He lifts his head. Drags his hands down his face. When they drop to the counter, his eyes are red but dry.
"Finish your eggs," he says. Quieter than before.
I finish my eggs.
When I’m finish, I stand up to take my plate to the sink and the room tilts. My hand shoots out—grabs the edge of the counter, misses, grabs air—and then Zero is there.
I didn't see him move. He was across the counter and now his hand is closed around my arm and his other palm is flat against my lower back, fingers spread wide, holding me upright. As if it was instinct. Alpha instinct. The same biological wiring that made Bane burn through a double dose of sedatives.
"Easy." His voice is different up close. Stripped of the sarcasm and the performance and the careful cruelty he wearslike cologne. What's left is just him. Just his voice, low and rough with sleeplessness, vibrating through his palm into my spine.
I should step back.
I don't step back.
My hand is on his chest—I put it there without deciding to, flat against his sternum, and I can feel his heart hammering. Fast. His t-shirt is thin and warm and underneath it his body is a wall of heat and his scent is everywhere—gunpowder and coffee so overwhelming it invades my senses.
My brain is screaming at me to run away from him, but the rest of my body wants to be consumed by him.
His gaze drops to my mouth. Stays there.
"You should—" He starts. Stops. His fingers tighten on my arm. The hand on my lower back presses harder, pulling me a fraction closer, and I feel his breath on my face—warm, unsteady, carrying traces of the coffee he's been drinking all night. "We should—"
We should stop. We should remember that you're my stepbrother.We should remember that Zero doesn’t really care, he just wants to consume.
His forehead tips toward mine. An inch. Half an inch. My hand curls into his shirt.
"Max."
Atlas. In the doorway to the hall. His voice is quiet but the timing is surgical. He sees exactly what's happening—Zero's hands on me, my hand on Zero's chest, the charged air between us dense enough to taste.
Zero's jaw clenches. His hand slides off my back—slow, reluctant, his fingers dragging across the fabric of the hoodie like they're memorizing the shape of my spine on the way out. He steps away. Doesn't look at Atlas. His hands hang at his sides and his fists open and close once, twice, like he's letting something go that he never quite had a grip on.
"You need rest," Atlas says. To me. Gentle. But his eyes move to Zero for a half-second—a look I can't fully read, something between warning and recognition and a grim acknowledgment as if they’re both drowning in the same water. "Bane's already out. The doctor said twenty-four hours minimum. Zero, walk her out."
I nod. My legs feel like they're made of wet paper.
Atlas crosses the room. His hand finds the small of my back—in the exact spot Zero's was, and I know he knows because his fingers settle into the warmth Zero left behind with a possessiveness that's barely disguised as guidance. He walks me down the hallway. Slow. Patient. Matching my shuffle, his body close enough that his scent wraps around me and my brain scrambles.
Too many pheromones. Too many alphas.
It’s overwhelming.
His thumb moves against my lower back. A small circle. Unconscious or deliberate—with Atlas, the line between the two is thinner than he'd ever admit.
The bedroom is dim. He's drawn the curtains while I was eating. The bed is turned down. The water and ibuprofen wait on the nightstand.
I sit on the edge of the mattress. He stands in front of me. The light from the hallway catches the side of his face and I can see every hour of the last five days written there—the hollows under his cheekbones, the lines around his mouth, the way his eyes keep moving over me like he's afraid I'll disappear if he blinks.
"What about Margot?" I ask. "She must be losing her mind—"
"She doesn't know, Max." His voice is steady. "As far as Margot and Richard are concerned, you've been staying witha friend from class. Needed some space. Bane had exams and stayed on campus to study."
"How? She would have called the police the first morning I didn't—"
"We've been texting her. From a burner. As you." His jaw tightens. I watch him swallow whatever that costs him to say out loud.
“Wait… how?”
