33. Earthly Aggression
Chapter thirty-three
Earthly Aggression
Cass
The man sitting next to him was not the man who had woken up next to him this morning.
A dull metal mask covered Riot’s face, scratched and dented from use that Cass didn’t want to think about.
Behind a fine mesh over the eye slits, Riot’s eyes were visible but muted, the gold already beginning to overtake the green and filtered into something dimmer. Something that might pass for normal.
Clawed gloves covered his hand, the fingers ending in curved talons, each one about three inches long and sharpened to a point that caught the afternoon light.
He looked like the illustrations on the classroom wall at Springfield Gardens.
The beast that walked on two legs; earthly aggression given form.
Cass had grown up being taught to fear exactly this—the Alpha at its most violent, the thing that transcendence was supposed to lift them beyond.
But it was still Riot. Under the mask, under the metal. The same hands that had braided flowers into his hair. The same voice that had said I love you too.
Cass’s stomach was tight and cold and he did not like any of this.
“Stay in the car,” Riot said. His voice through the mask was flat and metallic, stripped of the warmth Cass had learned to listen for. “Windows up. Doors locked.”
“What if—”
“If this goes wrong, get low and stay low until Sage handles it.”
Riot got out, the walkie tucked into his back pocket.
The sedan rocked with the absence of his weight.
Cass watched through the windshield as metal and menace walked toward the blockade with a steady, unhurried stride that said I am not afraid of you, and you should think carefully about whether you are afraid of me.
Three vehicles blocked the road ahead—trucks arranged between the concrete shoulders of two overpasses, creating a funnel with no room to pass.
Welded armor plating, scratch markings, and a general atmosphere of functional menace.
They looked like the kind of vehicles people built when they had to make do with what they could salvage from leftovers.
Five men stood around the trucks. Maybe six—Cass thought he saw movement inside one of the cabs but couldn’t be sure.
All big. All Alpha, from the way they held themselves—that specific looseness in the shoulders that meant confident rather than relaxed, with rifles slung casually, knives at belts, and a baseball bat wrapped in wire leaning against a truck bumper like it was resting between shifts.
A man detached from the group and walked out to meet Riot halfway.
He was big—not Riot’s height, but wider, thicker, the kind of build that came from years of physical labor and violence in roughly equal proportion.
Scarred. A grizzled beard that might have been brown once and was now the color of used dishwater.
His eyes were sharp and assessing, tracking the mask, the claws, the height.
What he didn’t do—and Cass noticed this with something like confusion—was attack.
He held up one hand. Palm out. Universal: I want to talk.
Cass could hear them through the cracked rear window. Barely. The wind was carrying their voices toward him in fragments.
“—serious hardware. Syndicate?”
“—matter?”
“—pays good money for escaped—”
“Not running. Passing through.”
A pause. Then the man—Cole, he said his name was Cole—nodded. Quoted a toll. Riot produced money. Cole counted it. Nodded again. Radios crackled. Directions were given—road clear through to “ED freak territory,” Jennings on the other side, they’d radio ahead.
It was civil. It was routine. It was, Cass realized with a confusion that felt almost like relief, nothing like what the Elders had taught him about Berserkers. Cole was running a toll operation the way a merchant ran a shop. Business.
Cass’s shoulders loosened. Just a fraction. Just enough.
The car window exploded.
There was glass everywhere—in his hair, on his skin, across the seat. An arm reached through the broken window, huge and scarred, closed around Cass’s upper body and hauled—lifting him through the window frame, his hip catching the door panel, glass raking his side.
He hit the asphalt. The arm didn’t let go. It tightened—banded across his ribs, pinning both of Cass’s arms to his sides, crushing him backward against a chest that felt like a wall.
“Hey, Cole.” The voice rumbled through the chest pressed against Cass’s back. “This one was hiding. Pretty sure the passenger toll is unpaid.”
The negotiation fifty feet away stopped.
Cole turned. He looked at the Berserker holding Cass, then looked at Cass, his feet off the ground, glass in his braids, pinned like a doll against a man twice his size.
“Well now,” Cole said. “That changes things.”
Riot moved. Instantly—one step, two steps, his hands coming up as his whole body shifted into something that wasn’t walking anymore but the beginning of a charge.
A rifle barrel swung into his direction
“Easy.” Cole held up a hand to his man with the rifle. Then to Riot. “Nobody needs to die over a toll dispute. Let’s just talk.”
