Last time he said no, I ran. Drove to a parking lot and got kidnapped and spent five days in a concrete cell.
His restraint didn't protect me. It almost killed me.
This time I'm not running. I don’t want to be the boy who runs anymore.
But I'm also not going to wait forever for Atlas Graves to decide he's brave enough to want me the way I want him to. Tofigure out that wanting me means wanting all of what that looks like—even the parts that include his brothers.
I close my eyes.
Tears leak out the sides, dribble down past my ears and land on my pillow. I don’t wipe them. I just pretend to be asleep until eventually I am.
Chapter 15
Bane
Ipromised Max I'd remember their faces.
I do. Both of them.
The thick-necked guard who pocketed the suppressant syringe and winked at the camera—round face, shaved head, a scar bisecting his left eyebrow. And his partner, the shorter one with the bag. Shovel jaw. Small eyes set too close together. Hands like slabs of raw meat.
I've been seeing those faces every night. Behind my eyelids when I close my eyes. In the shower. In the spaces between thoughts. The thick-necked one toying with Max, shoving him against the wall. The shorter one unzipping a nylon bag full of things I didn't get a clear look at but didn't need to, because my imagination has been filling in the gaps with meticulous, nauseating detail for days.
I remember their faces. And tonight I'm going to fucking rearrange them.
Zero drives. He hasn't spoken since we left the estate—just pulled his keys from his pocket when I came downstairs and looked at me once and that was the conversation. He's in all black. I'm in dark clothes I don't mind ruining. Atlas noddedus out the door from his office with a single tilt of his head that meantgo, do what needs to be done, don't tell me the specifics.
The address is east side. A walk-up above a laundromat, the kind of building where the hallway smells like mildew and the stairwell lights have been broken for months. Zero's contacts traced them in under forty-eight hours—Ellis fired them after discovering the unauthorized visit, cut them loose without severance or protection. Just two men on a couch in a shit apartment, watching television, assuming the worst was behind them.
How fucking wrong they are.
Zero parks. Kills the engine. Sits for a moment with his hands on the wheel, staring at the building's lit windows through the windshield. Third floor. Corner unit. The curtains are drawn but there's a blue flicker underneath—TV glow.
"Rules," I say.
Zero looks at me. The flat expression. The black eyes. I've grown up with this face—watched it at breakfast tables and in boardrooms and across from me in cars exactly like this one. I know what it looks like when Zero is angry. When he's amused.
When he's about to hurt someone.
This is worse than all of them. This is Zero with everything human switched off. Emptied out, filed away, replaced by the thing our father spent all these years cultivating. Atlas is the controlled one—purposeful, reluctant, violence as a last resort. Zero is the one who never needed it to be a last resort. Who speaks it the way other people speak their mother tongue.
"They stay alive," he says. "Everything else is open."
We take the stairs. Three flights. The hallway is narrow and smells like fried food and cigarette smoke. Apartment 3C. I can hear the television through the door—a game show, someone winning something, studio audience clapping.
I look at Zero. He looks at me.
I kick the door in.
The frame splinters. The door slams inward and hits the wall and the shaved-head guard is on the couch in a stained undershirt with a beer in his hand, and the look on his face—the half-second of confused, slack-jawed surprise before recognition hits—is worth every mile of the drive.
He sees me. Knows me. His face goes white.
"Oh fu—"
Zero is past me before the word finishes. He crosses the room in three strides, grabs the guard by the front of his shirt, and hauls him off the couch. The beer can hits the floor. Foam sprays across the carpet. Zero pins him against the wall with one forearm across his throat—not crushing, just holding. Positioning. The way a surgeon positions a patient before cutting.
"Where's the other one?" I ask.
