He presses the button.
The wall behind him goes transparent.
I knew something was coming. I'd prepared for it—war-gamed the possibilities, braced myself for whatever theatrical cruelty Kline had choreographed. I expected a cell. Maybe Max sitting in a room, restrained, roughed up. Maybe a live feed of the facility. Something designed to remind us what was at stake. Something I could absorb, file away as data, use as fuel.
Nothing I imagined looked like this.
Max. Naked. Strapped to a wooden cross, face pressed against the wood, wrists above his head, ankles spread. A leather gag buckled behind his head. His back is a map of violence—thin pink lines from a crop, and beneath them, darker welts. Raised. Angry. The kind that split skin. The kind that scar. Between his legs, a large plug, visible even from here. His shoulders shake with muffled sounds that carry through the glass—faint, distorted, but unmistakable. A cut on his lip, visible when his head turns. And his skin—flushed. Not just from the beating. A deep, full-body flush that I recognize because I've seen it before, in the kitchen, in the hallway, on the nights when his scent filled the house and none of us could sleep.
He's in heat. Full-blown heat.
The slick is visible on his inner thighs. Catching the amber light. And his body—despite the cross, despite the gag, despite the welts and the blood beading on his shoulder blades—is responding. Hips shifting against the wood. Spine arching. The involuntary, desperate movements of an omega in full heat with no relief and no escape.
They stripped his blockers, whipped him until he bled, and put him on display.
And beside him, a man the size of a building runs a gloved hand down Max's spine. Slow. Proprietary. The way you'd run your hand along the flank of a horse you're considering buying. Max flinches at the touch—his whole body contracting away from the hand, pressing harder into the wood—and the mandoesn't pause. Doesn't acknowledge the flinch. Just continues the appraisal.
This is Max. The boy who reads with a pen between his teeth. Who apologizes too much. Who curls into a chair with his knees drawn up and loses himself in a book so completely that the world ceases to exist. Who looked at me in the kitchen with panic in his dark eyes and trusted me when I said breathe with me.
Who begged me. Who said please, Atlas, please, and I said no, and he packed a bag and ran, and this is where running brought him.
Everything inside me detonates.
Zero moves first. He's out of his chair before I can reach for him—a blur of black violence aimed at the glass, at Talbot, at anything within range. Security intercepts. Brief, vicious. A table knocked sideways, glasses shattering, two men pinning Zero back into his seat with his arms wrenched behind him. He's snarling—actually snarling, teeth bared, the sound ripping out of his chest like something caged and feral. A vein stands out on his neck. His eyes don't leave the glass.
Bane doesn't move. Goes dead white. His hand shoots to the table edge, knuckles cracking, and he stares at the glass with an expression I've never seen on my youngest brother's face. Not rage. Not fear. Something past both. Something that's already calculating what it will cost to make this right and accepting the price.
I don't move.
I sit perfectly still. Hands flat on the table. Every muscle in my body locked into position by sheer force of will. My vision has narrowed to the glass—to Max, to the cross, to the hand on his body—and I am aware, with crystalline precision, that if I move I will kill Talbot Kline with my bare hands at this tableand Max will die in that facility and none of this will have meant anything.
So I don't move.
Talbot watches us. Reads us like a page. The satisfaction in his eyes is subtle—refined, controlled, the pleasure of a man who's played his best card and knows it landed.
"Get him. Off. That. Cross." My voice comes out low. Wrecked. Every syllable dragged through gravel. "Right now. Or this conversation is over and what comes next won't be a negotiation."
"I don't think I will." He sets down the remote. "Let me revise my terms. The shipping corridor and port access remain. But I'm adding a personal provision. Thirty days with Max. A cooling period. To ensure a smooth transition."
"Thirty days," I repeat.
"My men have been having some... difficulty maintaining professional distance." Talbot's eyes move to the glass. Behind it, the man draws the whip across Max's welted back—a slow drag, not a strike, but Max flinches violently, a muffled keen escaping around the gag. "He's quite compelling. Surely you understand."
Zero makes a sound. Low. Guttural. The security men tighten their grip.
"You'll have your shipping corridor," I say. Each word measured. Each one a blade I'm swallowing. "You'll have the port access. We need time to get everything worked out. Twenty-four hours."
"You can have forty-eight." Talbot lifts his wine. Takes a sip. Behind the glass, the man steps back. Raises the whip. Draws his arm back for a full strike.
That's when Bane speaks.
"Stop."
The word cuts through the room like a gunshot. Everyone turns. Bane's voice is unrecognizable—raw, elemental, strippedof every layer of polish and performance and boardroom charm. The voice of a man who's reached the bottom of himself and found something there he didn't know existed.
"You'll get your forty-eight hours," Bane says. He's looking at Talbot. Only at Talbot. His eyes are steady in a way that makes my chest seize. "My brothers will consider your terms. But Max doesn't stay alone."
My stomach lurches.
