"No." He crosses the room in three strides. His palms slam flat on the desk, scattering everything, rattling the bourbon glasses. The veins in his forearms stand out like cables. "You're asking me to hand our empire to a man who strapped Max to a cross. Who put a plug in him while we ate fucking appetizers. Who watched—" His voice cracks. Seals over. Goes flat. "Who watched him bleed and called it a preview."
"I know what he did."
"Then how can you stand there and talk about giving him shipping corridors?"
"Because Max is in that building." I hold his gaze. Don't blink. Don't flinch. "And so is Bane. And every minute we spend arguing about pride is a minute they're spending in a concrete cell."
Zero's jaw grinds. I hear it—enamel on enamel, the sound of a man chewing on words he wants to spit. His fingers curl against the desk, nails dragging across the wood.
"The corridor," I say. "The port access. The revenue share. We give him all of it."
"That guts us. You know that."
"It guts us temporarily." I pick up my glass. Set it down without drinking. "We concede. We sign whatever terms he puts in front of us. We shake his hand and smile and get our people home. And then—" I look at him. Let him see what's behind the machine. Just for a second. Just enough. "Then we take it all back. Every corridor. Every port. Every cent. And we take his operation apart from the inside. Slowly. Methodically. Until there's nothing left of Talbot Kline but a cautionary tale."
Zero stares at me. His chest rises and falls—controlled, deliberate, the breathing of a man fighting his own nervous system.
"How long?"
"Months. Maybe longer. We rebuild the intelligence network. Map his entire operation—not just the trafficking arm. Supply chains. Distribution. Personnel. Financial architecture. We find every load-bearing wall, and when we're ready, we pull them all at once."
"Months." Zero says it like the word is made of broken glass. "Months of writing checks to the man who—"
He stops. His hand shoots out—fast, vicious—and sweeps one of the bourbon glasses off the desk. It shatters against thefar wall. Amber liquid streaks the wallpaper. Glass shards scatter across the hardwood.
Neither of us moves to clean it up.
The silence breathes between us. I watch my brother standing in the wreckage of a crystal glass that cost more than most people's rent, his chest heaving, his eyes black and burning, and I understand that the glass wasn't bourbon. The glass was every scenario where he storms the facility alone and carries Max out in his arms and puts a bullet in every man who touched him.
The glass was the fantasy of simple violence. And it's in pieces on the floor.
"It's the only move," I say. Quieter now. "You know it is."
Zero's shoulders drop. Not surrender—recalibration. The predator finding a longer timeline.
A slower hunt.
"When we get them back," he says. Low. Measured. Every word a nail driven into a coffin he's already building. "Kline's people. The guards. The man behind the glass with the whip. Every single nurse and person of contact in that place. The asshole from last night." He looks at me. "They're mine."
"They're ours."
Something passes between us. Not agreement—something older. Deeper. The silent compact of brothers who were raised in a house where violence was a language and loyalty was the only law that couldn't be broken.
"I'll make the call first thing in the morning," I say. "Set up the signing. We've got twenty-four hours left—" I check my watch. "I want the terms locked by noon. Transfer documents by three. Max and Bane home by tomorrow night."
Home.
The word sits in my chest like something warm and sharp. Max in this house. Max in his room. Max safe andbreathing and within reach—within arm's length, within scent range, close enough to touch.
The thought makes my pulse quicken in a way that has nothing to do with strategy.
I've been running the rescue like a military operation because that's what the machine does. But underneath the machine, something else has been running—something primitive and possessive and utterly irrational. Something that doesn't care about shipping corridors or revenue shares. Something that has been counting every minute Max has been gone the way a body counts heartbeats: involuntarily, constantly, with the dull certainty that if the counting stops, everything stops.
I want him back.
Not as a stepbrother. Not as a family obligation. Not as a problem to manage or a crisis to resolve.
I want him back the way my lungs want air. Fundamental. Non-negotiable. The kind of wanting that doesn't negotiate with reason because it predates reason. Because it lives in the part of me that smelled vanilla and honey in the kitchen, held him in my arms, and lost the ability to think about anything else.
