“I know.”
“So…when we did sex and I bit him— and it was right when we—” He covered his face. The last time they had discussed the intimate things with Orion and Dante, Riot looked like he was about to burst into flames and Cass knew those things were private…but also everyone in this room now knew what Cass and Riot had been doing when the bite happened.
“Don’t—you don’t have to explain,” Orion said. “Same thing happened to me. We were together and I bit him and I didn’t plan it. My body just found his neck and I—”
“Bit down like you were trying to take a chunk out of me,” Dante finished. He said it with the fond, slightly awed tone of someone describing a natural disaster they’d survived and would happily survive again. “Best moment of my life, for the record.”
“Nobody asked,” Orion said.
“I’m providing context.”
Cass lowered his hand enough to look at Orion through his fingers. “You didn’t know what you were doing either?”
“Not a clue. Just instinct. My mouth went to a spot on his neck and every cell in my body saidbiteand I did.” Orion’s jaw was tight, but his eyes were honest. “The Omega’s body knows. You can’t accidentally do it with someone you don’t want. It’s—it’s like a safety lock. The deepest one.”
Cass thought about the cellar. It wasn’t scary or wrong, it was the thing he’d been reaching for since he was sixteen and kneeling on a mat being told the algorithm would find him his match. Even with the discomfort of that night, everything about it felt right.
“The bond is permanent,” Orion said. “As far as we know. Once the bite completes it, there’s no undoing it.”
Cass looked at Riot and smiled. “Good.”
Riot’s jaw worked, his brow furrowed, but when he caught Cass looking at him, he smiled back.
Dante’s hand went to his own neck and pressed it, and his eyes went half-lidded with a sound that was quiet and private and probably should not have been made at a table with other people present.
“Jesus Christ,” Orion said, rolling his eyes. “Nothere.”
“I was demonstrating a point.”
“You were getting off at a community table.”
“The bite mark stays sensitive,” Dante said to Riot, completely unembarrassed, his fingers still on the spot. “Permanently. It becomes a point of—let’s call it heightened receptivity.”
“Let’s call it what it is,” Orion said. “He gets hard when I touch it. Or when he touches it. Or when he thinks about me touching it. It’s like a button. A really inconvenient button in a really obvious location.”
Dante removed his hand from his neck like someone putting down a dessert they weren’t finished with. “It’s not a button.”
“It’s absolutely a button.”
Cass thought about the spot on Riot’s neck, what might happen if he touched it, and immediately felt a warmth pull at the wire. Riot’s hand found his knee under the table and pressed.
“Does the emotional stuff work both ways?” Cass asked, biting the inside of his lip as that warmth settled in his belly.
“The bleed-through,” Orion said. “Yeah. It goes both ways. And it gets stronger. You’ll be able to send things intentionally after a while. Calm. Comfort. Get the fuck away. Whatever you need him to feel.”
“I think I’ve already done that,” Cass said. “He was…having Berserker issues, and I was able to help him calm down.”
Orion and Dante exchanged a look. The kind of look that saidthat’s faster than we expectedwithout either of them saying it.
“How does it work for you?” Orion asked. “With a Berserker.”
“He’s always gentle with me,” Cass said. Orion’s eyes drifted down to his neck and Cass added quickly, “Most of the time.”
Dante made a sound that might have been a laugh, but Orion elbowed him again before speaking. “I know all of this sounds crazy. I didn’t believe it either, but we can ask Granny Lu for the book and show you—”
“I don’t care about the reason,” Cass said quickly, the words coming out the way things came out when he found the simple thing underneath all the complicated things: not loudly, just clear. “I don’t care about stages or enzymes or glands. I know I love him and he loves me. That’s all that matters, right?”
The room went quiet.
