Chapter 46
Chapter forty-six
Meditate on Fixing It
Riot
He found Matthias working the gag with his jaw, twisting his head against the bark.
The white cloth was halfway down his chin.
His voice was still going—hoarse now, cracking, the desperate repetition of a man who believed if he said the right words in the right order, the world would rearrange itself back to the way it was supposed to be.
“—needs to come back, the contamination will destroy his capacity for spiritual—”
Riot crouched in front of him.
Matthias stopped talking.
Up close, his eyes—the eyes that had been calculating since the first time they passed each other in the Neutral Zone and Matthias walked out of Cass’s hotel room smelling like blood and arousal—were wide, wet and stripped of everything except the thing at the bottom that had been driving all of it.
“Do you really think,” Riot began, “that he would be better off with you?”
“Yes.” Matthias said it with no hesitation, with the certainty of a fanatic or a parent, or the place where those two things overlapped. “I know him. I’ve known him since he was a child. I know what he needs. You’ve known him for weeks.”
“How many times?”
Matthias blinked. “How many times what?”
“You know what I’m asking.” Riot’s voice was quiet. Level. He could hear his own heartbeat. It was slow. “How many times did you rape him during Chrysalis?”
The word landed on the dark air and sat there.
“I have never—”
Riot hit him. Twice. Left hand, right hand, the impacts precise and controlled—not the Berserker’s wild obliteration, but the clean, targeted strikes of a man who understood exactly how much force to apply and where.
Matthias’s head rocked sideways, came back, rocked the other way.
Blood burst from his lip. A tooth shifted.
“Don’t lie to me again,” Riot said. “How many times did you drug and rape him? Because I’m going to be the one holding him when he has nightmares about it. I need to know, even if he never figures out what those nightmares are about.”
Matthias was crying the open, ugly cry of a person in pain who had never learned how to manage it because he’d always been the one holding the tools. The kind with blood and tears and snot and his breathing hitching in his chest.
“Chrysalis never worked on him,” Matthias croaked.
“The conditioning—the coded language, the guided restructuring—it’s designed to work on how people process metaphor and social cues.
Cassiopeia’s mind doesn’t process that way.
He’s too literal. The frameworks that rewire everyone else just.. . bounced off him.”
He swallowed and winced.
“The first week of the program, nothing took. Nothing. The facilitators reported total failure—it was unprecedented. The Elders brought me in because I was his guide. I knew how to talk to him. I stayed with him every day.” His chest hitched on a sob.
“I-I gave in to temptation. Just a few times! Every few days. Between the conditioning exercises. He was... the drug made him compliant and he was already so used to doing what I told him and I—I—”
Every few days.
Just a few times.
Every few days.
Riot did the math because his brain did math when the rest of him was somewhere else, somewhere very still and very dark and very far from the man crying in front of him.
The rest of him was with a twenty-four-year-old man whose lack of attraction to his best friend couldn’t be rewritten because he took everything literally had been drugged into compliance by the man who read him bedtime stories.
And then that man took advantage of him.
Just a few times. Every few days.
“He doesn’t remember,” Matthias said, as if it were a mercy. “He’s fine. I convinced the Elders to break his pairing with Honey and restructure the algorithm so he’d be paired with me. He would have been cared for. Protected. Loved.”
“You keep using that word,” Riot said.
“Because it’s true. I love him.”
Riot looked at him for a long time. The starlight on the ruined face. The tears. The blood. The absolute sincerity of a man who had raped a drugged young man he was supposed to protect fifteen to twenty times over two months and built an entire theological framework to call it love.
This was the man who told Cass he was deficient because Cass couldn’t make the scars carved into him go away. Who wanted to stamp out his brightness and curiosity and make him fit into a box Elysian Dynamics designed. This man didn’t know Cass at all. Not the way Riot knew him.
Cass was a gentle soul with a bleeding arm and a medical kit who had said please don’t kill me, then bandaged a stranger’s knuckles because he couldn’t not help.
The one who had followed a scent into one of the worst parts of the Neutral Zone, because his body trusted something his mind hadn’t learned to name yet.
The one who said I’m sorry to furniture and meant it every single time.
The one who bit the face of the man who raised him and then apologized for it…
That Cass had looked at Riot tonight and said please don’t hurt him. And Riot had said okay.
In that moment, Riot meant it. It wasn’t a lie. Riot never wanted to be a person who lied to Cass.
But he was about to be…
He sat with that, letting it settle into the architecture of what he was about to do.
This was not the Berserker’s hot, bright, uncomplicated violence.
This was a choice—premeditated, calculated, made with full knowledge of what it would cost. He was going to kill this monster, and then he was going to walk back to the man he loved and lie to him.
