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“Nobody loves the Ruari you saw those three weeks,” Ruari said.

Cassian’s head tilted. “It wasn’t that I didn’t like that Ruari. It just bothered me that I couldn’t cheer you up. I came every day. I brought you food, I talked until my voice went, and none of it made any difference. I kept thinking that if I could just be bright enough, if I could just fill the room up with enough of me, the dark would have to leave, because that’s how light works. Darkness can’t exist in the presence of the Light. But it didn’t work. And I hated that.”

Ruari’s breath snagged. “You shouldn’t have had to feel like that, Cass.”

“I know that now. My love can’t be the light that keeps out the darkness.” He smiled, lopsided. “That was on my first list, actually, on how to love an alpha. It was my Rule Four.”

Ruari remembered the days Cassian had spent performing sunshine at him. He’d lain in sheets he hadn’t changed, unable to lift his head off the pillow, and the brightness had come at him like noise. Then it stopped, and Cassian sat on the edge of the bed and let the room be quiet.

“It’s not the darkness that gets me that way, Cass,” he said. “It’s chemistry. Brain chemistry. I’ve got — there’s a name for it: bipolar disorder. Dr Hartwell diagnosed me four years ago, put me on medication for it, and when I take the medication properly, the episodes are shorter and further apart.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “When I don’t take it, which is what happened those three weeks, my brain does what it does, and there’s not a person alive who can charm it out of that. Not even you, and you’re the brightest person I know.”

“Thank you for telling me, Ruari.”

Cassian reached over the counter and wiped the flour from the side of his cheek with his thumb. The pad of it dragged warm and dry over Ruari’s skin before Cassian’s hand dropped back to his notebook.

“Bye, Ruari,” he said. “Take care of yourself, and take your meds. I’ll keep working on my thinking.”

The bell chimed and Ruari was already moving. He got the bolt across the door, and had the stairs under him, one hand on the rail, hauling the weight the bum knee wouldn’t carry. Halfway up he had to stop. He put his forehead against the wall and breathed through his mouth.

The only thing that got him going again was the thought of the whisky bottle waiting in his kitchen drawer.

Chapter Thirty-One

One week since Cassian had walked out of Proving Ground with his notebook clutched to his chest, and it was a genuine fucking wonder that Raf hadn’t handed in his notice.

Ruari caught himself mid-snap at a woman who’d asked for her sourdough sliced, a perfectly reasonable request he’d taken as a personal affront, and course-corrected into a smile so abrupt she took a step backwards. He carried the loaf to the slicer, fed it through, and stood with his hands flat on the machine while the blades worked. Then he bagged it and passed it across the counter with a nod that was meant to be warm but probably landed closer to unhinged.

The mornings were the worst. Cassian had been his pleasant disruption, the thing that broke the stretch of hours between the four a.m. bake and the lunchtime lull into manageable pieces, and without him Proving Ground was just a room full of bread and strangers.

He wiped down the counter. Restocked the pastry case. Wiped the counter again. Raf watched him from behind the espresso machine, and when a regular started on Villa’s midfield and Ruari’s answers shrank to one-word responses, Raf materialised at his elbow.

“Brioche needs knocking back.”

It didn’t. Ruari had knocked it back twenty minutes ago. But he took himself into the kitchen anyway. Raf had worked out where Ruari’s hands were safest when his mood ran hot: elbow-deep in dough, with a door between him and the paying public.

He drove his fist into the risen brioche and felt the air leave it in a soft, satisfying collapse. The next punch landed harder than it needed to, and the one after that harder still, until the dough was flat and overworked, and his knuckles ached.

His hip flask sat behind the bicarb on the second shelf, tucked where the angle of the door hid it from the pass-through. Ruari checked that Raf was occupied at the till, unscrewed the cap, and took a pull that burned a line from his throat to his sternum. He capped it and slid the flask behind the bicarb.

By noon, the flask was empty. He waited until Raf ducked out for a smoke break, then took the stairs two at a time, bad knee screaming on the turn at the landing, and refilled it from the bottle he kept in the kitchen drawer beneath the tea towels. He poured a measure into the flask, considered the level, and poured a second. The whisky caught the overhead light as it glugged from the neck of the bottle.

He screwed the cap tight, pocketed the flask, and went back downstairs to sell bread.

The second week was worse.

He shagged a woman behind the Elgin on a Thursday night, up against the wall by the bottle bins where the kitchen extractor fan drowned out the noise from inside. She was fit, and at twenty-two he’d have tripped over himself for her. She’d put her hand on his thigh at the bar, and got close enough for him to smell her perfume over the fryer grease, and he’d thought: why not? Why the fuck not?

It took a few goes to get it up at all, and he only managed it by not looking at her, by keeping his eyes on the wet brick over her shoulder while she worked him through his jeans. Her mouth was on his neck, her hand knew exactly what it was doing, and his cock kept losing interest anyway, going soft in her fist twice before he got it in her. He finished with his forehead on the wet brick and the extractor fan roaring six inches from his ear, and it felt muffled, like the orgasm had happened to someone else.

Ruari walked home alone, the cold air doing nothing for the self-loathing sitting low in his gut.

Upstairs, he sat on the edge of the unmade bed with his mobile in his hands and his thumb moving through his photo gallery.

He looked at Cassian eating a fig at the market stall, juice running down his chin, grinning at the camera with his eyes half-shut. Cassian asleep on Ruari’s sofa with one sock on and one sock off, Tangfastics wrappers scattered across his chest like confetti. A blurry overhead shot of Tala in her high chair, captioned with five exclamation marks and no words. Cassian and Raf pulling identical faces at a burnt batch of financiers. Cassian holding up a sourdough boule like a trophy, flour in his eyebrows.

Every third photo of his was of Cassian. The ones between were Cassian’s food photos forwarded to him, Diwa’s Filipino dishes, or the latest outfits Colin had bought Tala online.

His thumb hovered over one. Cassian crouched beside a Bernese mountain dog in the private garden square near Ledbury Road, both of them looking at the camera with the same open-mouthed delight, Cassian’s hand buried in the dog’s chest fur.