Chapter 19 #2
Had he eaten? Riot genuinely couldn’t remember.
There’d been... something, at some point.
Maybe. Before the hotel. Before everything narrowed down to Cass.
Nutritional self-care had, apparently, been one of the first casualties of whatever was happening to him.
Along with rational decision-making, self-preservation instincts, and any claim to professional competence.
“That’s not the point,” Stave said. “The point is we need to know if this is a supply problem or an us problem.”
Mod decay.
The words hung unspoken in the air between them.
They’d all talked about it, late at night when the suppressants were wearing thin and the modifications felt like they were crawling under their skin.
The enhancements hadn’t been designed for longevity—they’d been designed for corporate utility, and when that utility ended, Gensyn hadn’t exactly left an instruction manual, or a “Sorry We Ruined Your Biology” support group.
They had always known they were living on borrowed time. The question was always how much.
But Riot couldn’t make himself care about that right now. Not with Cass immediate and real and right there, separated from him by thirty feet of hallway and his own rapidly deteriorating self-control.
“I’m not falling apart,” Riot said through clenched teeth.
“You’re standing in Lilac’s living room with your eyes glowing and your hands bleeding,” Stave observed. “That’s at least partially apart.”
“Fuck off.”
“Compelling counterargument.”
Prepper moved further into the room, positioning himself against the far wall—as far from the hallway as he could get while still being present. Giving Riot space. It was such a familiar gesture, such a them gesture, that something in Riot’s mind loosened a fraction.
They’d learned this dance over years of living in each other’s pockets. How to exist around each other when their instincts were riding them hard. How to give space without abandoning. How to be family when every instinct was screaming that everyone in the room was either a threat or competition.
“Could just be stress,” Prepper offered, still rubbing the scar tissue on his face. “You’ve been running hard lately. Suppressants work less good when you’re burnt out.”
“Suppressants don’t work as well,“ Stave corrected absently.
“Fuck off with your grammar, I’m trying to be supportive.”
“Try harder.”
Despite everything—the jealousy, the desperation, the pressure of real life crushing in on him—Riot felt his mouth twitch.
This was them. This was his family. Stave with his sarcasm and his complete refusal to express concern in any way that might be mistaken for warmth.
Prepper with his rough-edged earnestness and his determination to be emotionally available even when the modifications were making it physically difficult to stand still.
They’d survived the lab together, survived the abandonment, survived ten years of scraping by on the margins of a world that wanted them dead or controlled.
They’d also survived the day they tried to take Orion and the shame of what they’d almost done, what they’d become.
Lilac burned half of Prepper’s face off to stop them, and now here they all were, standing in her living room like it was normal.
Like family. Which, Riot supposed, was what family meant when everyone in it had been manufactured in a lab and then returned to sender.
We’re better now. We have to be better now.
“I don’t think it’s mod decay,” Riot said finally, because he owed them honesty even if he didn’t have answers.
Even if every second of this conversation felt like holding a door shut against a flood.
“It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like.
..” He struggled for words that weren’t just Cass Cass Cass.
“Like my body decided the suppressants were optional. Like it just... stopped recognizing the chemicals.”
“That’s not better,” Prepper said. “That’s maybe worse.”
“I know.”
“We should test ours,” Stave said to Prepper. “Make sure the batch is still viable. If Riot’s failing and we’re next—”
”I know,“ Riot repeated, sharper this time. He didn’t want to talk about batches and viability and contingency plans.
The pull toward the hallway was so strong it felt physical—a hook behind his sternum, a gravitational anomaly localized entirely in a five-foot-eight Omega who smelled like caramel and cinnamon and the complete disintegration of everything Riot had built to keep himself functional. “But right now I can’t exactly—”
He heard Cass’s voice again, clearer this time. Upset. Riot was moving before he could stop himself.
“Riot, no—” Lilac grabbed for his arm.
He shoved her back and kept going. He just needed to check. Just needed to see that Cass was okay. Just needed—
“Brennan Loudon!”
Riot stopped mid-step.
His whole body had gone rigid, frozen by two names he hadn’t heard spoken aloud in years. Not since the lab.
He turned slowly.
