I set the bottle on the nightstand. Lie back against the pillows. My heart is still thumping but the adrenaline is fading, replaced by confusion I don't have the energy to untangle. Zero is in my room and he's just... sitting there. That's the part I can't reconcile. The Zero I know doesn't sit. He paces, he prowls, he vibrates with energy that needs an outlet. This version of him is eerily calm. Like a big cat stretched out in the sun, all that power banked and resting, and the choice to rest is what makes the back of my neck prickle.
"You should take the ibuprofen too," he says. He stands—fluid, the way he always moves, like his joints are oiled and his muscles never fully disengage. "I'll be right back."
He leaves the room. I listen to him in the kitchen—a cabinet opening, the tap running, the clink of a glass. Domestic sounds. Zero sounds, which shouldn't be domestic at all but somehow are. He returns with the water in one hand, his bodyfilling the doorway for a second before he crosses to the bed. Sits on the edge. The mattress dips under his weight and the proximity hits me—the width of his shoulders, the veins running down his forearms, the tattoos, a scar on his inner wrist I've never noticed before. He smells like the cold outside, like he walked here through the night air.
He picks up the ibuprofen from the nightstand. Shakes two into his palm. Holds them out.
"Take them."
I take them from his hand. Our fingers brush—a low hum that starts in my fingertips and spreads up my wrist, different from the jolt in the hallway last night, slower, steadier. I put them in my mouth. Take the glass from his other hand.
I swallow.
Zero watches my throat. His eyes track the tilt of my head, the bob of my Adam's apple, the column of my neck exposed as I drink. His gaze stays there a beat too long. Two beats. His pupils dilating in the dim light, the black swallowing the dark amber, and I feel the weight of his attention like a hand pressing against my pulse point.
I lower the glass. Set it on the nightstand. My hand is steady but my pulse isn't.
"There's something else," he says. And his voice has changed—quieter, stripped of the usual armor. He's looking at his hands. At the split knuckles. Working up to it.
"I read your journals."
The words hit me like cold water.
"What?"
"While you were gone. In the facility." He leans forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them. The posture makes him look younger somehow—hunched, the sharp angles of his body folded in on themselves. "I went into your room. Found the notebooks in the chest at the foot of your bed. AndI read them. All of them. The red one from when you were thirteen. The blue one. The brown one. Every page."
The room tilts. The notebooks. The ones I hid at the bottom of the chest under textbooks like they were contraband. Everything is in those pages. Linda and everything she did to me. The basement. What I felt, what I wanted, what I hated myself for wanting. Every ugly, private, bleeding thing I've ever put into words because paper was the only place safe enough to hold it.
And Zero read them.
Oh God.
"You had no right." My voice shakes. The anger is there—hot, bright, climbing my throat. "Those were mine. Those were private. You—"
"I know."
"You went through my things. While I was—while they had me in a—" I can't finish. The violation and the vulnerability are knotted together so tight I can't separate them. Every private thought I would never dare to share. Every vulnerability. Every weakness.
Every thought I had about him.
He readI came harder than I've ever come in my life while he was degrading me.
He readmaybe I deserve it.
Fuck my life.
"Max." His voice cuts through the spiral. Not sharp—firm. The way you'd grab someone's arm before they step off a curb. "Let me get this out. Then you can be as angry as you want."
I press my lips together. My hands are fists in the sheets.
"I shouldn't have read them. It was a violation and I know it and I'm not going to pretend I had a good reason because I didn't. I was out of my mind and I went looking for—I don't know. Something. Some piece of you I could hold onto while youwere in that place." He swallows. Hard. I watch his throat work. "But I read them. And I can't unread them."
He pauses. His hands settle on his thighs.
"The basement," he says. The word comes out rough. Scraped. "I didn't know it was your first time."
My face burns. I look away.
