He pressed closer. Riot made a low, satisfied sound against his mouth that vibrated through Cass’s lips and settled into his chest and everything was right.The way growing things were right. The way sunlight on skin was right. Not because anyone assigned it or approved it or ran it through an algorithm, but because his body knew the difference between a thing that was designed to feel good and a thing that actually was good.
“Ah—fuck.“ Riot broke the kiss with a hiss, his hand going to his ribs. The stitches. Cass pulled back immediately, guilt spiking.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“You didn’t do anything.” Riot’s jaw was tight but the corners of his mouth were still curved. “Just shifted wrong.”
“We should stop.”
“We should,” Riot agreed. He didn’t move away. His hand was still on Cass’s side, his thumb tracing a slow arc. “Or we could just... be careful about it.”
“Riot, your stitches—”
“I have survived worse.” His green eyes were very close, very warm, very focused on Cass’s mouth. “I’ve been hit with a pipe, stabbed, shot at, and dragged through the Static Zone with twelve stitches and no painkillers. I think I can handle you.”
The last two words—handle you—did that flippy thing to Cass’s stomach that had nothing to do with nausea. He felt his face go hot.
Riot noticed. Of course he noticed. The lopsided grin came back, gentler now, and he leaned forward and kissed the corner of Cass’s mouth with the kind of kiss that saidI see what that did and I’m not going to push but I want you to know I noticed.
“Come here, princess,” Riot said, shifting onto his back. “Just—here. On my good side. We can be careful.”
Cass settled against Riot’s uninjured side, his head on Riot’s shoulder, his good hand resting on Riot’s chest. He could feel the heartbeat under his palm in a rhythm he knew better than any meditation cadence he’d ever been taught.
For a suspended, impossible moment, they were not in Springfield Gardens. They were just two people lying together in the early light, touching because touching felt good, kissing because kissing felt right, and the rest of the world could wait.
Cass tipped his face up. Riot tipped his down. They kissed again as Riot’s hand slid from Cass’s hip to the small of his back, fingers spread wide, holding him close without pressing. Cass’s hand moved to Riot’s jaw, feeling the muscle there, the stubble, the hinge that locked when Riot was angry and softened when he was like this.
The bedroom door opened.
Cass heard it before he processed it: the click of the latch, the creak of hinges that had always stuck in humid weather, the soft pad of feet on the wooden floor. And then a sharp intake of breath, and the sound of ceramic hitting the ground, and—
“Cass?”
He knew that voice the way he knew his own heartbeat.
Honey stood in the doorway of the bedroom, a broken teacup at her feet and hot liquid seeping across the floorboards. She was dressed for the day—full white robes, high-collared and clean-lined, the fabric still crisp from the morning’s preparation. Her locs were pulled up and arranged with care, weighted with crystal beads and small copper clasps that caught the light from the window. She was taller than Cass remembered, her dark skin radiant even in the early light, her posture carrying the kind of alert composure that meant she’d been awake for hours, had probably already meditated and snacked and organized her schedule for the day before deciding to stop by the house and bring tea.
She was looking at the bed where her sacred bonding partner was lying in the arms of a man twice his size with copper hair and scars and a frame that took up two-thirds of the mattress, and Cass could see her mind working like watching someone sort through a drawer very fast.
Time did something strange, like the moment at the roadblock when his hand found the broken glass, and the world split into two speeds that existed simultaneously.
In one speed, everything was slow. Honey’s fingers moved through her locs in a gesture Cass had seen a thousand times—adjusting a bead, repositioning a clasp, smoothing a strand that had come loose. He’d watched her do it across dining tables, during meditation circles, while walking through the gardens debating the merits of different pruning techniques. Her hand rising to her hair was as ordinary as breathing.
But this time, her fingers bypassed the crystal beads and the copper clasps and found something nested against her scalp between two twisted locs, secured so close to the root that it was invisible until this moment where he watched her hand take a path it had never taken in any dining room or meditation circle or garden walk.
In the other speed—the real speed, the speed the world actually moved at—Honey’s hand went up and came down and it took less than a second.
The blade was small. Three inches. Thin enough to disappear in hair, sharp enough to catch the morning light along its honed edge in a way that was not decorative and was not accidental and was not anything Cass had ever seen in Springfield Gardens, where personal possessions encouraged ego and violence was the ultimate spiritual failure andnobodycarried weapons. Not the safety guides. Not the Elders. Not even Brother Matthias.
And Honey pulled it from her hair in a way that reminded him of Sage with her rifle.
She crossed the room in four long, furious strides that covered the distance between the door and the bed in the time it took Cass to open his mouth to say her name, and before the first syllable left his lips her knee was on the mattress and the blade was against Riot’s throat.
“Let go of my Omega,” she said. “Now.”
Chapter thirty-eight
Honey
