I came harder than I've ever come in my life while he was degrading me.
He wrote that. About me. In shaking handwriting with ink bleeding through the page.
Maybe she was right to try.
And he wrote that too. In the same entry. On the same night. Pleasure and self-destruction braided together so tight you can't separate them.
I come.
Hard. Violent. My vision whites out and the sound that tears out of me is Max's name—wrecked, desperate, soaked with grief and want and self-loathing so total it tastes like blood. I come into my own hand on his bed, surrounded by his scent, holding his t-shirt, with his words carved into my chest like a brand.
At least I'm SOMETHING to him.
Yeah. He's something to me. He's everything to me. And I proved it in the worst possible way—by taking what I wanted without asking and leaving him on a basement floor to bleed.
But Max—Max didn't just write about the pain. He wrotegood. Wrotealive.Wrote he looked at me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered and found something in that wreckage that looked like power. Like proof of existence. Like maybe being wanted violently was better than not being wanted at all.
And there's a part of me—the dark, selfish part that lives in my gut and drives everything I do—that reads those words and files them away. Not as permission. Not as absolution. As information.
As the knowledge that Max Carter, who is terrified of me and drawn to me in equal measure, felt alive in my hands.
I want to hurt him again. Not the way I did—not the careless, selfish taking. But the other kind. The honest kind. TheI see exactly what you are and I want it and I'm not going to pretend otherwise kind.
I want to pin him down and hear him say my name. I want to feel his body open for me and know he chose it this time. I want to be the person who makes him feel alive without making him writemaybe I deserve itafterward.
I want to deserve the wordgood.
I don't know if I can. The thing inside me that held him down in the basement—it doesn't have a leash. It doesn't respond to commands. It's the same thing that makes me good at violence and bad at everything else.
But Max isn’t a victim in this game. He’s defiant. Certain. He found power in my wanting and I want to give him more of it—on his terms, with his consent, with my hands and my mouth and my name in his throat.
I'm too selfish to give him up. That's the truth of it. Too selfish to step aside and let Atlas protect him with measured words and breathing exercises. Too selfish to let Bane be the one who holds him in the dark. Too addicted to his scent and his voice and the way he wrote ME in capital letters like he couldn't believe someone wanted him that badly.
I want him. All of him. The scent and the scars. The body and the bag by the door. The boy who wants to be chosen and the omega and all the fucked up parts of him he writes in here.
And I want to do it right this time. Not gentle—I can't be gentle, that's not what he wants and it's not what I am. But better. Honest. Present. The kind of brutal that asks first and stays after.
I don't know if I can be that. But sitting on Max's bed, holding the private words of a boy who wanted me to stay—
I want to try.
FUCK.
For the first time in my life, I want to try.
I clean myself up. Zip my jeans. Wipe my face with the back of my hand.
I put the notebooks back. All of them. Bottom of the chest, same order I found them. Close the lid. Won't tell Max I read them. Won't use them.
But I'll remember every word.
I go to Atlas's office. He's at his desk, blueprints spread, phone to his ear. He hangs up when he sees me. Looks at my face—the red eyes, the split knuckles, something different behind the usual violence.
"You okay?" he asks.
"No."
I sit down. The chair creaks under me. I look at everything scattered across his desk don't see anything. I see a red notebook. A blue notebook. Shaking handwriting. Ink bleeding through paper.
