Riot
Overthecourseoften fairly eventful years, Riot had woken up to many unpleasant things. Gensyn extraction teams. Fellow Berserkers mid-episode. A raccoon, once, near the remains of Peoria, that had gotten into his sleeping bag and expressed dislike for him with its teeth. Ken Nakamura chainsmoking on top of him. He had, through repetition, developed a sort of internal triage for these mornings: assess the threat, locate the exits, determine whether the thing isunpleasant, could it be reasoned with or did it need to be physically relocated.
Cass’s mouth warm on his, Cass’s fingers in his hair, the faint smell of his fading heat and slick with the low hum of a morning that was a very pleasant assessment. And then the bedroom door opened and a tea cup shattered and a blade found his throat with the precision of someone who knew exactly where the blood lived.
He stopped kissing Cass because, under the circumstances, it seemed prudent.
The hand holding the blade was shaking, but the shaking was the fine vibration of controlled fear, not the gross tremor of someone who’d never held a blade before. This hand had held this particular knife many times, just maybe never pointed it at a person.
He kept his eyes on the ceiling and processed: tall woman, dark skin, locs with crystal beads and copper clasps, white robes that were clean and pressed and not the clothes of someone who’d just woken up. She’d been awake for hours. She’d been organized and composed and heading into her day, and then she’d opened her bedroom door and found a man the size of a filing cabinet kissing her sacred bonding partner.
From her perspective, this probably looked bad.
From his perspective, the blade was very close to his jugular and Cass’s body was rigid against him and the Berserker instincts were offering, with cheerful enthusiasm, to solve the problem in a way that would involve significantly fewer people remaining alive.
She is his BEST FRIEND. She is TERRIFIED. I am in HER BED. Shut up.
“Let go of my Omega,” the woman said. Her voice was steady in a way her hand was not. “Now.”
Cass pulled back from Riot’s mouth—fast, sharp, the injured shoulder apparently a non-issue when someone had steel at the throat of the person he’d been kissing. He sat up. Riot felt the mattress shift, felt the warmth leave his side, and stayed very still.
“Honey.” Cass didn’t sound panicked. He sounded certain, that particular kind of certain of someone throwing themselves between a blade and the person it was pointed at without stopping to think about the blade. “Honey, stop. I love him.”
Nothe’s with me.Nothe’s my seeker.Not any version of the sentence that would have been tactically sensible or emotionally hedged or crafted for the audience. Just the truth. The real one. The one they’d finally gotten right in a root cellar after two false starts, delivered now to a woman with a knife the way Cass delivered everything that mattered—straight on, fully exposed, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that words could be used against him.
Honey’s hand didn’t move for five seconds. Her eyes moved from Riot’s throat to Cass’s face, then she stepped back and kept stepping back until she was at the door again. Her weight settled onto the balls of her feet.
She was terrified. He could see it in the fine tremor running through her shoulders, in the rapid pulse visible at her throat, in the way her eyes kept snapping back to him with the involuntary magnetism of prey tracking a predator, but she was managing it.
Cass was already moving off the bed and Riot didn’t try to stop him.
“Honey.Honey.“ He said her name like he was confirming she was real, as if their months apart had included the possibility that she wasn’t, and now she was standing in front of him with a blade in her hand and she washere,she was solid, she was the person he’d crossed the Static Zone and bled for.
He reached for her with his good arm. The injured one tried to follow and he gasped—a small, sharp sound he tried to swallow, and Honey was already there. The blade hand went behind his back, the other arm came around his shoulders, and she pulled him in.
“You scared me,“ she said into his hair. “Missions are only supposed to be three weeks, Cass. Three weeks. It’s been—”
“I know. I know, I’m sorry, I’m not good at—”
“Do you know what I—do you have any idea—” She was laughing or crying or both, her face pressed against the top of his head, her arms tight enough that Cass’s breath hitched. “I kept your herbs alive. All of them. Even the rosemary, and you know how I feel about rosemary—”
“You hate rosemary.”
”Iloatherosemary. I watered it every day. I talked to it. I told it you were coming back because if I didn’t tell something you were coming back I was going to—” She stopped and pressed her face harder into his hair. Cass’s arm tightened around her waist and he made the sound he made when he was trying not to cry—the held-breath, jaw-locked, I’m-fine-I’m-fine sound that never once fooled anyone.
“I’m here,” Cass said, muffled against her shoulder. “I’m here, I came back, I’m sorry it took so long.”
“You brought aBerserker,“ Honey said, and the word came out half-laughed, half-horrified, like the sound of someone trying to recalibrate their entire worldview while simultaneously having an emotional breakdown.
“He’s very nice, though.”
“And a Null.”
“She’s also very nice, but she doesn’t talk a lot and her grandma is—”
“Cass.” Honey pulled back. Her hands went to his face—both of them, the blade pressed flat against his cheek by the hand thatheld it. She held his face and looked at him. Really looked. “You look different.”
“I look the same.”
