Harley's POV
The apartment feels smaller with Tate Mercer standing in it. Not physically, he's stood here before, at the dinner that feels like a lifetime ago, but tonight the air is different, more charged.
My brothers have arranged themselves between us like a human barricade—Diego directly in front of Tate with his arms crossed, Mateo flanking the hallway, Aro hovering near the kitchen with an expression that's half concern, half morbid curiosity.
"Absolutely fucking not." Diego doesn't move. "He's not staying. He's walking back out that door and thanking God he still has functioning kneecaps."
"The conversation is personal, and I need to hear him out. Face-to-face. Alone."
"You needed to hear him out last time, and you ended up in tears on the couch while Mateo had to physically stop me from driving to his neighborhood." Diego's eyes haven't left Tate. "If he makes you cry again, I'm not going to be reasonable about it. I'm going to be creative."
"Diego." I step into his line of sight, forcing him to look at me instead of through me at his target. My voice leaves no room for negotiation. "I'm handling this myself. I need you to trust me enough to let me do that. And I'm not asking—I'm stating."
The silence stretches while Diego's jaw works like he's physically chewing on his own restraint. Behind him, Mateo catches my eye and gives an almost imperceptible nod—the oldest brother's quiet permission, the one that actually carries weight.
Diego steps back. One step, then two, then a full retreat toward the kitchen where Aro is waiting. His glare follows Tate like a heat-seeking missile.
"The door stays open," he says.
"The door stays closed." I take Tate's arm and pull him toward the hallway. "And if I hear a single footstep outside my room, I'm telling Mamá about what happened to her good plates last Thursday."
Diego's mouth opens, closes.
The nuclear option works every time.
I lead Tate into my room and shut the door behind us. The click of the latch feels louder than it should, like a seal closing on a space that's suddenly too small for the two of us and everything we're carrying.
"Talk," I say. "And don't start with an excuse, because I've had six days to build immunity to your bullshit and my tolerance is at an all-time low."
"You're overreacting.”
The words leave his mouth and I watch him hear them, watch the wince that follows, the awareness that he's already failing.
"What I mean is… The situation with my father is more complicated than what you saw. There are rules in my world, Harley. Unspoken ones that you don't know about because you've never had to live inside them, and breaking those rules in public doesn't just hurt me.”
He runs a hand through his hair, the gesture agitated, trapped. His voice climbs with each word, defensive walls rebuilding faster than I can tear them down.
“It hurts Ezra. It hurts every plan I have to get out from under…"
"Your rules look a lot like cowardice from where I'm standing.”
I cross my arms, creating a barrier between us in the small space of my room. My voice drops lower, colder.
“You have rules for everything, don't you? Rules for when to speak, rules for when to stay silent, rules for which people deserve your spine and which ones get your silence."
The words come out harder than I intend, but I don't soften them.
"Sloane disrespects me and you shut her down in front of the whole school. Your father disrespects me and you stand there like a statue. So either your rules are selective, or your courage is. Which one is it?"
"You have no idea what it's like living under his control!” Tate's voice rises, raw now instead of defensive. “Every word I say gets analyzed, every relationship gets evaluated for political liability, every choice I make gets filtered through the question of whether it helps or hurts his career."
Tate’s hands gesture sharply, cutting through the air between us.
"You think standing up to him in front of his aides would've helped you? It would've put a target on your back so bright you'd be blinded by it."
"I know exactly what it's like to have no control, Tate. I've lived it my entire life. My father's in prison, my brothers run with a gang, my mother works herself to death and I can't stop it."
My voice drops, and the anger shifts into something deeper, something that hurts more because it's true.
"Every day I walk into a school that was designed to remind me I don't belong, and I have zero control over any of it. The difference between us is that I don't use it as an excuse to stand by while someone I care about gets humiliated to her face."
The accusation lands, I see it hit—the exact moment it passes through Tate’s defenses and reaches something unprotected. His posture changes, the rigidity bleeds out of his shoulders and what's left looks less like anger and more like exhaustion.
"I wasn't ashamed of you."
His voice drops, raw now instead of defensive, stripped to something that sounds dangerously close to honest.
"I have never, not once been ashamed of you, Harley. My silence in front of my father wasn't an agreement. It was survival. It was the reflex of a boy who learned at twelve years old that pushing back doesn't change anything—it just gives him better aim."
He runs a hand through his hair, and the gesture is tired, defeated.
"My family is a facade—polished on the outside, rotting underneath. My father hits Ezra and calls it discipline. My mother drinks herself through charity galas and calls it coping. And I stood there and said nothing because I was trying to keep you outside of this shit hole."
"That's not your decision to make."
I hold his gaze, feeling the fight drain from the room, replaced by something quieter and more dangerous.
"I don't need you to decide what I can handle. I've been handling things you can't imagine since I was fifteen years old, and the last thing I need is another person deciding I'm too fragile for the truth."
The back-and-forth softens without either of us noticing. His voice loses its edge, mine loses its venom. The argument runs out of fuel and what's left is two people standing in a tiny bedroom, breathing hard, the honesty sitting between us like something newly excavated.
We end up sitting side by side on my narrow bed, shoulders almost touching. The argument is spent, and something quieter takes its place—the kind of silence that comes after a storm, when the air is clean and everything feels fragile.
"My father wants Princeton, then law school, then politics."
Tate stares at the wall.
"The whole thing is a conveyor belt and I'm just... cargo. The football dream, the Division I scouts—none of it matters because he's already decided, and what he decides becomes reality whether I consent or not."
I stare at the same wall, feeling my own ones crumbling.
"And my mother works double shifts so I can stand in hallways where people spit on my name. Everything I do, every grade, every competition, every campaign poster, is trying to build a bridge long enough to carry her out of here. And some days the bridge feels like it's made of paper."
The space between our shoulders closes by degrees neither of us consciously chooses. His arm presses against mine, warm through the fabric, and neither of us moves away.
I became aware of small things—the rise and fall of his breathing, the way his hand rests on the mattress between us, his pinky a fraction of an inch from mine.
I don't know which of us closes that fraction first. But suddenly his finger hooks over mine, barely a touch, tentative in a way I've never seen from him, and the contact sends something electric up my wrist and into my chest.
I turn my head slightly only to see that he's already looking at me.
His beautiful blue eyes move across my face slowly—not with the sharpness I'm used to, just looking. Like he's memorizing something he's afraid he won't get to see again. His gaze traces my forehead, my cheekbone, the scar above my left eyebrow, and settles on my mouth with a weight I feel on my skin.
His hand rises from the mattress and finds my jaw making my breath catch unconsciously. His fingers are warm against my skin, gentle in a way I haven't earned and don't know how to refuse. His thumb brushes the corner of my mouth, and the tenderness of it undoes something I didn't know was still holding together.
When Tate kisses me, it’s slow and deliberate, carrying every word we've said tonight and every word we haven't. And I kiss him back. Not because of the arrangement, not for an audience, not to prove a point or win an argument or shut anyone up.
I kiss him back because I want to, and the wanting is the most honest thing I've felt in years.