“Subtle,” Riot said as Sage pulled the Jeep off the main road and parked behind a utility shed.
“Shut up.”
“You could have put up a banner. Streamers, maybe.”
“She’s going to find out in ten minutes regardless,” Sage said. “I just want ten minutes.”
The quiet lasted about forty seconds.
Two figures came around the shed fast, and Cass recognized them—the other Berserkers, from Lilac’s house when he had been confused and everything was too much. The one with the burn scars, built like stacked boulders, and the tall, lean one whose face looked like it had never been at risk of smile lines.
“Shit,” Riot said, but he was almost smiling. He squeezed Cass’s shoulder and said, low and fast: “Prepper’s the one with the scars. Stave’s the tall one. Prepper’s going to be loud. Stave’s going to be quiet. Neither of them is going to hurt you.”
Then the back door opened and Prepper grabbed Riot by the front of his tunic and hauled him out of the car.
Cass lunged forward to go after him, but Honey’s hand closed on his good arm and pulled him back. He tumbled sideways across the backseat and through the open door he could see the three Berserkers going down in the dirt—not in a greeting, but something rougher and more fundamental, a tangle of limbs and weight and sounds that weren’t words, but meant things anyway.
“Riot—” Cass pulled against Honey’s grip. His legs were shaky and his head was swimming, but Riot was on the ground and two very large men were on top of him and—
“He’s fine,” Sage said from the front seat. She hadn’t moved. “This is what they do.”
“But they’re hurting him—”
“They’re saying hello. It’s a whole system. Just wait.”
Cass waited. His heart was beating too fast, his good hand was gripping the door frame, ready to move the second it stopped looking like hello.
Chapter forty-eight
Gensyn’s Reject Pile
Riot
“Youstupidsonofa bitch!” Prepper snapped, his voice cracking in a way that didn’t match a man who could bend a car door off its hinges. “Days without a check-in.Again.I thought you were dead. I thought they killed you in that compound and I was going to have to come in there and—”
“I’m fine.”
Prepper punched him in the face.
It was a good punch. Not a full-strength Berserker punch, but more of anI was scared and I’m angry about being scared and nobody taught me a better systempunch.Riot’s head rocked sideways and he came back grinning, blood on his lip, and he tried to get up, but Prepper pinned him to the ground with all the emotional regulation of a drunken child written on his face. Riot liked this. There was no theological framework for what was happening, just a fist and a feeling and the absolute inability to express one without the other.
God, he loved these idiots.
“I deserved that,” Riot said.
“You deserve worse.” Prepper hit him again in the same spot. “That’s for making me think about feelings. You know I hate that.”
Stave was kneeling on Riot’s arms, silent, his face doing nothing, which was Stave’s version of an emotional reunion and was, in its own way, more articulate than Prepper’s punches. Stave didn’t need to sayyou’re alive.He was confirming it with his hands, the way a medic confirmed a pulse.
“Your Omega is seeping through his bandages,” Stave said.
“Thank you, Stave. That’s very helpful.”
“It’s going to need attention.”
“I’m aware.”
Stave’s eyes flashed gold, and he shook his head, taking in a gulp of the night air through his mouth and saying nothing else. For Stave, this was the equivalent of a forty-five-minute therapy session about how a man who’d trained as a surgeon shouldn’t have to fight Berserker triggers every time someone scraped a knee in his vicinity.