He was going to tell Cass that Matthias was fine.
He was going to say it convincingly. And when Cass asked again—tomorrow, next week, in a month—Riot would repeat the lie with the same steady voice and the same steady eyes.
He would carry the weight of it for the rest of his life because the alternative was letting Matthias live in a world that contained Cass.
That was not going to happen.
Because Riot—Brennan—the man underneath all the modifications and the code name and the years of survival—made a decision with the part of himself that was human, whole, and unenhanced.
Riot took a deep breath, reached down, and took a handful of Matthias’s robes—the white fabric, the sacred garment, the symbol of spiritual authority and transcendence and everything Cass had been taught to revere.
He ripped it and the fabric tore with a sound like a gasp. A long strip came away in his hand.
“I’m going to hurt you now,” Riot said in the same voice he’d use to tell someone he was about to set a broken bone.
Matthias’s eyes went wide. “You told Cassiopeia you wouldn’t.”
“I know. He asked me not to,” Riot continued, his voice level, conversational, terrifyingly calm.
“I looked at him and I promised. And he believed me because he believes me about everything. Because I’m the one person in his life who has never lied to him.
” He paused. “That’s going to change tonight. ”
Matthias shook his head, pulling at his arms, his feet kicking at the tree roots.
“I will carry this,” Riot told him. “The lie. The promise I broke. I’ll carry it every day.
I’ll carry it when he dreams about this moment and I hold him and tell him everything is fine.
I’ll carry it when he’s happy and planting his garden, I will look at my hands and remember what they did tonight.
” He kept his voice steady. “I will carry that for him, because he shouldn’t have to carry what you did.
Because fifteen to twenty times in two months is enough for one person to carry, and he’s already carrying it even though he doesn’t know what it is. ”
He looked down at the strip of white fabric in his hand.
“He can’t see us from here,” Riot said. “That’s your logic, isn’t it? If they don’t know, they’re fine?”
Matthias opened his mouth.
Riot’s hand found his jaw, his thumb on one side of the joint, fingers on the other.
He didn’t squeeze—not yet. He just held it the way he’d hold something that needed to be moved from where it was to where it was going to be.
He pushed in with his thumb, the mandible sliding sideways with a wet pop that Riot felt through his palm.
Matthias tried to scream, but his jaw was dislocated and the scream came out as a gurgling moan that went nowhere.
Riot stuffed the strip of sacred robe into his mouth, past his teeth and tongue, into the opening where air rapidly inhaled and exhaled from.
The fabric went in and Matthias’s body did what bodies did—it gagged, it convulsed, it tried to expel the thing blocking its airway.
His eyes bulged. The blood vessels in them burst in small red streaks.
His legs kicked against the tree roots, the bound hands straining behind the trunk, fingers clawing bark.
Riot knelt there and watched with the full, clear, unflinching knowledge that this was murder, he was a liar, and Cass would never know.
The not-knowing was the last gift Riot could give Brother Matthias’s victim, and he was giving it with hands that were steady and a heart that was broken in a place that would never fully heal.
Matthias’s face darkened. Red, then deeper. His eyes were wide and wet and locked on Riot’s and the calculation was finally gone, replaced by the animal understanding that comes at the end—that this was happening. It was not going to stop and nobody was coming.
“Cass told me,” Riot said softly as Matthias’s eyes rolled up into his head, “that in your territory, people with disabilities are considered spiritually deficient.” He stood up.
“I hope that if your people find you before you die, you spend whatever time you have left in a chair you can’t get out of.
And then you can meditate on fixing it.”
He wiped his hands on his pants, turned, and walked back to the road.
He caught up with them in four minutes.
“Everything okay?” Cass asked, stumbling as he glanced behind him to give Riot a weak smile. Both Honey and Sage caught him to steady him.
“Yep,” Riot said. “I put the gag back in. He’s fine.”
He met Sage’s eyes for a moment as she scanned his hands and whatever was in his expression that was different from what had been there before.
She gave him a single nod.
“Can you carry me?” Cass stopped abruptly. “Honey’s nice…but you smell better. I’m sleepy.”
Riot knelt down and Cass practically collapsed into his arms, his head finding the place under Riot’s chin that it always found. “Okay, princess. I’ve got you.”
And as Riot stood and they walked in silence, he tried not to think about the words.
I put the gag back in. He’s fine.
Eight words would shape every morning after this one.
They were the price of the garden, of the tomatoes, of the life they were going to build together, because Riot was going to build it, brick by brick.
The foundation would have a lie in it, and the lie would hold because Riot would make it hold, so Cass could plant things on top of it and they would grow.