Max has been gone approximately six hours.
Six hours. Three hundred and sixty minutes. I know because I've been counting—every single one, the clock on my desk ticking with a sound like a small bone breaking, and each tick is a detonation, a reminder that wherever he is, whatever is happening to him, he's been there sixty seconds longer than the last time I checked. Each tick a failure.
Each minute another minute I didn't find him.
What are they doing to him right now? Right now, this second, while I'm sitting at a desk—
I slam my palm against the wood. Hard. The monitors jump. A coffee mug rattles. The pain blooms through my hand, sharp and clarifying, and I hold onto it because it's better than the alternative. Better than the images my brain keeps generating—Max in a room somewhere, afraid, alone, calling for someone and no one coming.
Calling for me and no one coming.
The ransom note sits on my desk. I've read it forty-three times. I could burn it from memory—the precise, almost calligraphic handwriting, the heavy cream linen stock, the wax seal like we're living in a goddamn Brontë novel. Talbot Kline. A man who sends death threats on beautiful stationery because he considers himself civilized.
We have your omega.
Four words. Four words and the scaffolding I've spent twenty-nine years building—the control, the composure, the machine that processes crises like data—came down in the time it took to read a sentence. I read those words next to Max's abandoned car, glass crunching under my shoes, Zero's blood on the pavement, and something inside me shifted. Not broke. Shifted. Like tectonic plates moving, rearranging the foundation of what I am around a single, screaming truth.
They have him. Someone took what'smine.
Your omega. Not your stepbrother. Not Max Carter.Your omega. Kline knows. Has known. Has been watching long enough to see what we are to each other, to catalog it, to weaponize it.
I press my palms flat against the desk. Breathe. In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth. The same exercise I taught Max in the kitchen when he was spiraling, his scent flooding the room, those dark eyes wide with panic—breathe with me, match my rhythm, you're safe—
He's not safe. He's in a building I can't find, surrounded by people who see him as product, and I'm doing breathing exercises at a desk like that means something.
I shove back from the desk. Stand. Pace. Three steps to the window, three steps back. My reflection stares at me from the dark glass—rumpled shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, hair I haven't touched in hours. I look unhinged. I look like a man who's losing a fight with himself.
Focus. Compartmentalize.The empire didn't get built by men who panicked.
My father's voice. The lessons of a lifetime. Separate the human from the machine. Let the machine work.
The machine. Right. Be the machine, Atlas.
The immediate problem isn't Kline. Kline is the enemy, the objective, the endgame—but the immediate problem is five foot seven, has kind eyes and gray-blonde hair, sleeps in lavender pajamas, and is going to wake up in approximately three hours to find her son's room half-packed and empty.
Margot.
If Margot finds Max gone—the duffel gone, the car missing, no note—she calls the police. That's who she is. She's not a criminal's wife in the ways that matter. She married Richard for love, not leverage. She doesn't know the depth ofwhat we do and Dad is retired anyways. She's a mother whose son is missing, and she'll do what any mother does.
She'll dial 911 and beg strangers to bring him back.
And police involvement means Kline kills Max or moves him somewhere we'll never find. That's the implicit understanding between men in our world. Law enforcement is the nuclear option. It annihilates everyone.
I pull Bane in at 4:15. He looks like hell—hazel eyes bloodshot, golden-brown hair wrecked from running his hands through it, still wearing the clothes he had on when we found the car. There's a dark smear on his sleeve. Blood—Zero's, from the shattered glass, or his own from punching the dashboard on the drive back. I didn't ask which. It didn't matter.
"We need to handle Margot," I say.
He stares at me. Blinks once, slowly, like the word handle doesn't compute in connection with the woman who makes us cinnamon rolls on Sundays and asks about our days like she actually wants to know.
"Handle."
"She wakes up. Finds Max gone. His room is half-packed—he was leaving, Bane. He had a bag." My voice cracks on bag and I hate it. I clear my throat. Keep going. "She'll see the empty room, the missing car, no note. She panics. She calls the police. And—"
"And Max dies." Bane finishes it for me. His voice is flat. Not accepting—just seeing the shape of it. The cage we're in. "So what's your plan?"
"We text her. From a burner. As Max."
The silence that follows has weight. Mass. Bane's jaw works—the muscle jumping beneath the skin, the same tell our father has when he's fighting to keep control.
