Chapter Eleven
Uriel was supposed to be his Evermate.
Nobody had ever said it out loud. It wasn’t the kind of thing you said, because the elders handled the naming, and to pre-empt the Universe’s choice was to close yourself off from its wisdom.
But Cassian had known since he was fourteen, when Uriel’s scent had first reached him across the dining table and caught him firmly in its grip.
He’d been seated between two of the older betas, spooning lentil stew into his mouth and half-listening to Elder Maren’s reading from the Universal Principles, when the air shifted.
Warmth and earthiness, mixed with the heat of a body that had been working in the sun, cut through the steam rising off his bowl and found him.
His spoon had stopped halfway to his mouth.
His skin had prickled all the way up his arms to the top of his head.
Uriel had been leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen, laughing at something one of the younger alphas had just said. He hadn’t been looking Cassian’s way, and he seemed to have no idea that his scent had just rewritten Cassian from the inside out.
After that evening, Cassian had spent three years collecting evidence that he was meant to be Uriel’s.
The way Uriel’s gaze found him during the morning practice, settling on Cassian’s upturned face.
The way Uriel brought him water after the planting days without being asked, the cup held out in his long brown fingers, his knuckles still dirty from the soil.
The way Uriel called him Calyx with a softness that turned the honorific into something private between them.
These were not coincidences because the Universe did not deal in coincidences.
So when the elders had come for him on the morning of his twenty-first birthday, their white robes bright against the wet grass, and led him barefoot across the compound to the Lumineer’s house, Cassian had gone willingly.
He’d gone joyfully. He’d walked through the low wooden door into the Lumineer’s study with his pulse thrumming and his whole body vibrating with the complete certainty that Uriel would be waiting there for him.
The Lumineer sat behind his desk, backlit by the window that overlooked the valley. He was Uriel’s father, and Cassian had searched for Uriel in his face a thousand times, finding him in the high forehead, and the way the light caught the bridge of his aquiline nose.
“Calyx.” The Lumineer’s voice was deep and unhurried, a voice accustomed to speaking truths that other people received on their knees. “The Universe has written a name in your heart. You have carried it since birth. Today, I speak it aloud so that you may hear what you have always known.”
Cassian’s breath caught. His fingers were laced in his lap, his knuckles white, his whole body tipped forward on the edge of his chair.
“Your Evermate is Charles Townsend.”
Cassian heard it, and his mind did the thing it always did when reality diverged from doctrine: it smoothed the surface, closed over the disturbance, and waited for the ripples to pass.
Charles Townsend.
He didn’t know a Charles Townsend. The name had no scent attached to it, no memories of a past shared.
Cassian sat very still in his chair while his brain cycled through every alpha he had ever met, searching for the one he’d missed, the one the Universe had apparently been pointing him towards while he’d been too busy looking at the wrong man.
The door behind him opened. Cassian didn’t turn around, because his body had gone rigid from the scalp down, and his breath stayed stuck high in his chest where it couldn’t quite reach his lungs.
A hand landed on his shoulder.
It was heavy, the fingers thick and soft, from hands that had never worked soil. The scent that came with it was artificial and sharp, nothing like sun-warmed skin.
“There he is,” the man said, from somewhere above Cassian’s head. “My Calyx.”
Cassian had tilted his chin up and looked into the face of Charles Townsend.
The man was craggy-featured and smiling with every one of his teeth.
His light-brown hair mixed in with a smattering of grey, that might have given him a distinguished look, if his eyes hadn’t been so dark, so flat, and so clearly hungry.
His thumb moved on Cassian’s shoulder in a slow circle, pressing the fabric of his white linen shirt against Cassian’s collarbone.
The Universe provides. The Universe provides. The Universe provides.
Cassian had smiled back and called him “Alpha.”
He’d gone home with Charles that afternoon, to the house in Bayswater with its high ceilings and its marble floors.
In the bedroom, the silk cords were already looped around the bedposts, but he was yet to learn what they were there for.
He’d walked through the front door with his hands clasped in front of him, his eyes cast down, the name Uriel still burning in his chest like an ember that he’d forgotten to put out.
That was the part that Cassian couldn’t reconcile, even now, after everything.
The Universe had written Charles’s name in his heart.
The Lumineer had spoken it. The doctrine was clear and the doctrine was infallible.
But if that was true, then why had Cassian’s heart been so full of Uriel that there hadn’t been room for Charles to fit?
He’d tried so hard to make room. He’d lain in the Bayswater bed with his wrists bound and his body still, receiving his Evermate’s blessing in the manner prescribed, and he’d told himself that the hurt was purification.
That Charles’s roughness was correction.
That the bruises on his inner thighs were the Universe burning away Cassian’s attachment to Uriel, searing out the wrongness so that the rightness could take root.
Charles must have sensed it. An alpha always knew when his omega’s heart was divided. Cassian had never spoken Uriel’s name in Charles’s house. But his body was a traitor. His body flinched when Charles climbed on top of him, and Charles was not a stupid man.
The hitting had started three months into the marriage.
A backhand across the mouth at the dinner table because Cassian had looked at his plate instead of at Charles while Charles was speaking.
Then a shove into the bedroom wall because Cassian had taken too long in the shower and Charles had wanted him clean and ready for him.
