He swallowed and winced.
“The first week of the program, nothing took. Nothing. The facilitators reported total failure—it was unprecedented. The Elders brought me in because I was his guide. I knew how to talk to him. I stayed with him every day.” His chest hitched on a sob. “I-I gave in to temptation. Just a few times! Every few days. Between the conditioning exercises. He was... the drug made him compliant and he was already so used to doing what I told him and I—I—”
Every few days.
Just a few times.
Every few days.
Riot did the math because his brain did math when the rest of him was somewhere else, somewhere very still and very dark and very far from the man crying in front of him. The rest of him was with a twenty-four-year-old man whose lack of attraction to his best friend couldn’t be rewritten because he took everything literally had been drugged into compliance by the man who read him bedtime stories. And then that man took advantage of him.
Just a few times. Every few days.
“He doesn’t remember,” Matthias said, as if it were a mercy. “He’s fine. I convinced the Elders to break his pairing with Honey and restructure the algorithm so he’d be paired with me. He would have been cared for. Protected. Loved.”
“You keep using that word,” Riot said.
“Because it’s true. I love him.”
Riot looked at him for a long time. The starlight on the ruined face. The tears. The blood. The absolute sincerity of a man who had raped a drugged young man he was supposed to protect fifteen to twenty times over two months and built an entire theological framework to call it love.
This was the man who told Cass he was deficient because Cass couldn’t make the scars carved into him go away. Who wanted to stamp out his brightness and curiosity and make him fit into a box Elysian Dynamics designed. This man didn’t know Cass at all. Not the way Riot knew him.
Cass was a gentle soul with a bleeding arm and a medical kit who had saidplease don’t kill me,then bandaged a stranger’s knuckles because he couldn’t not help. The one who had followed a scent into one of the worst parts of the Neutral Zone, because his body trusted something his mind hadn’t learned to name yet. The one who saidI’m sorryto furniture and meant it every single time. The one who bit the face of the man who raised him and then apologized for it…
That Cass had looked at Riot tonight and saidplease don’t hurt him.And Riot had said okay.
In that moment, Riot meant it. It wasn’t a lie. Riot never wanted to be a person who lied to Cass.
But he was about to be…
He sat with that, letting it settle into the architecture of what he was about to do. This was not the Berserker’s hot, bright, uncomplicated violence. This was a choice—premeditated, calculated, made with full knowledge of what it would cost. He was going to kill this monster, and then he was going to walk back to the man he loved and lie to him. He was going to tell Cass that Matthias was fine. He was going to say it convincingly. And when Cass asked again—tomorrow, next week, in a month—Riot would repeat the lie with the same steady voice and the samesteady eyes. He would carry the weight of it for the rest of his life because the alternative was letting Matthias live in a world that contained Cass.
That was not going to happen.
Because Riot—Brennan—the man underneath all the modifications and the code name and the years of survival—made a decision with the part of himself that was human, whole, and unenhanced.
Riot took a deep breath, reached down, and took a handful of Matthias’s robes—the white fabric, the sacred garment, the symbol of spiritual authority and transcendence and everything Cass had been taught to revere. He ripped it and the fabric tore with a sound like a gasp. A long strip came away in his hand.
“I’m going to hurt you now,” Riot said in the same voice he’d use to tell someone he was about to set a broken bone.
Matthias’s eyes went wide. “You told Cassiopeia you wouldn’t.”
“I know. He asked me not to,” Riot continued, his voice level, conversational, terrifyingly calm. “I looked at him and I promised. And he believed me because he believes me about everything. Because I’m the one person in his life who has never lied to him.” He paused. “That’s going to change tonight.”
Matthias shook his head, pulling at his arms, his feet kicking at the tree roots.
“I will carry this,” Riot told him. “The lie. The promise I broke. I’ll carry it every day. I’ll carry it when he dreams about this moment and I hold him and tell him everything is fine. I’ll carry it when he’s happy and planting his garden, I will look at my hands and remember what they did tonight.” He kept his voice steady. “I will carry that for him, because he shouldn’t have to carry what you did. Because fifteen to twenty times in two months is enough for one person to carry, and he’s already carrying it even though he doesn’t know what it is.”
He looked down at the strip of white fabric in his hand.
“He can’t see us from here,” Riot said. “That’s your logic, isn’t it? If they don’t know, they’re fine?”
Matthias opened his mouth.
Riot’s hand found his jaw, his thumb on one side of the joint, fingers on the other. He didn’t squeeze—not yet. He just held it the way he’d hold something that needed to be moved from where it was to where it was going to be. He pushed in with his thumb, the mandible sliding sideways with a wet pop that Riot felt through his palm. Matthias tried to scream, but his jaw was dislocated and the scream came out as a gurgling moan that went nowhere.
Riot stuffed the strip of sacred robe into his mouth, past his teeth and tongue, into the opening where air rapidly inhaled and exhaled from. The fabric went in and Matthias’s body did what bodies did—it gagged, it convulsed, it tried to expel the thing blocking its airway. His eyes bulged. The blood vessels in them burst in small red streaks. His legs kicked against the tree roots, the bound hands straining behind the trunk, fingers clawing bark.
