9. ~Riot~
~Riot~
Ihave known panic exactly twice in my life.
I am, it seems, about to be handed a third lesson, and I resent the curriculum.
The first time, my mother died in my arms.
I was small enough that her weight should have been impossible and somehow wasn’t, because a body emptying of itself goes terribly light.
She bled out slow against my chest on a kitchen floor that smelled of copper and the dinner she’d never finish, and instead of screaming, instead of cursing the man whose work it was, she spent the last of her breath being gentle with me.
Whispering.
Telling me what I’d become—the things she swore she could already see in me, the man I’d grow into, all of it spoken in the soft certain voice of someone who would not live to be proven wrong.
She made me promise.
Made me vow, with her blood going tacky between my fingers, that I’d stay a kind boy in a world that had just shown us both exactly how kind it intended to be.
I broke that promise comprehensively. But I have never once forgotten the shape of the panic—the helpless, clawing, useless animal terror of holding something precious while it leaks away through your hands and learning, in real time, that there is nothing on this earth your strength can do about it.
The second time came years later, and it was quieter, and it lived entirely behind my own eyes.
It was the half-second before I pulled the trigger and redecorated a wall with the inside of my father’s skull—the panic not of the act, which I’d rehearsed in my head ten thousand grateful times, but of what came after it.
Who I’d be on the far side. What kind of thing a boy becomes the moment he proves his dying mother’s last wish wrong with a single deliberate squeeze.
I felt the future yawn open under me like a grave, and I stepped into it anyway, and I have been falling, more or less contentedly, ever since.
Two panics.
That’s the whole ledger.
After the second one I sealed the account, because a man who feels that twice and survives both decides, sensibly, never to keep anything precious enough to be worth a third.
And then a woman in an orange jumpsuit, a creature I have known for the grand total of a handful of days, a thorn lodged so deep in the soft emotional side I’d sworn I’d cut out of myself that I can’t breathe around it—drops to a cafeteria floor like the plague itself reached up and claimed her.
I want it on record that I tried not to let her in.
I am very good at not letting people in; it’s the one skill I’ve honed past all the others, the careful art of being a closed and bolted house with the lights off. But she didn’t knock and she didn’t pick the lock.
She skipped across a room everyone else fled, drank my beer, told me it tasted better than piss, and put glass to my throat while she smiled—and somewhere in that she walked straight through a wall I’d spent twenty years pretending was load-bearing. I didn’t feel the breach until it was done.
That’s the trick of the truly dangerous ones.
You never feel the cut.
You just look down, eventually, and find you’ve been bleeding for a while.
I was already moving before any part of me filed the decision.
Against orders, pointed guns, and the very air of a wing I was never cleared to be standing in—I’d talked my way up here on a lie and a bribed orderly for no better reason than that I couldn’t stand another hour not knowing what she was doing, and the universe, which has a vicious sense of comedy, repaid my obsession by letting me be exactly close enough to catch her when she fell.
She drops, I catch her, and the moment her weight settles into my arms of the cafeteria floor rises up through twenty years to swallow me whole.
It all replays.
Piece by merciless piece.
The terrible lightness of a body giving up its tenancy.
The soft tender voice. The dreams someone laid on me with their last breath and the promise I couldn’t keep.
For an eternity that takes perhaps three seconds, I am eight years old again on a floor that smells of copper, holding the only good thing I ever had while it slips, and I am too small and too useless and too late, always too late?—
Reality slams the door on it.
Because Vex is not lying still and gentle in my arms.
Vex is convulsing—her spine arching, her limbs gone to a violent juddering mess, a thin line of pink froth at the corner of her mouth where she’s choking on her own saliva, and a thread of dark blood running from one nostril over her parted lips.
Her scent has curdled, the bright sugar of her going wrong and chemical and frightened, and the wrongness of it shrieks down every nerve I own.
I know what this is.
I’ve seen enough bodies fail to recognize the grammar of one starting to. And the recognition does the single most foreign thing imaginable: it makes me call for help.
Lucien! Silas!
