He doesn't spar with anyone anymore on mornings like this.
Anyone who matters, he hurts;
anyone who doesn't, he bores. The practice floor downstairs is quite, except for the sound of knuckles finding leather and leather learning its place. The bag swings and returns;
Atlas plants his feet and subtracts the motion until it obeys. He isn't angry. He is calibrating—force against restraint, breath against command.
The heartbeat intrudes between strikes, not metaphor but interference: a second rhythm riding his own, quickening and settling with a logic that ignores his.
He tries not to listen. But. He can't.
He decide it's a memory.But.. It isn't. He throws once, twice, then stops because the bag will tell him nothing he doesn't already know.
"Your stance is sloppy," Thorne says mildly from the doorway, which is the closest thing to affection he allows himself in the daylight.
Atlas doesn't look over.
"My stance is older than you."
"Then it should behave better." Thorne steps onto the mat and lets the door seal them in with the smell of canvas and salt. He studies Atlas the way Atlas studies threats: with a care that reads as cruelty until you need it. "You aren't healing," he says after a beat. "You're syncing."
Atlas's mouth tilts. "A diagnosis."
"A fact," Thorne returns. "Your pulse is not your pulse. It's a duet…. And we all know what that Duet, means"
Atals says nothing. The quiet isn't permission. It's a place to put a truth until it learns how not to make trouble.
Thorne doesn't push. He never has. He simply stands there long enough for Atlas to hear the echo between their breaths and hate it less.
Elara arrives on the silence's far side. She doesn't cross onto the mat. She stands where boards give way to concrete and tips her head the way she does when something delicate is on the table and she needs both hands free to take it apart.
"The tether is feeding on the Alpha line," she says, precise. "We wanted Myth. We got Math."
Atlas reaches for the towel and works the sweat from his wrists like he could polish an answer onto them.
"Can it be severed?"
"Could?" Elara's mouth shapes the past tense as if trying on a coat she used to own. "Perhaps. Before the solstice tipped. But it's not coming, Atlas." Her voice is soft enough to hide a knife. "It's here."
He turns away to the wide window that makes the city look smaller than it thinks it is. The rain has been practicing and is close to getting it right.
"Keep her unbothered," he says.
"Quiet. No wolves near her street. No mistakes."
Elara nods once. This is the work she knows how to do—containment, erasure, the careful art of making a world safe for a truth that will never be polite. Still, she says, "You're going to have to see her."
"No," he says, almost gently. "I'm going to have to not."
A low amused sound drifts in as Cassian Dray lets himself inside the room like a man entering a church he doesn't believe in. He looks neither at the bag nor the blood speckling it. He looks at Atlas's throat, at the place where a pulse can be read if you know where to stand.
"You're bleeding for a human," Cassian says, pleasant as rain on a roof you don't own. "What's next? Kneeling for one?"
Thorne moves before thought. Atlas lifts a hand and the movement stops Thorne the way a leash stops a dog that wanted to teach a lesson but was trained well. He doesn't bother to face Cassian. He lets the man look at his back, at the scars that glow faint when storms bruise the day.
"Careful," Atlas says, and doesn't have to add I was here when your father still thought the word Alpha was a hat he could wear. He drapes the towel over the rope, studies his knuckles as if he could read a treaty in them.
"What do you need, Dray?."
"A stronger leader," Cassian says, smiling now. "But I'll settle for a confession. You know what the old law says about… attachments." He rolls the word in his mouth as if it might dissolve into something he can drink.
"The old law," Atlas says, "also says what should happen to a House that mistakes disobedience for heritage."
They look at each other for a long time, an old conversation neither wants witnesses for.
Thorne breathes. Elara doesn't.
Cassian inclines his head, an acknowledgment, not a bow.
"The city smells different," he says. "Our world does, too. There's something in the air."
"Storm," Atlas answers.
"Change," Cassian says, and leaves the rest of the sentence on the floor like a weapon he'll return for later.
When he's gone, Elara speaks to the window, not to Atlas, because some truths are safer reflected than received. "He's right about one thing. This will not stay quiet. Not with the tether burning silver under your skin."
He opens his hand, palm up, and there it is: the faintest flicker along the vein, a suggestion of light trying to decide if it has the right. It pulses once under his skin and stills. He closes his fist and the light respects the boundary.
For now.
He showers; he changes; he reinstalls the idea of being a man inside his body like a system update. By evening he is back in the office, the city arranged obediently beyond the glass. His Work lines up to be sorted. He sorts it. The day obeys. Mostly.
At dusk the pulse returns, steady as a metronome on a piano no one else can hear. He forgets to pretend not to listen.
She is awake, standing on her balcony. He knows the position of her hand on cold metal as if it were his own history. He doesn't close his eyes. Closing them would be confession.
Elara's reflection appears beside his in the window. She doesn't speak. She waits. He inhales and the scent comes as if the distance had been moved aside: rain, pine, faint metal, the unmistakable heat of a body remembering it has one.
"Thorne's right," he says at last, voice low enough to make the glass prefer him to the wind. "This isn't healing. It's syncing."
"And you," Elara asks, so quietly the room could pretend it didn't hear, "are you breaking?"
"I don't break," he says. It's true in the way a rule is true until it isn't.
She doesn't smile.
"Then bend where you choose to, before someone else forces it."
He thinks of kneeling. He thinks of the old oath carved into his scars. He thinks of the ruin and the rain and the word mine spoken by an animal who didn't understand it was a verb you earn. He thinks of a woman saying his name into a room that let her.
The city blinks. The storm decides to arrive and makes a clean job of it. Lightning sketches a brief signature across the glass, and in that white-blue line he sees another line superimpose itself: thin, silver, traveling from somewhere he cannot see to somewhere he is not supposed to be.
He lifts two fingers and touches the pane as if it could be skin. Warmth meets him from the other side as if a palm had been waiting there.
"Then maybe," he says to nobody, to Elara, to the window and the weather and the vow that has been chewing its way out of his chest since the hospital, "maybe the leash was never mine."
Across the city, in a room with a scored railing and a mirror that refuses to mind its business, your hand matches his without choreography. The glass thrums between you like an instrument that finally learned its note.
The thunder answers. The pulse inside him—and inside you—does, too. The line glows once, faint and defiant, then goes quiet before it can betray either of you to the night.
For now.