Stave was still by the wall, arms crossed, his expression utterly flat. No sympathy in those blue eyes. No hesitation. Just the cold practicality of someone who’d identified a problem and selected the most efficient solution.
“Sit the fuck down, Brennan,” Stave said, “and use your actual brain for five fucking seconds.”
“Don’t—” Riot’s voice came out strangled. “Don’t call me that.”
“Why? Because it reminds you that you used to be someone who thought before he acted?”
Brennan died in that lab. Brennan was an idiot who trusted Gensyn’s promises and volunteered for enhancement and woke up six months later as something else entirely.
The fact that Stave knew this—knew exactly where to aim, exactly which name would cut through the noise—was either a testament to their bond or a compelling argument for never letting anyone know him well enough to weaponize his past.
Stave pointed at the couch. “Sit. Down.”
Riot’s legs folded. He didn’t decide to sit—his body just did it, dropping onto Lilac’s worn couch like a puppet with cut strings. His hands kept shaking.
“That’s not my name anymore,” he said to his bloody palms.
“No,” Stave agreed, moving to sit on the coffee table across from him.
His knees almost touched Riot’s—close, grounding, the kind of proximity that would have felt threatening from anyone else.
“It’s not. But Riot’s about to do something monumentally stupid, so I figured I’d try appealing to whoever’s left underneath. ”
Prepper had moved closer too, settling against the arm of the couch in that easy, familiar way.
Present without crowding. Support without smothering.
They’d done this for each other a hundred times—talked each other down from the edge, reminded each other that the modifications weren’t all they were.
It was, Riot supposed, the closest thing any of them had to therapy.
Cheaper, certainly. And with more swearing.
“Talk to us,” Prepper said quietly. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”
Everything. Nothing. Too much to articulate and not enough of it rational.
“I can’t leave him,” Riot said finally. The words felt torn out of him, a confession he hadn’t meant to make.
“I know that doesn’t make sense. I know I barely know him.
But something’s—” He broke off, frustrated by his own inability to explain.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me. And I don’t care. I just know I can’t leave.”
“That’s biology talking,” Stave said. “Omega in heat, your suppressants failing, of course you feel like you can’t leave.”
“It’s not just that.”
“How do you know?”
Riot didn’t have an answer. He just knew—the same way he knew his own name, the same way he knew which of his brothers was approaching by the sound of their footsteps.
This thing with Cass wasn’t just biology.
It was something else. Something he didn’t have words for, which was inconvenient for a man whose original skill set had been built entirely around understanding psychological patterns.
“I don’t,” he admitted. “I just... feel it.”
Stave’s expression didn’t change, but something flickered in his eyes. Maybe skepticism. Maybe something else. “Feelings are unreliable,” he said. “Especially ours.”
“I know.”
“You’re going to do something stupid anyway, aren’t you?”
Riot met his brother’s flat stare. “Probably.”
For a long moment, no one spoke. Then Prepper let out a heavy sigh and clapped a hand on Riot’s shoulder—brief, solid, grounding. “Well,” he said, “at least you’re honest about it.”
Lilac sat down beside Riot and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, we’re here to help,” she started. She began speaking rapidly in hushed Spanish to him, but Riot didn’t hear a word of it. He was too focused on the sounds coming from the room, the smells, the need—
“Riot!”
Cass was stumbling through the doorway from the hall, golden hair wild, his skin flushed and his hazel eyes scanning the room with frantic intensity.
His robes were still soaked through, clinging to his body in ways that made Riot’s mouth go dry and his brain go quiet.
Behind him, Dante and Orion skidded into view, their eyes wide as they were greeted with all three Berserkers.
“Cass, wait—” Dante started.
Every Berserker in the room went still as Cass crossed the remaining distance—Riot felt Stave and Prepper tense, felt their predatory attention snap into focus. An Omega in full heat, running toward them, vulnerable and desperate and available—
Claim him. Pin him down. Show them all—
Cass didn’t even glance at them.
He didn’t look at Stave with his dangerous stare, or Prepper with his burned face, or Dante with his Alpha competence, or Orion with his fellow-Omega understanding. He looked at Riot. Only at Riot.
And then he crashed into him.