He should have stayed away. Failing, that he should have sent Elara or a scientist or a lie.
Instead, He walks beside you, through the halls of the tower he built, to make violence, civilized. He showed you doors, ones that opened for him and rooms that did not deserve names.
He did not show you the cells.
He did not show you the chapel beneath the building where old oaths slept.
He did not show you the place where his scars were made.
He kept his hands to himself.
Mostly.
In an observation corridor, a pane of glass ran the length of a laboratory that looked like a chapel devoted to numbers. Beyond it, technicians pretended the Alpha wasn't walking past their prayer books. The glass held their reflections politely.
You stopped. He did, too.
On the other side of the pane, a monitor flashed a reel of slow heartbeats—green-tongued lines climbing and falling in patient grammar. You didn't want to know whose. But. You knew anyway, Yours. You only realized you'd put your palm to the glass when heat met you from the opposite side.
Atlas had done the same. You hadn't seen him move. You felt it—the moment your hands aligned through a barrier that was never meant for intimacy. The tether lit under your skin like someone touched a match to a line of salt.
Breath. His. Yours.
The window listened.
"Don't," he said. The sound was closer to a plea than a command. It was almost worse.
"I'm not doing anything," you said. It was almost true.
Thorne's footsteps were the sound of judgment that had seen this coming. He stopped far enough away to make the two of you responsible for distance.
"Alpha," he said.
Atlas looked at the glass as if it had struck him. He pulled his hand back the way he pulled knives out of people—without flinching, as if pain were proof the job was being done correctly.
"Enough," he said to himself, to the window, to the blood that refused to remember whose it had been first.
He walked you to the elevator without touching you. The doors considered your faces and decided not to close.
"Thank you for not lying to me," you said, because you needed to put one good thing in the room before it made something worse.
He met your eyes. The blue of them was the heatless part of flame. "I'm trying not to," he said.
"You're doing a terrible job," you said.
"I know," he said, like a man saying grace.
The doors shut between you. You rode the box down through floors with names like "Research" and "Security" and "Nothing You Want."
When you reached the lobby your legs remembered how to move again.
Outside, the city breathed on your face like a dog that loves you too much.
On the roof above, Atlas stood alone, holding the wolf in . For now.