The door closes behind him.
The private alcove in the restaurant is empty. Just me and Zero and empty glasses and a dark wall and the ghost of a sound I will hear for the rest of my life.
"Forty-eight hours," I say.
Zero doesn't answer right away. He's staring at the dark wall. At the place where Max was. His jaw is working—slow, grinding—and his hands are flat on the table now, palms down, like he's physically holding himself to the earth.
"The man behind the glass," Zero says. His voice is quiet. Not the snarl from earlier—something worse. Something that's moved past rage into the place where plans are made. "The one with the whip. The one who had his hands on Max."
"What about him?"
"I'm going to find him." Zero looks at me. His eyes are black. Flat. The eyes of something that hunts. "When this is over. After we get them back. I'm going to find that man, and I'm going to take my time with him. Every mark he put on Max—I'm going to put on him. And then I'm going to keep going until there's nothing left to mark."
It's not a threat. It's not bravado. It's a statement of fact, delivered with the same calm certainty he uses to describe murdering those who betray our father.
I should tell him to focus. Should redirect him toward strategy, toward the forty-eight-hour clock, toward the plan we need to build before sunrise.
Instead I say: "You won’t do it alone."
Chapter 5
Bane
The sedative tastes like burnt plastic at the back of my throat.
They inject me in the restaurant parking lot—two men, efficient, a needle in my neck before I've fully processed the cold night air. The world softens. Edges dissolve. I feel myself being guided into the back of a vehicle, feel hands securing something thick and dark over my eyes—professional blindfold, padded, no light leaking at the edges. My wrists are already zip-tied. They loop them through something bolted to the seat.
I'm thinking about Max.
About the way his shoulders shook behind the glass. About the welts on his back—thin pink lines and darker ones underneath, the kind that split skin. About the sound he made when the man touched him. A muffled keen that carried through glass and candlelight and will live inside my chest until I die.
I'm thinking about the fact that he's been in this building for days and no one has held him.
The sedative makes everything swim—the rumble of the engine, the leather smell of the seat, the low murmur of voices I can't parse. I focus on what I can track. Left turn. Straight for a while. Right. The road surface changes—smooth to gravel, gravelto something else. A ramp or a garage, the echoes compressing, the air temperature dropping. Underground.
Left turn. Thirty steps. Right turn. Fifteen steps.
I'm counting because Atlas would count. Because Atlas would memorize the route, file it away, build it into whatever plan gets us out. And since Atlas isn't here—since I walked away from my brothers and into the hands of a man who seals his threats with wax—the least I can do is pay attention.
Left turn. Thirty steps. Right turn. Fifteen steps.
I don't second-guess the decision. Not for a second. I watched Atlas's face when I spoke up—the flash of something I've never seen there before. Maybe a little bit of concern, but his shoulders relaxed slightly the minus I put the idea of going with Max on the table.
Hopefully Zero feels the same way too.
At least one of us can take care of Max.
I would have chewed off my own tongue to be the one to do it.
Because I can't stop seeing it. Max's body flushed and slick and responding—hips rocking against the wood, spine arching, sounds leaking through the gag that were desperate and wanting and utterly involuntary. They stripped his blockers and forced his heat and put him on display like a piece of livestock in season, and that man—that hulking, dead-eyed man—ran his hands over Max's body like he was checking the merchandise. Touched him. Handled him. Dragged instruments across his skin and watched him writhe and did it like a fucking demonstration.
And Max couldn't stop any of it. His body did what it was designed to do, and they used it against him, and somewhere behind the amber light and the leather and the restraints, the person I—
The person Max actually is was screaming.
Nobody is going to touch him again. Nobody. Not a guard. Not a handler. Not a buyer. Not anyone on this earth who hasn't fucking earned the right.
My job is simple. Be here. Put myself between Max and whatever comes through that door next.
