It's his.
Wren's lullaby drifts through the wall. Max sleeps against my chest. The fluorescent tube hums.
I close my eyes. And for the first time in days, I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.
Chapter 6
Zero
2AM. Atlas is in his office making calls, running strategy. He told me to sleep.
I can't sleep.
Haven't been able to since we found the car. Haven't been able to do anything except hunt people down and pace and hit things and stand in the shower until the water went cold and my skin went numb and it still wasn't enough. My body hums with violence that has nowhere to go. My knuckles are split from the bag downstairs—four rounds, bare-fisted, until the leather was smeared red and my hands stopped working.
Didn't help. Nothing helps.
Bane is gone. Walked into a cage for Max like it was nothing. Like it was obvious. Like the decision didn't cost him anything except the jacket he buttoned before turning to follow Kline's man out the door.
It cost him everything. He just didn't flinch.
I would have flinched. That's the difference between me and my youngest brother. Bane acts from the heart. I act from the gut. And the gut is a dark, selfish place that doesn't volunteer for sacrifice—it volunteers for violence.
The duffel bag sits on my dresser. Max's bag. The one we pulled from his car the night he disappeared. Atlas tagged it as evidence, went through it once for information, set it aside.
I don't know why I'm standing in front of it. My feet brought me to it the way they always bring me toward Max—unconsciously, magnetically, like the needle of a compass that's been demagnetized and recalibrated to point at one specific person.
I unzip it.
His clothes.
The scent hits me like a freight train.
Vanilla. Honey. Smoke—the kind that curls off burning sugar, sweet and dark. Faint after days in a bag, but unmistakable.His. The scent that leaked through and filled the vents of the Graves estate and drove me out of my goddamn mind.
I pick up a t-shirt. Gray. Soft. Worn thin at the collar. I bring it to my face before I can talk myself out of it and breathe in so deep my lungs ache.
Max.
The scent is a fist around my chest. Not lust—not yet. Something rawer. The olfactory equivalent of a missing persons report.This person existed. This person was here. This person is gone and you didn't stop it.
I go through the bag. Jeans—folded, not rolled, because Max folds everything. Two more shirts. Underwear. A toothbrush in a plastic bag. A phone charger. The essentials of a boy who's been keeping one bag packed his whole life. Ready to disappear at a moment's notice.
Ready to leave before he can be left.
At the bottom, under the clothes, a notebook.
Brown. Faded. Worn soft at the corners, the cover creased from being shoved into bags and backpacks and probably underpillows. A rubber band holding it closed. The kind of notebook Max probably bought at a drugstore for two dollars and carried with him everywhere because it holds things more valuable than anything money can buy.
I shouldn't open it.
This is Max's private world. The interior of a person who guards his interior because everyone who's ever seen it has used it against him. Opening this notebook is a violation. A trespass. He wouldn’t want me to.
And that’s exactly why I can’t help myself.
I open it.
The handwriting is small. Neat but cramped, like he's trying to fit as much as possible into as little space as possible. Trying not to take up room. Even on paper.
