“With Honey. Your compatibility assessment was unusual from the start, and we think—” Brother Matthias’s hand settled on his lower back and rubbed gentle circles into his skin, which was a relief since Cass felt the residual edges of a heat cramp trying to build. “We think the difficulty may not have been your failure, Cassiopeia. The pairing itself may have been incorrect.”
Not my failure.
Eight years. He’d been carrying this for eight years—the weight of being the person whose body wouldn’t cooperate, whose heart wouldn’t follow the algorithm, who was the first and only person to ever fail Chrysalis, because something inside him was broken so badly that not even the Elders could fix it…and Brother Matthias was saying it wasn’t him.
“It wasn’t because of me?” His voice was very small.
“The algorithm made an error. The compatibility model matches members with members, peers with peers. But it doesn’t account for all possible pairings.” The hand on his back stopped moving. “It doesn’t account for pairing regular members with Elders.”
The hope that had been rising—enormous, bright, the biggest feeling he’d had in years within the walls of Springfield Gardens—dropped. All at once. Everything went cold, his arms and his legs and his fingers, like someone opened a window inside him and the warmth was pouring out.
He means himself.The thought was so simple and concrete that even Cass couldn’t misunderstand it.Brother Matthias wants to be paired with me the way Honey is paired with me. But I want Riot paired with me because that feels right…Cass’s mind kept trying to put the idea somewhere and there was nowhere for it to go, like trying to fit a fork in a drawer that was only shaped for spoons.
“Someone who has guided you since childhood,” Brother Matthias said, gentle and certain. “Someone who knows your soul better than anyone.”
Cass thought about Riot.
Not on purpose—his mind just reached for the thing it needed and the thing it needed was Riot. Even though they hadn’t known each other as long, everything about Riot felt right. Riot knew his soul. Riot didn’t talk down to him. Riot had never hurt him on purpose and he always apologized when he did it accidentally. He thought about Riot’s gentle hands the last time he was like this, bleeding and in his undergarments, running through the hotel…and then felt the all-too-familiar sensation of slick soaking through his undergarments.
“Cassiopeia.” Brother Matthias went still. His voice was different, still warm, but heavier, and Cass recognized the sound because it was the same kind of sound Riot’s voice made whenhis eyes would start to glow. “Did you experience your heat while you were away?”
“It—it might have—”
“Of course. That’s why the energy pathways are so damaged. Don’t worry. I know how to fix this,” Brother Matthias said. His hands resumed rubbing those gentle circles on his lower back, but they began to move, lower than before. The way Riot’s hands would move over his skin.
No. That’s….
“What are you doing?” Cass squeaked out. “That’s not—you don’t usually—”
He tried to pull back, but Brother Matthias’s arms held him tighter. “It’s all right. This is part of the release. The energy has settled deep—”
“No.” The word came from the same place that drove glass into a stranger’s arm at the roadblock, a strange animal part that felt like he was in danger despite knowing this should be a safe place. “No, this isn’t—stop, please let go of me.”
“Cassiopeia, the healing—”
“Please let go of me.”
The arms didn’t move. The voice stayed gentle: “I understand this is frightening. The contamination doesn’t want to be released. The resistance is the negative energy.”
He’d heard those words every session. Every time it hurt and he wanted it to stop and it didn’t, because the words made the hurt make sense. The pain is negative energy leaving. The fear is contamination. The hands on his body are helping. The man holding him loved him.
But Riot stopped. In the bathroom at Lilac’s house, when everything was too much—Cass said stop and Riot stopped, even when his eyes were gold and his body was stronger and the things inside him made it hard to stop. He stopped.
Brother Matthias wasn’t stopping.
The anger arrived without warning, bright and hot in his chest, and it was his. Cass had never felt it before, not like this.Not when he was being teased growing up, not when people were cruel and mean in the Neutral Zone, not when Granny Lu called him trash like he wasn’t standing right there. He was fine with being known as slow, as being too dumb to be a proper Elysian, and needing things explained twice. Those things didn’t make him angry.
But Brother Matthias was doing something he shouldn’t be doing, and Cass asked him to stop, and he wasn’t stopping and it was making him really fucking angry.
“Stop!”
“Shhh, it’s okay, Cassiopeia, you can trust me,” Brother Matthias murmured, crushing Cass to his chest as his hands slipped below the waistband of his underwear.
This isn’t right.
Cass surged up and he bit down with everything he had, right on his cheek. Brother Matthias cried out, releasing Cass as he jerked backwards, a hand clamped over his face, blood running through his fingers.
“Don’t touch me!” Cass snapped, reaching for his robes as tears rolled down his cheeks. “Those parts of me are not for you!”
