“You don’t.” Her thumbs traced his cheekbones and in that moment, Riot finally understood what Cass meant when he said Honey was brilliant. Her eyes were wet and bright and she was reading him, analyzing his face, calculating something only she had the variables for. “You look like something bad happened.”
“Not just bad things.”
It hurt, watching them. The small, private kind of hurt—the kind that came from things that weren’t his and weren’t meant to be. His stitches pulled when he breathed too deep. He focused on that.
Honey’s eyes came back to him, still standing with Cass’s face in her hands.
“You,” she said. “The Berserker.”
“Riot.”
“That’s not a real name.”
“It’s the one I’ve got.”
Her jaw worked. She was still touching Cass’s face. Still holding the blade. Still managing her fear with the intelligence and spatial control that made Riot thinkif we get out of this place, I want her on our side,which was premature but felt true.
“He was kissing you,” she said to Cass without looking away from Riot. “When I walked in. You were kissing him.”
“Yes.”
“In our bed.”
“Yes.”
“While he’s—” She gestured at Riot with the blade hand, a motion that took in his size, his scars, the stitches, the general situation. “While he’sthat.”
“He’s not what you think,” Cass said.
“I think he’s a Berserker, Cass. I think he’s the thing they told us about in every classroom lesson about the outside since we were children. I think he could kill everyone on this block and the only thing stopping him is—” She stopped and looked at Cass again. “Is you,” she finished quietly. “The only thing stopping him is you.”
“That’s not—”
“She’s not wrong,” Riot said.
Both of them looked at him.
“She’s right to be scared of me,” Riot said to Cass. “I am what she thinks I am. I’m also other things, but the dangerous part is real and it would be a lie to pretend it isn’t.” He looked at Honey. “I’m not going to hurt him. That’s the only promise I can make that’s worth anything.”
Honey released Cass’s face, tucked the blade somewhere into her robes with a motion so smooth he lost it between blinks, and sat down on the edge of the bed. On her side, as far from Riot as the mattress allowed. Cass sat beside her, and the geometry of the room said what it said—the two of them were meant to be in this space, together, with him on the outside.
He didn’t push into the space.
“Tell me everything,” Honey said to Cass. “Don’t skip the parts you think will scare me. I’m already scared.”
Cass told her. Not everything —he left out the sudden heat and the wellness supplements and learning words likecum. He focused on his mission going wrong over and over in the Neutral Zone. Finding Riot. The journey. He talked fast and scattered, like there was too much inside him and he was trying to get it out before it solidified into something he couldn’t move—hands gesturing, sentences starting and restarting, jumping between timelines. Honey followed all of it. Her mind was visibly working—sorting, filing, building a structure out of the scattered pieces Cass was handing her.
And while he talked, his right hand kept moving to his chest, adjusting where the fabric overlapped.
“You’re doing the thing,” Honey said, cutting through a sentence about getting stuck in mud.
Cass’s hand froze. “What thing?”
“Your nervous tic. The robes.” She nodded at his hand, currently pressing fabric against his collarbone. “You always check them when you’re anxious.”
“They fit differently than I remember.”
He’s hiding it from her.
