“Good,” he repeated. “I tell you I love you and you saygood?”
“Itisgood.” Cass’s hand found Riot’s face and felt his eyes start to burn. “All the meditation and hoping and failing Chrysalis…all of it was trying to make me feel this. Exactly this. And it never worked. Not once. And here it is anyway.” He paused. “It just grew.”
Riot’s breath shuddered out of him and he pulled Cass closer—not just in an embrace. It was like a perimeter. Something in his body permanently rearranged itself around the task of keeping Cass close, and Cass could feel it in the way Riot’s muscles settled, the way his breathing dropped into something deep and sure.
Everything felt right for once.
Outside, the wind sang through rusted blades. Two songs. Depending on who was listening.
Cass was listening to Riot’s heartbeat.
He slept.
Chapter thirty-two
Spiritual Language
Riot
Somethingwasdifferentaboutthe morning.
Riot couldn’t place it at first. He woke to stone walls and oak beams and the gray half-light of dawn filtering through the cellar’s narrow ground-level window, and the unfamiliarity of the setting was the only wrong thing. Then Cass shifted against him, his face pressed into his chest, one leg thrown over Riot’s hip— and the details of the previous night flooded back with the subtlety of a car crash.
He’d expected the flood to bring panic. Guilt. The crushing weight ofwhat did I do?
It didn’t come.
That was the different thing.
He lay very still, cataloguing. The Berserker instinct was quiet, but not the chemical quiet of suppressants—that familiar fog that sat between him and his own impulses like a pane of dirty glass. This was something else. The Berserker wasthere, fully present, alert, but it wasn’t sending up the endless loop oftake him, keep him, mine, finish what you startedthat had been the background hum of every waking moment since the alley in the Neutral Zone.
It was... settled. Like a dog that had been circling for hours and finally found the right spot and laid down.
That’s new.That’s very new and I don’t like it.
Except that wasn’t true either. He did like it. That was the problem. He liked it the way he liked breathing after holding his breath—automatic, necessary, and deeply suspicious because nothing that felt this good had ever not been a trap.
The wound on his neck throbbed.
He reached up carefully, trying not to wake Cass, and touched it. The bite was hot under his fingers, and when he pressed it, his whole body responded—a pulse of warmth that started at the bite and radiated outward through his chest, his spine, his hands.
He pressed it again. The warmth spread and settled into his bones.
Stop touching it.
He touched it again.
Cass made a sound in his sleep. Not distress—something small and content, the kind of noise that implied good dreams. His face nuzzled deeper into Riot’s chest, and Riot felt something happen that he had no framework for: a mirrored contentment,like a pressure in his chest that mapped exactly onto the relaxation of Cass’s body, as though Cass’s comfort was leaking through some channel that hadn’t existed twelve hours ago.
That’s also very new. That’s also something I should probably be concerned about.
He catalogued it alongside the settled impulses and the wound that felt like home and filed the entire collection underThings That Are Wrong With Me: Chapter Whatever, I’ve Lost Count.
The cellar smelled like them. Both of them, together, in a way that Riot’s nose recognized as different from what either of them smelled like alone. His own baseline and cordite was still there, but threaded through it—woven into it, like someone had taken two separate fabrics and stitched them into one—was something warm and golden and unmistakablyCass. As if the bite had pushed Cass’s scent into his own bloodstream and his body was pumping it out through his skin.
I smell like both of us.
He didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t have a reference point, a name, a section in any guide he’d ever read. What he had, right now, in this cellar, was a sleeping man pressed against his chest and the unfamiliar experience of peace.
