27. Unauthorized Access
Chapter twenty-seven
Unauthorized Access
Cass
There was a door in his mind that he didn’t open.
It had been there for months, a heavy thing, made of dark wood or maybe metal, with a weight behind it that pressed against the frame.
Sometimes he could feel it there, at the edges of his thoughts, when Brother Matthias talked about Chrysalis or when he tried to remember exactly what had happened during those hazy weeks when he’d been so hungry and tired and wrong.
The door stayed shut. It was easier that way.
When he’d tried to push on it before, curious and confused, wanting to understand why his memories had holes in them, it hurt.
Not body-hurt. Head-hurt. The kind of pain that made his vision swim and his stomach turn and his thoughts scatter like startled birds.
So he left it alone. Everyone had doors they didn’t open. That was normal. That was fine.
But tonight, in the warm dark of Lilac’s guest room with Riot’s arm heavy across his waist and the silver circlet on the dresser catching moonlight as he fell asleep, something was different.
The door was cracked open.
Not much. Just a sliver. Barely enough to notice. But Cass could feel it—a whisper of cold air against his dreaming mind, a pressure that hadn’t been there before.
He should turn away. He knew he should turn away.
Instead, he drifted closer.
The sounds came first. Muffled, distant, like hearing voices from underwater. A low murmur that might have been words. A rhythm that might have been breathing. Cass strained to hear, pulled by something he couldn’t name, something that felt like fingers hooked into his chest and tugging.
“—have to be thorough, Brother Cassiopeia.”
Brother Matthias’s voice. Calm. Measured. The way it always sounded during all the times he’d held the punch tool and explained that pain was just impurity leaving.
But there was something underneath the calm. Something thick and heavy, like honey gone rotten.
Cass’s dream-self reached the door. His hand pressed flat against the wood without him deciding to move it. The surface was warm. It shouldn’t have been warm.
“Good. That’s—yes.”
A sound leaked through the crack. Low. Guttural. Not his voice.
And then—
Phantom pressure. Somewhere in his body that didn’t exist in this dream, in a place he couldn’t locate or name. Like an echo of sensation bleeding through the walls between sleeping and waking, between now and then.
Cass’s stomach lurched. He tried to pull his hand away from the door but it wouldn’t move, wouldn’t obey, and the crack was widening on its own now, inch by terrible inch—
“I feel sick.” He heard his own voice, distant and distorted. “Please. I feel so sick.”
“That means it’s…it’s working.”
The crack was wide enough to see through now. Cass didn’t want to look. Every instinct screamed at him to turn away, to run, to slam the door shut before—
He looked.
White room. White sheets. A thin healer’s cot that seemed too narrow, too exposed.
And himself.
Where are the healers? I don’t remember this.
His hair was pulled back from his face, like someone had tied it, gathered it away from where it might fall. His skin was flushed an ugly red, sheened with sweat that caught the clinical light. His eyes—
His eyes were wrong.
Glassy. Unfocused. Staring at nothing with the blank emptiness of a doll.
His mouth hung slack, and there was bile on his chin, over the corner of the cot, dripping into a bucket on the floor that was already half full.
He was leaning over the edge of the cot, shoulders heaving with dry retches that produced nothing.
Where are my robes?
Brother Matthias’s voice seeped through the door again, distant and watery. “Almost there. The earthly attachments run so deep in you.”
“I don’t feel good,” the version of himself on the cot slurred and heaved again. A thin whine escaped his slack mouth, animal and broken.
And then he looked up, those glassy eyes finding the crack in the door with real Cass watching. For one horrible moment, they focused, sharp with something that might have been recognition, might have been warning, might have been a plea.
“Close the door.” He heaved again, his hands gripping the edge of the cot. “Close the door. Close the door. CLOSE THE FUCKING—”
His voice cut off, his body jerking forward on the cot as Brother Matthias made a weird sound.
Cass slammed the door shut.
The force of it reverberated through his skull with a spike of pain so sharp it yanked him out of sleep.
But the bedroom was wrong. Everything was wrong. There were hands on him and weight pressing down and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t—
He screamed.
His body moved without permission—thrashing, clawing, desperate to get away. His elbow connected with something solid that let out a grunt of pain. Hands grabbed at his wrists and he fought harder, blind with terror, still feeling the echo of something pressing inside his skull.
“Cass! Cass! It’s me—stop—it’s Riot—”
Strawberries.
The scent cut through the panic like a blade through smoke. Strawberries and cream and cordite. Riot. Safe. Riot. Safe.
