Granny Lu’s hand stayed on Sage’s head, her mouth a thin line.
Then she smacked Sage on the back of the head.
“Three DAYS.” Granny Lu’s voice cracked open and underneath the authority was a woman who had been terrified. “Three days, Sage. Not a radio check. Not a signal. Not a goddamnword.I thought I raised you better than that. My kin ought to have more sense than a lick of—”
“Wait,” Riot said. “Kin?”
Sage didn’t look at him. “It wasn’t relevant.”
“You’re her actual—herbiological—”
“Riot.”
Riot had known Sage for months; they went on patrols together, talked shit together, and he had been stitched up by her more than once after doing something incredibly stupid. He trusted her with his life and with Cass’s life, which was more. Somehow she’d neglected to mention that the woman who ran the Collective—who controlled their resources, their safety, their everything—was hergrandmother.He filed this underthings I will be loudly annoyed about at the earliest opportunityand moved on, because Granny Lu was rolling toward Honey.
“Thisis what you spent three years carrying on about?“ Granny Lu said to Sage. “All that moping and staring at the horizon like some lovesick poet—forthis?”
“Granny…” Sage pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed.
“At least she’s tall,” Granny Lu concluded as Honey stared at the rifle in her lap, wide-eyed, like she was waiting for it to go off.
Riot bit the inside of his cheek to keep himself from laughing, but the laughter he held died as Granny Lu turned toward him.
Cass moved closer to Riot, still standing in front of him like there was something he could do to protect Riot from her. The pattern was becoming clear: anything that approaches Riot, Cass gets between them. Berserker, woman with a gun, angry grandmother, none of it apparently mattered. The math of it was absurd.
Granny Lu looked up at Cass, her brow furrowed, then she smirked. She grabbed her rifle by the barrel and nudged him with the wooden butt of the gun, shifting in her chair to peer around the side of Cass, her eyes locking on Riot’s torn tunic and the edges of the bite mark. “What were you two doing when you bit the big one?” Granny Lu asked.
Cass went scarlet and Riot could feel it in his own ears and face, like he was the one blushing. Granny Lu knew something about the bite, which meant she understood something about what was happening between them.
“Tallulah,” he said in a low voice, his fist curling at his side. Granny Lu narrowed her eyes and held his gaze.
“Sage.” She settled her rifle back across her lap. “Go fetch Dante and Orion. Community center. My office. Now.”
Chapter forty-nine
The Real Thing
Cass
GrannyLu’scommunitycentersmelled like old wood and coffee, and the room she’d put them in had mismatched chairs, a long table, the particular staleness of a space that got used for every kind of conversation a small community needed to have. She’d wheeled herself out saying “Orion asked to handle this and Lord knows I’ve explained it once, ain’t no way I have the patience for round two.”
Cass and Riot sat on one side, Orion and Dante on the other, both of their chairs pressed back against the wall like they were worried the table might find a new location that involved going through them.
Dante was not sitting the way Cass expected a former corporate spy to sit. He was slouched in his chair with one arm draped across the back of Orion’s, his legs stretched out, and he was looking at Cass and Riot with the easy, assessing attention of someone who was comfortable being exactly where he was and didn’t care who knew it. His other hand rested on Orion’s thigh. Orion hadn’t removed it, but from the set of his jaw, he was thinking about it.
Cass leaned into Riot because his body was done pretending it could do anything else. Riot’s arm was around him, solid, and through the wire, Cass could feel anxiety humming under his skin, like fast little jolts of electricity to his major muscle groups.
“So,” Dante said, looking at Riot. “Congratulations. You belong to a princess now, I guess.”
“Dante,” Orion said with a sigh.
“I’m being welcoming.”
“You’re being an asshole.”
“Both can be true.” Dante’s thumb moved on Orion’s thigh, but Orion shoved his hands away. Dante put it back on Orion’s thigh.
“There’s no such thing as a permanent bond,” Riot said, even as his arm tightened around Cass. “That’s corporate bullshit. Contracts. Algorithms. None of it’s permanent.”
