Atlas goes first. Methodical. Tie pulled loose and dropped. Shirt unbuttoned from the top, each button precise. The undershirt comes over his head and the lamplight catches the muscle of his chest, his shoulders, the silver at his temples. He folds the shirt. Sets it on the chair. Even now. Even in this.
Bane goes next. The glasses come off first—set on the nightstand with a click. Then the shirt, pulled over his head one-handed, the motion easy. His body is lean and warm in the low light. The scar on his side that I've kissed a dozen times. He kicks his pants off and stands there in his briefs with his cock straining against the fabric and his eyes on me, patient, waiting for the cue.
Zero doesn't undress. He strips. Shirt grabbed at the back of the collar and ripped over his head. Belt unbuckled, jeans shoved down, kicked off. No underwear. He's hard and dark and not waiting for a cue from anyone. He's on the bed before his clothes hit the floor, crawling up from the foot, his mouth finding my ankle, my calf, the inside of my knee.
"Zero—"
"Shh." His mouth drags up the inside of my thigh. "Let me taste you first."
Atlas climbs onto the bed on my left. Settles beside me. His hand cups my jaw and turns my face toward him and he kisses me again—deep, slow, the kind of kiss that is a whole conversation—while Zero's mouth works higher up my thigh. Bane climbs on to my right. His hand finds my chest, splays flat over my heart. His mouth goes to the bond mark on my neck—his mark—and he presses an open kiss there that sends a shiverdown my spine that Atlas feels through the kiss and Zero feels through my thighs and the bond between the four of us cracks open like a door.
I can feelall of them.
Not just their hands and their mouths.Them. Atlas's restraint, fraying. The cost of the day loosening out of his muscles as he kisses me. Bane's tenderness, enormous and unhurried, his thumb tracing slow circles on my sternum. Zero's hunger—raw, animal, the leash he holds himself on slipping one notch for every inch his mouth climbs.
Zero's tongue drags flat and hot across the crease of my thigh and I buck into Atlas's kiss. Bane's hand presses me down.
"Easy, baby. Let him."
Zero doesn't go to my cock. He goes past it. Pushes my thighs apart with both hands—wide, wider—and lowers his mouth between my legs.
His tongue finds my hole and the sound I make is muffled by Atlas's mouth.
"Fuck—Zero—"
Atlas swallows the rest. His hand tightens on my jaw. His other hand slides into my hair and holds, firm, keeping me in the kiss while Zero eats me out with the single-minded filth of a man who has been thinking about this for hours. His tongue works me open in slow flat strokes, then dips inside, then circles, and I am leaking slick onto his chin and trying to arch off the bed but Bane's hand on my chest is an anchor and Atlas's mouth is a cage and I can't move and I can't breathe and I don't want to do either.
"He's so wet, Atlas." Zero, from between my legs. Wrecked. "He's dripping. You should see this."
Atlas breaks the kiss. Looks down the length of my body to where Zero is spread between my thighs with his mouth slick and shining. Something crosses Atlas's face—possessive, awed,the composed eldest brother undone by the sight of his brother's mouth on his omega.
"Get him ready," Atlas says. Low. "But don't rush."
"I don't rush." Zero's tongue drags through me again and my hips jerk. "I savor."
Bane laughs. Soft, almost not there. His mouth is still at my throat, working the bond mark in slow open kisses, and his hand has drifted from my chest down to my stomach, tracing the line of hair below my navel. His fingertips graze the base of my cock and I twitch so hard Bane has to pin my hip.
"Look at you," Bane murmurs. Into the mark. "Look at you, Maxie. All three of us and you're just lying here shaking for it."
"Bane—"
"Shh. I know. I know, baby."
Zero adds a finger alongside his tongue. I cry out and Atlas's hand is back over my mouth in an instant—the reflex, the habit, the automatic response to any sound I make that might carry through walls. Except tonight the house is empty. Margot and Richard are in Connecticut learning about soil.
There's nobody to hear me.
Atlas realizes it the same second I do. His hand loosens. Doesn't leave—just loosens. His thumb traces my lower lip.
"Let him be loud tonight," Bane says. To Atlas. Soft.
Atlas looks at Bane. Something passes between them—a decision, a permission, a shift in the rules they've been following for months. Atlas lifts his hand off my mouth. Sets it on the pillow beside my head. Leans down.
"Be as loud as you want, sweetheart."
Zero curls his finger and presses against the spot inside me and I scream.
Not a moan. Not a gasp. A scream—sharp, broken, what I've been holding behind Atlas's palm and Bane's hand andpillows and my own fist for months. It rings off the ceiling and fills the room and nobody stops me.