Riot stopped and Cass could see the tremor running through his forearms even from fifty feet away.
Please don’t hurt him.
“Let go of him,” Riot said. The mask stripped it flat but something underneath was wrong—too low, too dense, like the sound a cable makes right before it snaps.
“Toll first,” Cole said, walking toward Cass. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
He stopped in front of Cass.
“Heat,” Cole murmured, reaching out to play with the ends of Cass’s hair. “You are a boy or girl? Because you’re pretty for either.” He tilted his head, smelling the air and eyeing his chest and throat. “Claimed. Recent. Very recent.”
Cass’s body went cold. Being so obviously examined felt like being read—like the man was opening him up and looking at the pages without asking.
“He’s mine.” Riot’s voice was a growl from across the distance. “He’s my Omega and you’re going to take your hands off him.”
Something bloomed in Cass’s chest. Warm, sudden, completely inappropriate for the situation—a flower opening in the middle of a fire.
Mine. He said mine. Riot said it without hesitation, spoken to strangers as a fact rather than a question.
Not he’s with me or he’s under my protection but he’s mine and the word landed in the place that Cass didn’t know was empty.
Which was a terrible thing to feel while being held off the ground by a man whose arm was compressing his ribcage, but bodies didn’t care about context.
“Oh heavens,” Cass said, very quietly, because Cole was so close and every reflex he had was firing—remove yourself from earthly aggression, seek harmonious distance—and his body did what bodies sometimes do when scared and cornered.
He kicked, his bare foot connecting with Cole’s shin.
He immediately felt bad. “Oh…oh, I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to —my foot just decided to do that. I’m very sorry.”
Cole stared at him.
The Berserker holding him went still.
Two men who’d been drifting closer stopped.
“Holy shit,” the Berserker holding him said with a laugh. “He’s Elysian.”
“He apologized,” one of the others said. “He kicked Cole in the shin and then he apologized.”
Cole’s face changed. The bored look drained out of it and was replaced by something else—an intensity that Cass didn’t have a word for. The expression of a man who’d been doing routine work and just realized something extraordinary landed in his lap.
“An Elysian Omega.” Cole’s voice dropped as he turned toward Riot. “Where in the hell did you find this?”
“Let. Him. Go.” Each of Riot’s words were bitten off.
“Relax. Nobody’s hurting him.” Cole turned back to Cass. His voice became the kind of careful gentleness of someone approaching something wild and valuable and easily spooked. “Hey. What’s your name?”
“C-Cass, it’s um, short for Cassiopeia. My birth giver picked it, and apparently she liked astrology.
I mean, that’s what I was told, but I like—” Cass cut himself off.
That was probably more than the man wanted to know, but he was scared and his mouth liked to fill in the quiet too much. “It’s just Cass.”
“That’s pretty. You’re Elysian? From Springfield Gardens?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re with this one—” he gestured toward Riot “—by choice?”
“Yes. Riot is my—he’s—yes.”
Cole studied him for a long moment. Something calculating moved behind his eyes—not cruelty exactly, but something that ran numbers and reached conclusions and didn’t let sentiment interfere.
“Okay, Cassiopeia.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “Here’s the situation. Your Alpha paid the vehicle toll. But you’re a different matter. You’re an Omega in my territory, that’s a separate toll.”
“I don’t have any iscs.” Cass’s voice came out small. The arm around his ribs made breathing difficult and thinking harder. “But I maybe if you ask Riot? Or if he doesn’t have enough, I could help you with something? I’m not smart or very strong, but I’m good at plants. And laundry.”
A sound went through the men. Not laughter—something lower, something that vibrated at a frequency Cass didn’t recognize but that made the skin on his arms prickle.
“Not that kind of help, sweetheart.”
“Oh.” Cass tried to think. “I could organize? I’m okay at mending clothing, I can—”
“We want to borrow him.” Cole said, glancing back at Riot. Casual. Friendly, even. “Just for a few days. You can stay and watch if you like—join in. There’s only twelve of us when the relief crew rotates through. Nobody gets rough.”
Cass didn’t understand. Borrow was a strange word for labor. Generally someone didn’t borrow a person to cook for them— they hired them, or they asked, or invited them to contribute harmoniously. Hammers and things like tools were borrowed, not people.
“What do you want me to do?” Cass asked.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing he’d ever heard.