I head back to my room and grab my laptop. I open it. Check my student portal.
Three missed assignments. A paper due in two days I haven't started. Discussion board posts marked incomplete. An email from my creative writing professor:Max, I noticed youhaven't submitted your last two pieces. Is everything alright? Please don't hesitate to reach out if you need an extension.
I stare at the assignments. Read the same paragraph of instructions three times. The words slide off my brain like water off glass—I can see them but I can't hold them, can't make them mean anything, can't connect the person who cared about deadlines and grades with the person sitting in a hotel penthouse with bandages on his back and a cover story to memorize.
Everything just feels different now. Like I’m not the Max I was before. School is…
I care about it. I want to write. But deadlines and fitting into the perfect box of what a student is supposed to be just feels too exhausting to manage.
I close the laptop.
I stand up from the couch and take stock. Stretch my arms above my head—the welts pull but don't scream. Roll my neck. Flex my hands. The wrist abrasions are fading, pink instead of angry red.
Wait…
I go still. Close my eyes. Check in with my body the way I've learned to—scanning for the warmth, the prickle, the low hum of biology winding up. The pilot light.
The part of my biology I’ve become painfully familiar with lately.
Nothing.
My body temperature is normal. My skin isn't flushed. The ache that's been squatting in my belly for weeks—the constant, low-grade emergency of an omega whose suppressants failed—is just... absent. The facility blockers have definitely worn off by now. If the heat was coming back, I'd feel the crawl starting. The warmth building. The slow wind-up.
Instead I feel quiet. Like my biology has exhaled. Like whatever Bane did—the knot, the release, twenty minutes locked together on a prison mattress—satisfied something deep enough that it's not asking for more. My body got what it needed and the cycle reset and for the first time in weeks, I feel like myself.
I think about Bane inside me. The knot swelling. The fullness. The way everything just... stopped hurting.
My face heats. I press my palms against my cheeks and shove the thought sideways.
I wander back to the kitchen. Read Atlas's note again. The handwriting is so precise it looks printed, except for the A at the bottom—slightly rushed, the tail of the letter trailing off like he was already reaching for his phone or his keys or the next crisis.
Rest today. He underlined it. Twice.
The tiredness is still there. Muted by the food and the coffee I found in the cabinet, but present—a heaviness behind my eyes, a drag in my limbs that won't quite lift. The doctor said twenty-four hours. My body agrees.
I rinse my plate. Set it in the sink. Walk back down the hallway to my room, pulling the curtains tighter until the city disappears and the room goes dark enough that time loses its edges. I crawl under the covers. The sheets are cool against my skin and the pillow is soft and the silence holds me the way concrete walls never did.
I sleep. Deep. Dreamless. The heavy, greedy sleep of a body that's been running on fumes and has finally been given permission to stop.
∞∞∞
I wake up because someone is in the room.
I don't know how I know. Some animal part of my brain, some leftover survival wiring from the facility, registers the change before my eyes open—a presence, a weight in the air, the nearly imperceptible sound of someone breathing who isn't me.
My eyes open. The room is dim. Curtains still drawn.
The chair in the corner is occupied.
I can't see his face. Just the outline—legs stretched out, arms draped over the armrests, a body at rest in the blue-gray glow of city light filtering through the curtain gap. For one freezing, airless second I'm back in the facility, waking up to a stranger in the dark, and my lungs lock and my hands claw at the sheets and the scream building in my throat—
Gunpowder. Black coffee. Ozone.
Zero.
Every muscle in my body seizes.
I lurch upright—sheets tangling around my legs, hands fisting in the comforter.
