I push the thought down. Lock it away. There are still precious hours on the clock and a criminal empire to temporarily surrender and two people in a concrete cell counting on me to be the machine.
Be the machine, Atlas.
The machine doesn't want. The machine works.
Zero moves to the window again. His reflection stares back from the dark glass—a ghost version of my brother, hollow-eyed and sharp-edged. He braces one hand against the frame. The silence stretches.
"I used to sit outside his room."
The words come out low. Almost inaudible. Like he's not sure he's saying them out loud.
"At night. After everyone was asleep. I'd sit on the floor in the hallway with my back against his door and just—" He stops. His throat works. "Listen to him breathe. Make sure he was still there. Sometimes for hours."
I don't say anything. Don't move.
"I should have locked him in." His voice shifts—harder now, the grief curdling into something uglier. "Should have bolted the door. Chained him to the goddamn bed frame. Shackled him somewhere he couldn't run—somewhere I'd always know exactly where he was." His fist presses against the window glass. "If I'd done that, he'd be upstairs right now. Asleep. Safe. Hating me for it, maybe, terrified of me, but safe."
It's a monstrous thing to say. Possessive. Unhinged. The logic of a man who would rather cage something than risk losing it.
And I understand it completely.
Because I cloned his phone. Because I tracked his location. Because I carried him to my bed and watched him sleep and memorized the rhythm of his breathing the same way Zero memorized it through a door. We just built different cages—Zero's made of proximity, mine made of surveillance—and neither of them held.
"That's not how it works," I say. Quiet. "You can't keep someone safe by taking away their choices."
"Worked for Dad."
The words hit a nerve he knows exactly how to find.
Because he's not wrong. Richard Graves kept everything he loved under lock and key. Mom had a driver who reported her movements. A security detail she didn't choose. A house she couldn't leave without someone knowing where she was going, who she was meeting, what time she'd be back. He called itprotection. She called it love, at least out loud, at least to us. But I remember the way she stood at the kitchen window some mornings—just standing there, coffee going cold in her hand, staring at the gate at the end of the driveway like she was measuring the distance to a life she'd never reach.
She never left. Never complained. Never pushed back—not where we could see. She accepted the cage because she loved the man who built it, and the man who built it loved her so completely that he couldn't tell the difference between holding someone close and holding them captive.
And then she died anyway.
Cancer doesn't care about security details. Doesn't care about locked gates or drivers who report to your husband. She died in a bed Richard had paid a quarter million dollars to fill with the best medical equipment money could buy, surrounded by people he'd hired to keep her alive, and none of it mattered. All that control. All that protection. And he couldn't protect her from the one thing that actually came for her.
I was nineteen. I watched my father—the most powerful man I'd ever known—stand at the foot of her bed and realize that power means nothing when the enemy lives inside the body you're trying to save.
He changed.
I swore I'd never be him. Never build a cage and call it love.
And here I am. Cloning phones. Tracking locations. Counting the minutes since the person I want most walked out of a house where I had every resource to keep him and couldn't give him one good reason to stay.
"Shut up," I say. "She was controlled. There's a difference. Mom knew the difference. She just never said it out loud."
Zero flinches. Small. Almost invisible. But I see it—the crack, the place where our mother's name still lives like a splinter too deep to extract.
His jaw locks.
"He packed a bag, Atlas." Barely a whisper. "One bag. Like he's been doing his whole life. Ready to disappear. And we were right here—three of us, in this house, and he still felt like he had to run."
The words land in the space between us and sit there like something alive. Because Zero isn't really talking about locks or chains. He's talking about the fact that Max lived under our roof and still didn't feel safe enough to stay. That the boy who sat outside his door for hours listening to him breathe couldn't make him feel protected enough to unpack.
Which isn’t hard to believe considering that boy assaulted him.
And I didn’t do much better.
