“Riot, don’t.”
Riot’s hand was on the door handle. He still hadn’t turned around.
Cass tried to find the wire on purpose, reaching for the strange connection the way he’d reach for something in the dark.Please. Please turn around. Please stay.
He didn’t know if it worked. He didn’t know how any of it worked. He only knew that a breath later, Riot’s knuckles had gone white on the door handle and he did not open it.
“Please don’t leave,” Cass said softly.
Riot slammed a fist into the sink. The sound was enormous in the small bathroom: porcelain cracking, the basin splitting, a pipe bursting somewhere inside the wall. Cold water erupted from whatever broke, spraying across the tile, hitting the mirror, soaking everything as more of the sink fell to the floor and shattered.
Cass flinched. The whole body kind where his shoulders came up, his head ducked, and his hand came up in a reflex that saidloud noise, someone angry, anger is dangerous.Water hit his face and he was flinching from something the man he loved did, and the anger was still in his chest where Cass discovered it earlier, sitting right next to his fear the way all his emotions sat: side by side, refusing to be separated, all insisting on being true at the same time.
Riot turned, eyes blazing, but not with the flatness this time.
Cass was learning which gold meant what. There was the gold that was hunger, and the gold that was protection, and the gold that was the flat kind that didn’t know who Cass was anymore.
And there was this gold. A new one. The one that looked like light spilling in from behind a door that didn’t quite fit its frame.
“Brennan,” Cass said it the way he’d said it to the mask at the roadblock, because Riot was the modifications and the mask and the claws, but Brennan was the person who came back. Heknew that then, somehow. He knew it more now. “Brennan. I’m scared.”
Riot’s face fell.
“I’m scared,” Cass said, his lower lip quivering, “and there’s something in me from the needle and I don’t know what it is. It’s making it hard to—I need you to stay. I need—” He made himself slow down. He needed to get this right while he still could. “I needyou. The part that’s still in there.”
He looked at Riot, blinking away his tears so he could see him clearly.
“I’m not scared of your eyes like this…I need you to know that. That part—it’s a you that’s having a hard time, but it’s still you. The part that scares me is when there’s no one in it. When it’s just—” He tried to find the word, but the creeping warmth was making his words move through honey. “When it’s flat. I can’t—” His voice cracked. He let it. “I can’t do whatever comes next if the part I love isn’t here.”
Riot didn’t move. The water kept spraying. The broken pipe hissed.
Then his shoulders dropped.
Riot crossed the bathroom and pulled Cass against his chest, careful of the sling and his bandages, and just held him. Riot’s heart pounded against Cass’s ear—fast, hard, the heartbeat of someone who had just walked himself back from a place he might not have returned from. Cass pressed his face into the wet fabric of Riot’s tunic to muffle another sob that snuck out of his mouth.
“I’m here,” Riot said into Cass’s hair. “I’m here. I’m not going out there without you.”
“Promise me.”
Riot made a sound, not quite a laugh, not quite a sob—it was both of those and neither. “I promise.”
There were three even, measured, knocks at the door, like the person knocking knew the two people on the other side of the door were in the middle of something and didn’t care because there was a timeline.
“It’s me.” Sage cracked open the door, her arm appearing just enough to drop Cass’s robes and underclothes. “You have about four minutes before someone comes to see why the plumbing is screaming. Get dressed. We’re moving.”
She shut the door a little too hard.
“Your eyes are still gold,” Cass said after a moment, tracing the hollow beneath Riot’s eye with his finger.
“I know.”
“They might not go green before we have to run.”
“I know.”
“I don’t care what color they are,” Cass said. “I need you to know that. I don’t care if they’re gold the whole way out. I just don’t want them flat and blank, okay? The blank is the part that leaves.”
“The blank is the part that leaves,” Riot repeated softly, like it was the first time anyone had made that distinction. He pressed his forehead against Cass’s, his eyes closed. “Okay. Okay. Let’s get you dressed. Let’s go.”
