“I… cloned your phone a while back.”
My heart skips a beat.
“Bane helped me match your voice. Your patterns. She believes it."
The thought of Atlas and his brothers hunched over a burner phone, composing texts in my voice to my mother—love you, I'm fine, don't worry—makes something complicated twist in my chest. Gratitude and horror braided together.
Atlas…cloned my phone?What the actual fuck?
"Here's how we bring you both back." Atlas shifts into the mode I recognize—the strategist, the planner, the man who sees six moves ahead. "Bane goes home tomorrow. He walks in looking tired from studying. Tells Margot he pulled an all-nighter at the library. His wrists will be covered—long sleeves—and the sedation should be worn off enought to pass as exhaustion. Richard won't look twice. Margot might fuss but she'll accept it."
"And me?"
"You stay here. Tomorrow night too." He holds up a hand before I can protest. "You need the recovery time and I need you walking into that house looking like yourself. Right now you look like someone who's been through something, and Margot will see it in three seconds. And I don’t think you’re ready to answer all her questions."
He's right. I know he's right. If I walked through that door tonight, Margot would take one look at me and the careful fiction they've built would collapse.
"Day after tomorrow, you come home. The story is you got into a scuffle near campus—wrong place, wrong time. Some guys hassled you. Bane heard about it and came to check on you, which is why he stayed an extra night." He pauses. "The bruises track with that timeline. The split lip heals enough in two days to look like a bar fight instead of—"
He stops. Clears his throat.
"Instead of what it actually is," I finish for him.
"Yes." Quiet. "Margot will worry. She'll fuss. She'll want to call the police and you'll talk her out of it. And then she'll believe it, because the alternative is something no mother can afford to imagine about her son."
"She'll see through it eventually. She's too smart."
"She won't look for what she doesn't want to find." He paces in front of me, his hands in his pockets. "And by the time you walk through that door, you'll have your story straight. You won't crack under pressure. You won't freeze. You'll look her in the eye and tell her you're fine and she'll believe you because she needs to."
The weight of it settles over me. Two days in this hotel. Two days of lying in clean sheets and eating room service and rehearsing a cover story for the woman who saved my life. Two days of pretending the last five didn't happen so that the people who love me never have to know what was done to me.
"Okay," I say.
I look down at my hands. Clean now. The blood scrubbed away in the shower, the grime gone, the skin underneath pink and raw. They look like my hands again. Almost.
"What about Kline? The deal?"
"Don't worry about that."
"Atlas. I'm not a kid. You don't have to—"
"I know you're not a kid." His voice catches on something. He clears his throat. "Believe me, Max, I'm very aware that you're not a kid."
The words hang between us. Heavier than he intended. His jaw tightens—he heard it too, heard the way it sounded, the admission hiding inside the reassurance.I'm very aware. Of your age. Of your body. Of the fact that you begged me and I said no and you ran and I almost lost you.
He crouches in front of me. Eye level now. His hands rest on my knees—warm, solid, grounding. His thumbs find the inside of my kneecaps and press gently, and the intimacy of the gesture—the specificity of it, his hands on my legs, his face level with mine in a dim bedroom—makes my breath catch.
"The deal is done. The terms are signed. You're safe. Bane's safe. Everything else is my problem, and I will handle it." His gray eyes hold mine. The control is still there—always there—but something softer is bleeding through tonight, something he's too tired to hide. "That's what I do. Let me do it."
His thumbs trace small circles on my kneecaps. The same gesture Bane makes—small, repetitive, soothing. Something the Graves brothers do without knowing they do it. Something their mother probably did. Three men carrying the ghost of a woman's tenderness in their hands.
"Okay," I say. Because my eyes are closing on their own and I can’t fight it anymore. But my thoughts are all scrambled up in him–my stepbrother.He said no. There are reasons—good reasons, important reasons—and none of them matter because he’s touching me and his eyes are soft and he looks at me like I'm the answer to a question he's been asking his whole life.
He helps me lie back. Pulls the covers up. His hand lingers on the edge of the blanket for a moment—fingers curledin the fabric, knuckles white, holding on the way everyone in that house holds on to things.
"Atlas."
"Yeah?"
