His heartbeat. My heartbeat. And the space between them getting smaller.
Chapter 8
Atlas
The blueprints are useless.
I've been staring at them for three hours—floor plans of the Meridian Holdings warehouse complex spread across my desk like a surgeon's diagram of a patient he can't save. Every entry point marked. Every guard rotation logged. Every breach scenario war-gamed, tested, and discarded.
Because Bane is inside.
My youngest brother—twenty-four years old, sharp jaw, steady hands, the one who was supposed to run the legitimate side and never get blood on his suit—is locked in a concrete cell with Max. And every tactical option I had died the moment he buttoned his jacket and walked out of that restaurant.
Talbot didn't accept Bane's offer out of generosity. He accepted it because it was the best strategic move anyone made all night—and Bane handed it to him gift-wrapped. One Graves brother inside the facility means any hostile action risks fratricidal casualties. A breach team hits the building, Kline's men put a bullet in Bane before we clear the first corridor. An extraction op goes sideways, Talbot has a dead alpha from oneof the most powerful families on the eastern seaboard, and the leverage shifts from negotiation to annihilation.
Bane neutralized our military option by being brave.
I want to strangle him for it. I want to hold him. Both impulses sit in my chest like twin charges wired to the same detonator.
Zero stands by the window. He hasn't sat down in an hour—just paces between the glass and the far wall, a caged thing wearing a man's clothes. His knuckles are split open again. Fresh blood, not dried. He hit the bag after he got up this morning, and when the bag wasn't enough, he hit the wall. The drywall in the gym has a fist-sized crater that I'll deal with later.
If Richard doesn’t see it first and blow a gasket.
Zero’s shirt is torn at the collar. His eyes are bloodshot, ringed with the purple-black of a man who hasn't slept in days. There's a smear of something dark on his jaw—Caruso's blood, maybe, or his own from biting the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste copper. He looks like what he is: a predator with no prey in reach and no outlet for the violence humming through every muscle.
I recognize the look because I feel it under my skin. The difference is I've had twenty-nine years of practice keeping itoffmy face.
"Run it again," Zero says. Not looking at me. Staring at the dark lake behind the house through the window like the answer is somewhere in the trees.
"I've run it. Nine times." I push back from the desk. My chair rolls into the bookcase. I don't fix it. "Every scenario ends the same way. We breach, they kill Bane. Or they kill Max. Or both."
"Then we don't breach. We go in quiet. I go in alone—"
"And do what? Fight through a facility you've never seen with no intel on the interior layout, no backup, and two hostagesyou can't locate?" I keep my voice level. "You're not a one-man army, Zero. You're one man with rage and a death wish."
He turns from the window. The look he gives me would make most men flinch.
I'm not most men. And he's not most threats. He's my brother, and right now the fury pouring off him is indistinguishable from grief.
I’ve truly never seen him like this.
Nothing has ever made himcareso much.
"So what's the play?" His voice drops low. Dangerous. "We sit here? Twiddling our thumbs at his mercy? We've burned twenty-four hours already, Atlas. Twenty-four hours of our people in that box while we stare at floor plans."
"No."
"Then what?"
I stand. Walk to the sideboard. Pour two glasses of bourbon I know neither of us will drink. The ritual matters—the motion, the weight of the decanter, the amber liquid catching the desk lamp. It gives my hands something to do that isn't shaking and it slows everything down.
"We give him what he wants."
The silence that follows has a sound. A low, pressurized hum—like a pipe about to burst.
"No."
"Zero—"