Then came the things that weren’t hitting, exactly, but hurt nonetheless: the grip on his upper arm that left four fingerprint bruises, the yank of the silk cord when Cassian shifted on the mattress, the hand around his throat during sex that pressed just hard enough to make his vision sparkle at the edges.
Cassian had absorbed all of it. He’d thought of each incident as a correction and shelved it alongside the doctrine that explained why this correction was necessary. The Universe did not make mistakes, which meant the fault was in Cassian.
He had loved the wrong alpha. He had allowed Uriel’s scent to colonise a heart that had been promised to Charles since birth.
And the pain that Charles delivered was the Universe’s answer to that betrayal, a burning-out of the contamination so that Cassian could one day become the vessel his Evermate deserved.
All of Cassian’s memories of the Bayswater house fell away the moment Uriel’s fingers carded through the careful coif that Lysander had helped him with in Hamish’s hallway, undoing everything in three strokes so that his hair fell across his brow.
“You look wrong like this,” Uriel said, frowning. His thumb traced the edge of Cassian’s hairline. “Like someone’s been dressing you up.”
Cassian couldn’t speak now that Uriel’s scent had found him again after all these months. Uriel’s hand settled on the curve of Cassian’s jaw and cupped it, tilting his face upwards. Cassian turned into the touch, pressing his cheek against Uriel’s palm as his eyes slipped closed.
“Everyone’s been absolutely frantic over you, Cassian,” Uriel said. “Charles more than anyone.”
Cassian opened his eyes at the mention of his Evermate’s name. “I’m all right,” he said.
“You were talking to a strange alpha.” Uriel’s jaw tightened, and his hand dropped from Cassian’s face. “In public while unaccompanied. You were laughing with him, and toying with his desire.”
Cassian’s pulse kicked up. He held onto the edge of the basin and turned around so that he was facing Uriel properly, his back pressed against the cold porcelain.
“I’m learning how to be a modern omega,” Cassian said.
He said it to watch Uriel’s face change, and it did.
The alpha’s expression darkened, his blue eyes narrowing.
“Hamish has an omega. A male omega, Uriel, just like me. The Universe brought him into my sphere, and he’s been teaching me things like how to order food and use the trams.”
“The documentarian.” Uriel’s mouth thinned. “You’re living with the documentarian and his omega?”
“They’ve been kind to me.”
“They’re revelling in their sin, Cassian.
” Uriel stepped closer, and the scent of him thickened in the confined space until Cassian could feel it pressing against his skin.
“Two men fornicating under the same roof as a Calyx, corrupting you with their filth, filling your head with ideas about independence and modernity while they drag you further from the Light with every day you spend under their roof.”
Cassian’s fingers gripped the basin’s edge tightly.
He wanted to argue, but the objection wouldn’t form, because it wasn’t as though he hadn’t thought this himself, while listening to Lysander and Hamish through the wall.
The contamination argument had lived in his head since he’d arrived in Brunswick East. Hearing Uriel speak it aloud was different from thinking it, though, because the words sounded sharper when they came from an alpha’s mouth.
“Come back with me.” Uriel’s hand found Cassian’s and closed around it.
“The Light forgives all transgressions when the transgressor lays down his ego and prostrates himself before its glory. You know this, Cassian. You’ve known it since you could speak.
The family will welcome you home with open arms, and every wrong that you’ve done in the outside world will be cleansed from you as though it never happened. ”
Cassian shook his head.
“All will be forgiven,” Uriel pressed, “when you give yourself over to your Evermate.”
“I can’t.” The words came out thin, but they came out.
Cassian’s hand stayed in Uriel’s, his fingers curled against the alpha’s palm, because letting go of Uriel’s hand was beyond him.
“I can’t, Uriel. I need time to myself. I need to think.
” He swallowed. “I’ve only just started really thinking about things.
On my own. Without anyone telling me what the answer is before I’ve even finished asking the question. ”
Uriel stepped forward and pressed Cassian against the wall beside the sinks, one hand braced beside Cassian’s head, the other still holding his hand.
The tiles felt cold through his shirt, and Uriel’s scent was all he could focus on until Uriel leaned in and kissed him softly.
It lasted no more than two seconds, but in that time Cassian’s free hand came up and gripped the front of Uriel’s jacket of its own accord.
“Come home to us, Cassian.”
“I can’t.” His voice broke on the second word, and his fingers tightened in Uriel’s jacket. “I need time, Uriel. Please.”
Uriel’s jaw worked. His grip on Cassian’s hand tightened until the bones of his fingers pressed together painfully. “Where are you staying? Give me the address.”
Cassian did, because Uriel had asked, reciting it and then adding, “It’s at the end of a row of cottages, with jasmine on the fence.” He straightened up, his pride cutting through his trembling. “And I have a mobile phone now. Hamish gave it to me.”
Uriel’s eyebrow rose.
“The number is oh-four-two-one, three-eight-seven, nine-nine-two-five,” Cassian recited, the digits that Hamish had made him memorise. “You can call me on it whenever you like.”
Uriel looked at him for a long moment, his eyes moving across Cassian’s face as though he were mapping out every change the outside world had made to it. “I’ll see you again,” Uriel declared.
Cassian received it as a promise. Uriel would come for him. The name that had been burning in his chest since he was fourteen was still there, still bright.
Cassian pressed his fingers against his own lips where Uriel’s mouth had been, and watched the alpha turn and walk out of the bathroom without looking back at him.