"Someone was," I say.
He goes still against me. Completely still. The breathing stops.
"What?"
"I was behind that wall, Max. Me and Atlas and Zero. The man—Kline—he made it go transparent. To show us."
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
I feel him pulling away—not physically, not yet, but something inside him retreating, shutting doors, boarding windows. The shame hitting fresh. He showed me his worst moment and now he's realizing I watched it.
"You saw," he says. Barely audible.
"I saw."
"Everything."
"Yes."
His breathing changes. Faster. The edge of panic. I tighten my arms around him—not forcefully, just pressure.
Grounding.
I'm here. I'm not leaving.
"And you came anyway." His voice is strange. Hollow. Like he's testing a theory he doesn't believe. "You saw all of that—what I looked like, what my body was doing, the sounds I—you saw all of that. And you walked in here anyway."
"Of course I did."
"Why?"
The question hangs between us.
I think about the first dinner.You're nothing. You're nobody.The look on his face—not angry, not defiant. Hurt. The kind of hurt that saysI already knew this but I was hoping I was wrong.
I think about the library. The chair. His hand slipping, my hand catching him, his face inches from mine and those darkeyes wide with surprise, and the half-second where neither of us breathed.
I think about his room. Standing in his doorway. The apology I forced through a throat that didn't want to open.I was scared. I cared from the first minute I saw you.And then the kiss—slow, deliberate, his mouth under mine, the way he leaned into it like he'd been waiting.
I think about the cross. The welts. The way his body shook.
"Because I was wrong," I say. "About everything I ever said to you. Every word. You'renotnothing, Max."
My voice does something it shouldn't. Cracks. Just slightly. Just enough.
"You're the reason I'm sitting on a concrete floor in a trafficking facility with zip-tied hands and a sedative headache. That should tell you… something about what you are to me."
Silence.
Then Max's hand finds mine. Fingers sliding between my fingers. Lacing together. Holding on.
The silence that follows is warm. Not empty. Full. Something growing inside it—something too new and too fragile to name.
We sit like that. I don't know how long. The fluorescent hum fills the space between breaths. His thumb traces a circle on the back of my hand—small, barely there, something he probably doesn't know he's doing.
Then he yawns.
It's so ordinary—so human—that it almost breaks me. A yawn. His jaw stretches. His eyes flutter. And then he's leaning into me harder, his face turning, pressing into the curve of my neck. Settling there. His breath warm and damp against my pulse.
