"Yeah. I bet you do."
The silence opens something. Not a door—more like a seam. The kind that, once it starts, keeps giving.
"Linda used to lock me in the bathroom," Max says. Flat. The voice he uses for things that cost too much to say with inflection. "When my—when my body did things she didn't like. She'd scrub me with dish soap in cold water and lock the door and leave me on the tile floor."
My jaw tightens. I don't interrupt.
"She'd say I was disgusting. Unnatural. That it was my fault. My body. My sickness." He pauses. "Nine the first time. Sixteen when Margot got me out."
"Seven years."
"Seven years."
I want to say something that fixes it. There's nothing that fixes it.
"Margot found me through the system," he continues. "She was a social worker. She came to the house for a routine check and—" A breath. "I don't know what she saw. I never asked. But she came back. Three times. And then she started the paperwork."
"She chose you."
"Yeah." His voice does something—wavers, steadies. "She's the only person who ever has."
The words land in the space between us and sit there like something alive. Two people who lost mothers in different ways—his to cruelty, mine to cancer—and found that the absence shaped everything that came after.
The sedative must be cooling off in my system and I roll my neck, my senses coming back slowly.
"Business degree," I say. "That's what I'm doing. The legitimate side. I want to take Graves Industries fully cleanwithin ten years. Atlas thinks I'm naive. Zero thinks I'm boring. But the criminal side—it's what killed my mother. The stress. The secrets. She knew. She always knew. And it ate her alive."
Max turns to look at me. Really look. Not the guarded sideways glance I've seen at the estate. A full, open, searching look that makes my chest do something uncomfortable.
"You want to take the whole thing legitimate?"
"Every division. Every shell company. Every dirty dollar."
"That's not naive. That's brave."
Nobody's ever called my ambition brave. Atlas calls it impractical. Zero calls it soft. Richard calls it premature. Brave is new. Brave hits different, coming from someone who knows what real bravery costs.
"You're easy to talk to," I say. The words fall out before the filter can catch them. "That's—I don't say that. To anyone. Ever."
Max's shoulder presses against mine. Just slightly. "You're easy to talk to when you're not being a fucking asshole."
I deserve that. "I know."
"I forgave you for that a while ago."
"You shouldn't have."
"Probably not. But I did."
∞∞∞
Max
The lock buzzes.
I tense immediately. The sound has become a trigger—a Pavlovian jolt that floods my body with adrenaline before my brain can process context. Medical rounds happen every eighthours. The injection that keeps the heat suppressed. The woman in scrubs who doesn't speak, just swabs and sticks and leaves.
It's been almost nine hours. I can feel the edges—the faintest warmth in my belly, the prickle along my arms that means the blocker is wearing thin.