They’re here—somewhere in this churning room, because everyone who matters has somehow converged on this cafeteria like guests summoned to an event none of them RSVP’d to. I find Doc first, and his pale eyes aren’t on the woman bisected and screaming her ruin out across the tile a few feet away.
They’re on Vex.
On the seizing, bleeding thing in my grip. And the cold thing that passes over his composed face tells me everything about how bad this is.
Hands close on me. Guards, trying to wrench me off her, peel her out of my arms, and something in me that doesn’t bother consulting the rest of me answers with a sound I feel in my back teeth.
I don’t fully track the next stretch.
There’s a snarl coming out of me that doesn’t stop. There’s a wall against my spine—I’ve retreated, somehow, folded us both into a corner with my body curled around hers like a fist around something it will die before it opens, and a forest of leveled weapons has bloomed in a half-circle facing me.
Every gun in the room. All of them pointed at the rabid prisoner cradling a dying Omega and growling like the animal they always swore I was.
“MOVE—AND GUNS DOWN!”
Lucien’s voice detonates across the cafeteria, and it is not the dry, mild, fountain-pen voice he usually wears. It’s the other one.
The Alpha command dropped into it like iron into water, the register men like him almost never spend because spending it admits they have it—and the entire room goes rigid and silent in a single heartbeat. The guards freeze mid-lunge. The screaming patients choke off.
Even I feel it lock my spine, the oldest part of my brain snapping to obedience before my pride can object. It’s the first time in longer than I can remember that anyone’s command has reached me at all.
And into the stillness he’s made, Silas comes.
Unhurried. Gliding, like the floor was poured for him and the emergency scheduled at his convenience, that pale candle-wax face serene above his immaculate dark coat.
He looks, crossing that cleared and frightened space toward me, like an angel descending to do the obvious and merciful work of declaring a death.
But I’ve learned to read the small print on him in the days I’ve known him, and his eyes—those warm too-bright amber eyes—are doing something his serene mouth isn’t.
He doesn’t like the trajectory of this.
He doesn’t like it at all, and Silas Crowe disliking the angle of a death is the most alarming thing I’ve witnessed all day.
He reaches me in a few long strides and simply takes her, lifting Vex out of my locked arms with a gentle, total authority I’d break anyone else’s hands for. He ignores the growl still rolling out of me.
He knows that I’m only going to be loud and feral and impossible until somebody proves to me this woman I barely know and can’t stop circling is going to live to annoy me another afternoon. He files my noise under weather and goes to work.
First he prises something from her clenched, juddering hand—a slim syringe, half its contents gone—and his expression flickers as he reads the level of it.
He says a clipped word to Doc and flicks the syringe across the gap, and Doc catches it one-handed, already reaching into the breast of his white coat to produce something small that he hurls straight back.
Silas snatches it from the air, thumbs it open, and tips whatever’s inside into his own mouth.
Then he seals his lips over hers.
I feel two things at once, with the graceless honesty of a man whose feelings have never learned manners.
Relief, because some functioning corner of me understands this is fast-acting, that he’s feeding her something through the one route that’ll cross into her quickest, that this is a save and not a liberty.
A hot, irrational, utterly rabid spike of jealousy, because that is my Omega’s mouth and I haven’t so much as tasted it yet, haven’t earned those lips, and some snarling caveman buried under all my cynicism objects violently to another man getting there first, even like this, even to drag her back from the edge of a grave.
Jealousy, in the middle of a medical emergency, is possibly the most embarrassing thing an Alpha can feel.
I feel it anyway. I’ve never been able to govern the wanting; it’s the one muscle in me that never learned discipline.
Silas keeps his mouth on hers, patient and unbroken, holding whatever he gave her in place long enough to take—and slowly, slowly, the violent shaking eases.
The arch leaves her spine. The juddering gentles, then stutters, then stops, and her body goes limp in his arms.
He lifts his head. And she’s still. So eerily, completely still that the relief curdles instantly back into terror, because limp and quiet is not the same as alive, and I know the difference better than any man should.