The house was small and familiar and wrong in ways he couldn’t figure out. The furniture was where it had always been—the woven rug Honey had made during enrichment, the shelf of approved texts with their cracked spines, the two ceramic cups on the counter that they’d painted during a potteryworkshop, hers with precise geometric patterns and his with lopsided flowers that she told him were beautiful and that he knew, even then, were not.
Riot asked about what Brother Matthias whispered, and that made Cass’s head hurt again.
“Can you just hold me together for a bit?” he asked instead.
Riot took off the tunic that was a little too tight in his shoulders and laid down in the bed that was supposed to be for Cass and Honey alone and opened his arms. Cass climbed onto the bed, let Riot’s hand settle on his injured shoulder, and Cass was asleep before his next breath.
We need to release the negative energy sooner rather than later.
Brother Matthias’s words, whispered close enough that Cass felt the warmth of his breath against his ear.
The door rattled.
Sooner rather than later.
This is the light finding its way in, this is the divine making space for itself inside you.He knew what those sessions were. They were healing. They were necessary. They were the reason his scars existed—because the negative energy lived so deep in him, so stubbornly, so resistant to the gentler methods, that Brother Matthias was forced to use more intensive techniques for weeks and months and years.
Everyone said so. Brother Matthias said so. The scars were proof of how hard they’d worked together to fix what was wrong with him, and he still was unable to heal himself.
The door rattled harder.
Cass turned away from the door. In the space between waking and sleep, this was something he could do—just turn, the wayhe’d turn from a window when the view was too bright. The headache eased slightly. The rattling faded to a vibration he could ignore if he held very still.
Before they’d taken Sage away to the Sisters’ Sanctuary and Riot to the infirmary, Cass caught her elbow in the corridor and asked the question that had been sitting in his stomach since the roadblock.
“What did they want?” he asked. “The wild Berserkers. When they said borrow.I offered to cook and clean and they looked at me like…what did they want?”
Sage glanced both ways down the corridor, then leaned in.
“That very loud thing you and Riot did in the root cellar?” she’d said, her voice flat and quiet. “That’s sex, Cass. They wanted sex.”
The word had landed in his body and sent ripples outward through his chest and stomach and legs. Riot had taught him other words, the steps between, the way bodies moved together and apart. But knowing the word and understanding that six men had looked at him and wantedthat—wanted what he and Riot had shared in the dark, in the cellar, where it had been good and frightening and chosen—
They wanted to take that from him. Without asking. Without the choosing.
“Oh,” he’d said. And then, because his mouth was faster than his brain and always had been: “Oh, no.”
Sage squeezed his good arm once and let herself be taken away to the Sisters’ Sanctuary and Cass stood in the corridor with the wordsexsitting inside him like something swallowed wrong.
As he’d been drifting back to consciousness with Riot’s heartbeat against his back, Riot’s hand warm on his shoulder, in the bedthat wasn’t theirs holding them both in a space that smelled like lavender sachets and Honey’s hair oil—his mind did the thing it sometimes did. The thing that wasn’t thinking, exactly. More like... settling. The way water settled, finding the lowest point and resting there, and seeing from that place what the shape of things actually was.
Brother Matthias saw marks on his body and Cass lied to his face about it.
Those were from Riot and the thing they’d done together that was loud enough for Sage to hear from far away, apparently, which was embarrassing but also—it hadn’t been something donetohim. It had been something they’d donewitheach other. Riot’s hands on his hips and thighs left those marks. They’d been the hands that stopped. The hands that shook when they stopped. The hands that held him after and stroked his hair.
But Brother Matthias couldn’t know that
Riot needed to be seen as good, because hewasgood, deep down, underneath the gold eyes and the violence and the hands that didn’t always stop the first time, he was the man who picked wildflowers. He was the man who bought a silver circlet from a Neutral Zone vendor and couldn’t make eye contact while explaining what it was. He was the man who saidI love youand Cass felt it differently than when Honey said it.
Cass was already known as deficient. He was the one the programs didn’t work on, the one whose earthly attachments ran too deep, the one who needed extra sessions and stronger supplements and more intensive guidance. If the marks had to belong to someone, they could belong to wild Berserkers. Wild Berserkers who did terrible things in terrible places. That story kept Riot safe.
He was okay with that. He’d been told he was damaged his whole life, carrying one more mark on the inventory wouldn’t change the shape of what he was.
The door kept rattling.
Cass woke and lay very still, allowing the dreams he could never quite remember recede. His head ached. His stomach was hollow. The door was rattling faintly, distantly, the way it always did after the dreams.
I’m okay. I’m in my house. Riot is here. I’m okay.
