Cass stared at his own hand, halfway beneath the car in shock. Blood on his fingers. Warm. Not his.
I did that. My hand did that without asking me first.
CRACK. From the overpass. Cass heard a body hit the ground.
And then it was quiet.
Notquietquiet. The sounds underneath—groaning, wet breathing, wind through the girders. The sounds the living made and the sounds the dying made and the difference between them. He heard a car driving away as he wiggled out from beneath the car, his teeth grit and tears streaming down his face as he tried his best to not sob.
Cass’s left arm hung wrong as he braced the car. The shoulder was hot, swelling. He cradled it against his chest.
Riot was standing in the middle of the road.
The gloves dripped. His shirt was soaked red. His chest heaved. The gold behind the mesh was blazing—flat and bright and vast, the light of something that had burned through its containment and didn’t know how to turn off.
He was standing over the knife-wielder. What was left of the knife-wielder. Still looking down. His hands opening and closing at his sides in a rhythm that wasn’t conscious, like a machine that didn’t know the task was done.
Around him—the road. What had been men. Cass couldn’t look at most of it. His eyes skipped and skidded across the asphalt the way they would skip across text he wasn’t ready to read. His brain was doing him the enormous kindness of refusing to fully process what it was seeing.
The walkie crackled from near his knee where it must have fallen. Sage’s voice: “Clear. I’m coming down. Cass—stay away from him. Stay AWAY from him. Do you hear me?”
But Riot was bleeding. The wound across his ribs was pulsing with each breath and the blood was spreading and through whatever the thing that hummed between them was, Cass could feel something pouring off Riot that wasn’t rage.
It was absence.The place where Riot used to be was empty. Just the gold and the body and two impulses: destroy threat andtake. No language. No thought. No Riot.
“CASS!” Sage’s voice echoed in the distance. “DO NOT GO NEAR HIM!”
Cass walked toward Riot on legs that shook with every step, bare feet on glass and blood and asphalt, stepping around things he would not look at, things he would not let his eyes describe to his brain.
“Riot, you’re hurt.”
The gold tracked to him. Tracked ON him. His hands flexed.
Riot stepped toward him. Not the way Riot walked—the way something wearing Riot’s body walked. The attention pressed against Cass’s skin like a physical weight.
“Riot, it’s me. It’s—”
Riot moved.
Around him. Through the space between them—suddenly THERE, above him. The claw-glove fisted in his hair and yanked— Cass’s head snapping back, throat bared, a cry tearing out of him.
Riot’s other hand found the waistband of his pants and pulled at them, the claws slicing into his skin at his hip. The yank on his hair wrenched his injured shoulder. The pain was so complete it became a kind of silence—everything else erased, just the pain and the hand in his hair and the hand at his waist.
“Riot, please stop,” Cass whimpered.
Riot froze but didn’t let go.
Sage was yelling in the distance, her boots slapping on the asphalt.
“I know you’re really mad right now…but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt,” he whispered. Cass’s right hand, shaking and bloody, reached up and pushed the mask up just enough to expose Riot’s mouth.
His lips were drawn back from his teeth in a snarl, blood dripping from his lips like he had bitten through something during the fight.
Cass kissed him.
On the snarl. His mouth against bared teeth and blood with the softest thing he could offer against the hardest thing Riot’s body could produce. Cass didn’t care. He pressed closer, one-armed, his injured shoulder screaming where Riot’s grip had wrenched it, and kissed him like it was the only language left between them.
“Riot,” he whispered against the bared teeth. “Please come back.”
