The hand in his hair loosened. Not all at once—in stages, like something thawing. Fingers uncurling from a fist into something that was almost a cradle. The pull on his scalp eased from a yank to a hold. Cass’s eyes burned. His shoulder throbbed with every heartbeat but the hand in his hair was gentling and that mattered more than anything his body was trying to tell him about damage.
He pushed the mask up further, past the nose, past the cheekbones, until the only thing between them was skin and blood and the air. Riot’s face underneath was —
Beautiful, Cass thought, and then,wrecked.
“Brennan.” He kissed him again. Slower this time. His good hand came up to cup the side of Riot’s jaw, his thumb tracingthe line where the mask had pressed red grooves into skin. “I’m here. You can stop now.”
Riot made a sound. Not a word. Not a growl. Something broken and human—the sound a structure makes right before it stops being a structure. It vibrated against Cass’s lips, against the palm cupping his jaw.
The gold drained.
It didn’t fade—itcollapsed, like something giving way from the inside. One second the eyes behind the pushed-up mask were flat and burning and empty, and the next they were green. Riot’s green. The green that went soft when Cass said something that didn’t make sense. The green that tracked him across rooms like he was the only moving thing in the world.
But the green washorrified.
Riot’s eyes widened, scanning—the road, the bodies, what was left of the bodies, the red shapes that didn’t look like people anymore. His gaze dropped to Cass’s face, then lower, to the shoulder hanging wrong, to the blood soaking into Cass’s pants from his hip.
Cass felt the strange blankness crack open and everything that had been behind it came flooding through.
Horror. A tidal, drowning wave of it. Self-loathing so sharp Cass flinched like he’d been slapped. And underneath that, buried so deep it was almost inaudible—the desperate terror of a man looking at the person he loved and trying to calculate how much damage he’d done.
Riot’s hands flew off Cass like he’d been burned. He stumbled backward—one step, two—tripped over something that had been an arm, and his knees hit the bloody pavement. The sound was terrible. Wet and hard at the same time.
“No—” Riot covered his face. His shoulders drew inward, hunching, folding, making himself smaller than Cass had ever seen him. “Tell me I didn’t—”
“You stopped.” Cass’s voice came out steady. He didn’t know how. Everything inside him was shaking, but his voice came out steady because Riot needed it to, and Cass’s body had always been better at knowing what people needed than his brain was.
He took a step toward him. Then another. His bare feet in the blood on the asphalt, still warm. “You always stop when it matters.”
The sound Riot made behind his hands was not agreement.
I’m here. I’m not afraid of you. You stopped.
There was a click behind him. The distinctive sound of a bolt being drawn back.
“Step away from him, Cass.” Sage’s voice. Hard and flat and breathing like she’d sprinted the last two hundred yards from the overpass, because she had. Cass turned his head—slowly, because fast movements seemed like a bad idea right now—and saw her.
She was on one knee at the edge of the carnage, rifle shouldered and aimed past Cass at Riot’s hunched form. But the rifle looked wrong. Different. There were things attached to it that hadn’t been there before, like she’d assembled this configuration during the fight, maybe.
“Cass.” Her voice brooked no argument. “Move.”
“He’s okay,” Cass said.
“He’s in post-episode. His cortisol is still—”
“He’sokay.” Cass turned his body—bad shoulder and all, grinding pain shooting white across his vision—and put himself between the rifle and Riot. Squared his narrow shoulders against the muzzle he couldn’t see but could feel, the way he could feel someone watched him from across a room. His bloody hair hung across his face and he didn’t push it back because both hands were busy—one useless, one reaching behind him to find Riot’s knee.
“Cass, I need you to move. Right now.”
“No.”
The word came out simple and clear and it surprised all three of them. Cass could feel Riot flinch behind him—the hand on Riot’s knee felt the jolt run through his entire body.Don’t protect me,the flinch said.I’m the thing you should be running from.
Cass didn’t move.
He shifted his weight backward instead, lowering himself to the pavement in front of Riot, and curled his body over Riot’s hunched form. His good arm came around Riot’s shoulders as his chest pressed against Riot’s back and his bloody hair fell around them both like a curtain.
It hurt. His shoulder screamed. The position was terrible, kneeling in blood on asphalt with his weight distributed all wrong and his left arm a dead thing hanging at an angle that made his vision swim. But Riot was shaking, and Riot’s hands were still over his face.
