"Yeah." My bound hands find his face. Cup it. His cheeks are wet. His skin is hot. I see the tracks of dried tears, the swollen lip, the red marks where the gag dug into the corners of his mouth. I hold him the way I held him in his room that night—palms against his cheeks, thumbs where his tears are—except that night I kissed him, and right now I'm looking at him in flat fluorescent light in a concrete cell, and the distance between those two moments is the cruelest thing I've ever measured.
"Yeah, it's me. I'm here."
"How—what are you—why are you here?"
"Because you shouldn't be alone."
"But—are they coming? Atlas, are they—is someone—" His voice cracks. Splinters. The words tumbling out fast and fragmented, each one more desperate than the last. "Are they going to get us out?"
"It's complicated." I hate saying it. Hate the way his face crumbles around the edges when I do. "Atlas and Zero are working on it. They know where we are. It's going to happen—hopefully soon."
"Hopefully?" The word comes out like I've hit him.
"Soon," I say again. Firmer. Like saying it with more conviction will make it more true. "But I couldn't—" I stop. Start over. "I wasn't going to let you sit in here alone while they figured it out. That wasn't an option."
His mouth opens. Closes. His chin trembles—a small, terrible thing—and something behind his eyes just... gives way.
Max breaks.
Not quietly. Not the controlled tears I watched through the glass. Full-body, shuddering sobs that wrack his frame, that shake his shoulders and clench his fists and make sounds I'veonly heard once before in my life—the night my mother died, the sounds I made into Atlas's chest while he held me and said nothing because there was nothing to say.
Max presses against me. Forehead against my collarbone, hands fisted in my shirt, his whole weight collapsing into me like a building giving up on its foundation. He's naked—bare skin against my clothes, shaking so hard I feel it in my bones—and I wrap my zip-tied arms around him as best I can, awkward and limited and barely an embrace, and I hold on. I don't think about the skin. Don't think about his body against mine. I think about the scrubs on the bed behind me and the fact that they left him like this and what I'm going to do about it when I get the chance.
He's shaking so hard my teeth rattle.
I don't sayit's okay. It'snotokay. Nothing about this is okay.
I don't sayyou're safe. He's not safe. We're in a concrete cell in a trafficking facility and the door is locked and my hands are bound and I have no idea how to get us out.
I say: "That blindfold they put on me smelled like someone's gym bag. Like specifically someone who does not believe in washing their gym bag. I think it might be the worst thing that's happened to me today, and I was drugged and put in a car against my will, so that's saying something."
A sound escapes Max. Not a sob. Something smaller. Wetter. The ghost of a laugh, strangled at birth.
"I'm serious. When we get out of here, I'm filing a formal complaint about the blindfold. The kidnapping I can forgive. The blindfold hygiene is where I draw the line."
Another sound. Closer to a laugh this time. His fingers loosen slightly in my shirt.
"Also, if Atlas doesn't get us out of here within forty-eight hours, I'm going to kill him. And then the entire Graves empirewill collapse within a week because I cannot do math. Zero can't either. We'll be bankrupt by Tuesday."
Max laughs. Broken. Wet. Shaking. But real.
I hold him tighter. My arms ache from the zip ties. My knees ache from the concrete. The sedative is making the world tilt sideways. I don't care. I would kneel on this floor for the rest of my life if it meant he kept making that sound.
You're not nothing. You were never nothing. I was lying. I was drowning in something I couldn't name and I lashed out because that's what I do. I said the cruelest thing I could think of because you walked into my house and my life and my chest and I didn't know what to do with you there.
I don't say that either.
The sobs slow. Settle. Max's breathing evens out—still shaky, still catching on the exhale, but no longer the drowning gasps of ten minutes ago. He doesn't pull away. Stays pressed against me, forehead in the hollow of my throat, his breath warm on my skin.
His bare skin is cold under my arms. Goosebumps everywhere. He's been naked on a concrete floor—for how long? Since they brought him back from that room?
"Hold on." I pull back. Just far enough. His eyes snap to mine—panicked, like I'm leaving—and I shake my head. "I'm not going anywhere. Just—hold on."
I push myself up. My knees grind on the concrete. Cross to the mattress. The gray scrubs are crumpled there—thin, institutional, tossed like an afterthought. I grab them with my bound hands and bring them back.
Max hasn't moved. Still curled on the floor, arms wrapped around his knees, chin tucked. Trying to take up as little space as possible. The welts on his back are vivid in the flat light. I force myself to look at them—not flinch from them—because looking away would be another form of making him invisible.
"Arms up," I say.
