubling forward over the sink, a sound ripping out of me that I muffle with my fist. The heat floods outward from my core in rolling waves—my hips, my thighs, the base of my spine—and I recognize it. I know this feeling. I felt it once before, in a kitchen at the Graves estate, when my body betrayed me for the first time and Atlas found me on the tile.
A full heat.
Not a spike. Not a warning. A full, catastrophic, biology-overriding heat, crashing through me like my first all over again.
No.
No no no no no—
I grip the sides of the sink and stare at my reflection. Flushed. Pupils blown. Sweat running from my hairline down my temples. My lips are parted, my breathing ragged, and I can see the pulse in my throat hammering against Zero's bite mark.
How could I be this stupid? The suppressants are in my nightstand at the estate.Two hundred miles away. I didn't bring them because I chose not to take them, because I was done hiding, but what the fuck was I thinking? I should have just taken the damn things to get through this vacation.
Why did I?
Because I'm a fucking idiot who confused bravery with recklessness and now I'm locked in a bathroom with a full heat bearing down on me and no pharmaceutical safety net and my mother is on the beach outside.
A knock on the door. "Max?" Bane. "You okay?"
"Go away." My voice comes out thin. Wrong. The voice of someone who's losing a fight with their own body.
"Max, you don't sound—"
