I don't know what to do with that. My brain keeps trying to fit it into the old pattern—the one where I get used and abused and discarded—and it won't go. The shape is wrong. This isn't abandonment. This is something I've never been offered before.
A choice.
Zero's hand finds my face.
My cheek this time. His palm settling against the side of my jaw, his fingers curling behind my ear, cupping my face with a possessiveness that stops whatever I was about to say. His body shifts on the bed—closer, larger, the air between us thickening with something that isn't heat but lives in the same neighborhood.
His scent sharpens. Gunpowder and ozone and a darker note underneath—the alpha pheromone I caught in the basement when he pinned me to the bench and growled my name. It floods the room in seconds and my body responds before I can stop it. Spine straightening. Chin lifting. The omega in me orienting toward the alpha like a compass needle swinging north.
His knee presses against my thigh through the covers. His shoulders block the window light. He's bigger than me in ways I keep forgetting until he's this close—broader, denser, built from different materials entirely.
His eyes lock on mine. I know Zero angry. Cruel. Hungry. Wearing violence like cologne. This isn't any of those things. This is what lives underneath all of it—the thing he's kept buried under the sarcasm and the sharp teeth—and I'm watching him choose to let me see it.
"But don't make me wait long."
His voice drops into a register I feel in my sternum. The hairs on my arms rise.
"I'm making an effort, Max. For you. Because I don't want to scare you." His thumb traces my cheekbone. His eyes don't leave mine. "But you and I both know what's between us. I felt it in the basement. I felt it in the hallway. I feel it right now, sitting on this bed, and so do you."
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out. His hand is warm on my face and his scent has thickened and his breath is close enough to feel and I'm pinned—not by his hands, not by force, but by the sheer density of what he's saying and the fact that some traitorous part of me believes every word.
"I won't beg you to admit it to yourself." His face moves closer. An inch. His breath on my mouth. "I'm not patient. I don't do gentle. And I want what's mine."
Mine.The word detonates somewhere behind my ribs.
"So heal." His thumb strokes my cheekbone one last time. Slow. "Find it in yourself to forgive me. Or don't."
His hand drops from my face. He stands. The mattress shifts. The air cools where his body was.
He looks down at me from his full height. The city light catches the sharp line of his jaw, the dark eyes, the mouth that just traced my lip and promised things I'm not ready to hear.
"But you belong to me, Max." He says it the way other people say the sky is blue. Like it's not a claim. Like it's a fact of the natural world he's simply informing me of. "And I will not let you forget it."
He holds my gaze for three more seconds. Then he turns and walks out of the bedroom. His footsteps cross the suite. The front door opens. Closes.
The lock clicks.
I sit in the dark with my heart hammering and his scent still thick in the air.
You belong to me.
I should be furious. The arrogance. The audacity of a man who read my journals and took my virginity on a weight bench and flushed my medication and has the nerve to cup my face and tell me I'm his.
Iamfurious. Some of it is even real.
But my hand drifts to my cheek. Presses against the skin where his palm was. The warmth is already fading but I hold it anyway.
I don't want to scare you.
That's the part I keep circling back to. Not the possessiveness—I expected that. Not the claim—that's just Zero being Zero. The part where he said he was making an effort. For me. The part where his voice went quiet and his hand was gentle and he looked at me like I was something worth being careful with.
Nobody has ever been careful with me because they wanted to be. Only because they had to be. Because I was fragile, or broken, or a case file with a number on it.
Zero doesn't have to be careful. He's choosing it. And that terrifies me more than anything he said about belonging.
I press my face into the pillow. Close my eyes.
Sleep doesn't come for a long time. But when it does, I dream about dark eyes and gunpowder and a voice that saysminelike it's the only word that matters.
