“I love you too, princess”
Chapter forty-one
Seekers Wait Outside
Riot
ThedoorclosedandRiot stood on the other side of it in the warmth of the evening air, surrounded by the scent of a well tended herb garden and he couldn’t breathe.
They spent time together. They cleaned the bathroom, showered, washed their clothes, and ate the modest snacks in the house and just laid on the bed together. Cass tried to put braids in Riot’s hair, but apparently it was “too clean” and the braids wouldn’t hold. Riot let Cass talk about the things hewanted to plant when they got back to the Collective and how he wondered if Granny Lu would still hate him.
Riot savored every moment and almost managed to convince himself that staying in that bed, staring at Cass napping, meant time had stopped. It hadn’t.
Matthias arrived at the house after night fell with a leather case and a warm smile, looked Riot dead in the eye, and said, “The seeker should wait outside.”
Cass looked at Riot, just once, with a look that saidI knowandI’m sorryandtrust meandplease goall compressed into a single second of eye contact. Then he turned away and opened the door to the bedroom and Matthias followed him in and the door closed.
And now Riot stood in the herb garden with the rosemary Honey hated and he couldn’t fucking breathe.
He paced. The front path—eight steps to the gate, eight steps back. The sandals were wrong for pacing. Too loose. Slapping against his heels on every turn. He kicked them off and walked barefoot on the cold flagstones, because the cold was something to feel that wasn’t the other thing he was feeling.
He heard Cass make a sound. Small. Controlled. The sound of his body registering pain put a pressure on Riot’s right hip. Not from outside—from inside.
That’s not mine. That’s—
But it was in his body, so it was his.
It was about then he stopped pacing. He could break down the door. It looked like everything in Springfield Gardens had been pre-fabricated and shipped in, probably from SVI territory, and SVI wasn’t really known for its excellent structural integrity. It would be easy.
But the look Cass gave him…
He walked through the little patch of grass in front of the house, closer to a cracked window that he knew would carry thesounds from inside better, and his legs decided in that moment it was a good time to not work. He just sat there in the grass, next to a cilantro plant that had begun to flower, and tried to focus on the smell of that instead of the scent of blood seeping from the window.
The crying came the same way, with his tear ducts just deciding to do that. His chest heaved and the sound that came out of him was—Christ—it was the sound of a child. Not a man. Not a Berserker. A child. The kind of crying that Brennan Loudon did when they’d strapped him to a table and injected something into his spine without anesthetic and he understood the thing they promised him was not the thing they were doing.
He couldn’t remember crying like that since. He didn’t cry when he woke up, months into the Endeavor program, to find that his roommate had used the screws on the toilet lid to kill himself. Not when more of them killed themselves after the incident with a Beta researcher who got too close. Not when Gensyn declared them deceased. He didn’t cry in even the worst episodes, the ones where he came back to himself covered in someone else’s blood and couldn’t remember whose. He was a weapon and weapons didn’t cry because weapons didn’t have the wiring for it.
But the wiring was back. Being around Cass somehow reconnected that ability in Riot and now that reconnection looked like a six-foot-eight Berserker sitting in an herb garden in Springfield Gardens, sobbing into his hands while someone carved circles into the man he loved.
Pathetic. You’re pathetic. At least a weapon can protect something. You can’t even do that. You’re sitting in the GRASS while he—
The burning in Riot’s chest shifted. A new circle. Lower. Along the ribs.
I’m feeling it. I’m feeling what Matthias is doing to him. I don’t know how and I don’t know why and it doesn’t MATTER because I can feel it and I’m sitting in the GRASS—
He cried hard enough that he had to muffle it against his own knees. The Berserker instincts screamed inside his skull, but the screaming had nowhere to go, because Cass saidtrust meand trust was the only thing keeping Riot’s hands out of Matthias’s throat.
Time passed. He didn’t know how much. The meditation bell rang. The evening light shifted. The crying burned itself out the way a fire burned itself out, not resolved, just exhausted of fuel. He sat in the grass with his face wet and his eyes swollen and hated himself so thoroughly he could pass a Gensyn corporate compliance survey.
Then he heard movement.
Not from inside the house. From the back. A rustle. A hushed voice.
All of the grief and the rage routed into the targeting system as his body shifted fromcollapsed man crying in the grasstothreat responsein under a second. He sprang to his feet and moved around the side of the house before the thought finished forming.
The back of the house had a small patio with more plants in planters, a stone bench, and a trellis with something flowering. And underneath that trellis, half-hidden by the flowering vine—
Sage and Honey.