Cass stopped fighting. He went limp so suddenly he would have collapsed forward on the bed if Riot hadn’t been holding him up.
“There you go.” Riot’s voice was steady, but there was something underneath it. Something strained. “You’re okay. You’re with me. You’re safe.”
Cass was shaking. His whole body shook so hard his teeth chattered as he looked up and saw a red mark blooming on Riot’s cheekbone. Cass had hit him. He’d hit Riot. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—I couldn’t tell it was you—”
“It’s okay.” Riot’s voice was gentle. “Did you have a bad dream?”
“The door was open.” Cass’s head was pounding and the phantom sensation was still clinging to him, fading but there, wrong but there. “I saw—there was a cot—and I was—”
His stomach lurched.
Cass clapped a hand over his mouth and scrambled out of bed, legs tangled in sheets, knees hitting the floor hard as he darted toward the bathroom. He made it to the toilet just in time, his body heaving, bringing up nothing but bile and fear.
Footsteps behind him. Riot’s hands, reaching for his hair, gathering it back from his face and Cass flinched so violently he nearly cracked his skull on the toilet rim.
“Sorry—shit—sorry.” Riot’s hands retreated immediately. “I won’t touch your hair. I’m right here. I won’t touch.”
Cass couldn’t answer. He was still heaving, his body trying to turn itself inside out, tears and snot streaming down his face. The tile was freezing under his bare knees. The phantom pressure was finally fading, finally leaving, but the wrongness lingered like a stain.
When the heaving stopped, Cass slumped against the toilet, too hollowed out to move. His head was pounding—the warning throb of the door being pushed on—and his throat burned from bile. A cool washcloth pressed against the back of his neck. Cass flinched again, but less this time.
It’s Riot. Just Riot.
“Better?”
“I don’t know.” Cass’s voice came out wrecked. “I don’t—I saw—”
“What did you see?” Riot’s hand was steady on the washcloth, but Cass could feel the tension radiating off him.
“Behind the door.” Cass pressed his palms against his closed eyes, trying to find words for things that didn’t have words. “I was on a cot. In a healing room. I was sick—I kept throwing up—and my hair was tied back—and—there were no healers. There are always healers…”
He stopped. His head pounded harder.
“And what?” Riot’s voice was still controlled, but barely. Cass could hear the cracks.
“Only Brother Matthias was there, but I couldn’t see him.” Cass’s breath hitched. “He kept saying things—that he had to be thorough—that the impurity was leaving—and there was—”
“There was what, Cass?”
“I don’t know how to—” Cass shook his head, frustrated. “Something felt wrong. And I was sick and my eyes were empty and I couldn’t make it stop and there was a sound—”
“What kind of sound?”
Cass’s head was splitting now. “I don’t know. Low sounds. Like—” He tried to think, tried to find a comparison, but his brain kept sliding away from the memory like water off glass. “I don’t know. I don’t understand why I can’t remember—”
Riot was silent. Too silent. Cass forced himself to look up.
What he saw made his breath catch.
Riot’s face had gone to stone. Not the hot anger Cass had seen before—this was cold. Frozen. His eyes had that flat predator quality, the Berserker watching from just beneath the surface, and his hands—his hands were shaking. Trembling with the effort of not doing something.
“Riot?”
“I’m okay.” The words came out rough. Wrong. Riot closed his eyes, and Cass watched him breathe—slow, deliberate, the way someone breathed when they were trying very hard not to break something. “I’m okay. Keep talking.”
The door in his mind was rattling, trying to open, and the pain was so bad he could barely see.
“No more.” Cass pressed his hands over his ears, childish and desperate. “I can’t. Please. My head hurts so much and the door is trying to open and I can’t—”
Riot’s arms came around him.
Not grabbing. Not demanding. Just—there. Solid warmth, the steady beat of a heart that was pounding too fast, giving away the rage that Riot’s voice was hiding.
“Okay,” Riot said into Cass’s hair. “Okay. You don’t have to tell me. Not right now. I’ve got you.”
They stayed like that for a long moment—Cass slumped against the toilet, Riot curled around him on the cold bathroom floor, both of them shaking.
“Honey,” Cass said when he was certain he wouldn’t throw up again.
Riot’s arms tightened around him. “What about her?”
“She’s still there. If she has to—if someone makes her sick—” He didn’t have words for the shape of his fear.
“Hey.” Riot pulled back enough to look at him, and some of the frozen rage had thawed. His hands came up to cup Cass’s face, thumbs wiping at the tears. “Look at me. Look at me.”
Cass looked.