Cass’s eyes drifted to Matthias one more time, tied to the tree, and something crossed his face—grief, anger, love, and the ruins of all three. Then the drug pulled him back under and his eyes went soft and his head settled against Riot’s shoulder again. They started walking, letting the muffled protests of a man who didn’t deserve to live and the beautiful prison wall of Springfield Gardens fade with every step.
They were only two hundred meters away, maybe a little more, when Matthias’s voice cut through the night air. “Cassiopeia! Cassiopeia, you need to come back—it’s not safe—your soul is at risk of permanent harm—Cassiopeia,please—”
Cass stirred in Riot’s arms.
“Don’t listen,” Riot whispered, pressing another kiss to Cass’s forehead, as though he could soothe him back to sleep.
“Down,” he said, thick and slow, the word costing him. “I want—I can walk.”
Riot looked at Cass. His eyes were barely open, but Matthias was still yelling. He needed to do something about it. He gently set Cass down, waiting for Honey and Sage to brace him before he took a step back.
“I’m going to go fix the gag,” Riot said.
Sage looked at him.
“Just the gag,” he said. “That’s all. We need the time. If the safety guides hear him yelling—”
“Riot.” Sage glared at him for a moment, then turned to face the road. “We’re going to keep going. Just catch up when you’re done.”
He didn’t wait for her to possibly change her mind. He turned and walked back along the road, his strides long and quick, and behind him he heard Honey murmuring to Cass. They could handle him for a little bit.
Chapter forty-six
Meditate on Fixing It
Riot
HefoundMatthiasworkingthe gag with his jaw, twisting his head against the bark. The white cloth was halfway down his chin. His voice was still going—hoarse now, cracking, the desperate repetition of a man who believed if he said the right words in the right order, the world would rearrange itself back to the way it was supposed to be.
“—needs to come back, the contamination will destroy his capacity for spiritual—”
Riot crouched in front of him.
Matthias stopped talking.
Up close, his eyes—the eyes that had been calculating since the first time they passed each other in the Neutral Zone and Matthias walked out of Cass’s hotel room smelling like blood and arousal—were wide, wet and stripped of everything except the thing at the bottom that had been driving all of it.
“Do you really think,” Riot began, “that he would be better off with you?”
“Yes.” Matthias said it with no hesitation, with the certainty of a fanatic or a parent, or the place where those two things overlapped. “I know him. I’ve known him since he was a child. I know what he needs. You’ve known him for weeks.”
“How many times?”
Matthias blinked. “How many times what?”
“You know what I’m asking.” Riot’s voice was quiet. Level. He could hear his own heartbeat. It was slow. “How many times did you rape him during Chrysalis?”
The word landed on the dark air and sat there.
“I have never—”
Riot hit him. Twice. Left hand, right hand, the impacts precise and controlled—not the Berserker’s wild obliteration, but the clean, targeted strikes of a man who understood exactly how much force to apply and where. Matthias’s head rocked sideways, came back, rocked the other way. Blood burst from his lip. A tooth shifted.
“Don’t lie to me again,” Riot said. “How many times did you drug and rape him? Because I’m going to be the one holding him when he has nightmares about it. I need to know, even if he never figures out what those nightmares are about.”
Matthias was crying the open, ugly cry of a person in pain who had never learned how to manage it because he’d always beenthe one holding the tools. The kind with blood and tears and snot and his breathing hitching in his chest.
“Chrysalis never worked on him,” Matthias croaked. “The conditioning—the coded language, the guided restructuring—it’s designed to work on how people process metaphor and social cues. Cassiopeia’s mind doesn’t process that way. He’s too literal. The frameworks that rewire everyone else just... bounced off him.”
