Chapter Fourteen
Cassian turned the lock on his bedroom door for the first time since Hamish had shown him how to use it.
Then he pressed his back against it, sliding down it until he was sitting on the carpet with his knees drawn up and his mobile clutched in both hands.
He’d memorised the three numbers on it: Hamish, Lysander, and as of six weeks ago, Uriel.
I got home safe he typed, hunting for each letter with his index finger.
The predictive text kept trying to turn his words into other words, which Cassian found deeply annoying.
He was trying to communicate with the person the Universe had written into his heart, and his mobile wanted to talk about ducking.
The reply came back within seconds.
Good. I was concerned. Your companion was aggressive.
Cassian stared at the screen. The letters swam for a moment, his eyes still hot and swollen from crying, and he rubbed his sleeve across his face before he could focus.
hes not agressive. Lysander is trying to protect me. He just doesnt undrestand about us
He doesn’t understand because he is outside of the Light. You cannot expect illumination from someone who has chosen to live in darkness and sin, Cassian.
Through the bedroom wall, Cassian could hear Lysander moving around the kitchen.
I know but he has been kind to me Uriel. Him and Hamish both. They dont follow the Light but they have been good to me
Kindness that leads you away from the Light is seduction dressed in gentleness.
Cassian read the message three times. On the compound, this would have been an obvious truth, as self-evident as the sun rising.
The Light was the source of all goodness, so anything that drew you from it, however pleasant it felt, was by definition working against your wellbeing.
Elder Maren had taught this to the children every morning during the sunrise readings, her voice carrying across the wet grass: The wolf does not bare its teeth. The wolf smiles beguilingly.
Cassian googled the word ‘beguilingly’, trusting auto-correct’s suggestion when it came to the spelling. Doing something in a charming, fascinating, or attractive way, often with a subtle element of trickery or deceit.
But wolves didn’t buy you turnovers… Cassian was fairly certain of that.
Outside, the afternoon light was turning the bedroom window into a bright rectangle that fell across the foot of the bed and lit up the dust motes drifting through the air.
His room. Hamish called it Cassian’s room now, not the spare room.
There was a desk lamp in the corner that he’d bought specifically for Cassian, and a stack of library books on the bedside table that Elisa had helped him choose.
His life was accumulating in here, settling into the gaps like sediment.
His mobile buzzed.
Are you still there?
yes im here. Im thinking
What are you thinking about?
Cassian picked at a thread on the hem of his shorts.
What he was thinking about was too large and too tangled to fit into a text message.
Uriel’s scent had filled the bathroom at Cinema Nova, and the kiss they’d shared had rewritten his understanding of the whole world.
Uriel had cupped his jaw the same way Charles used to, but the gesture had felt entirely different because the hand belonged to the right person.
im thinking about you he typed, then deleted it, then typed it again and sent it off before he could change his mind again.
The three dots appeared and stayed for a long time.
I think about you constantly, Cassian. I have thought about you every day since you left.
Cassian curled forward over his knees, his eyes squeezed shut. The warmth of the screen through his t-shirt felt like a hand resting over his heart.
There was a knock on the door. “Cass.” Lysander’s voice came through the wood. “I’ve left food for you out here. Please, come and get it. We can talk when you feel ready.”
Cassian held his breath and listened to the retreating footsteps, counting each one until they faded into the creak of a floorboard at the far end of the corridor. Then he eased the lock open, cracked the door, and retrieved the tray from the hallway floor.
Lysander had made him a ham and cheese sandwich, cut into triangles the way Cassian preferred, with a thick wedge of chocolate cake beside it. The cake had a fork resting next to it, and there was a glass of water with a slice of lemon floating in it.
Cassian carried the tray to the bed, settled cross-legged on the mattress, and started with the chocolate cake.
The cake was dense, dark, and sweet enough that his teeth ached. He ate it in big forkfuls, licking the frosting off the tines between bites. His mobile sat on the duvet beside him, the screen still lit with Uriel’s last message.
I think about you constantly, Cassian.
Another message arrived as he scraped the last of the frosting from the plate.
I can meet you outside your house tonight. We can go back to the compound together.
The fork stopped halfway to his mouth. A smear of chocolate frosting sat on his lower lip, and he tongued it off without thinking, his eyes fixed on the screen. Back to the compound. Back to the dormitories where someone was always close enough to hear you breathe.
Then back to Charles.
Going back to the compound meant going back to the Lumineer, who would send him back to the house in Bayswater, because a Calyx who had strayed from his Evermate was a vessel in need of correction. Charles’s corrections left bruises that took weeks to fade.
Cassian set the fork down on the tray and picked up the sandwich. He ate without tasting it, his jaw working mechanically while he turned Uriel’s message over and over in his head.
i dont want to go back. ive told you why Uriel
He finished the sandwich and brushed the crumbs off the duvet onto the tray. Then he picked up his mobile again, because the next thought was growing big inside of his head, and if he didn’t let it out, it would sit there and calcify into something he would never say at all.
i think the Lumineer may have made a mistake when he gave me Charles as my Evermate
He stared at the words on the screen. Every letter was a small act of heresy and the sentence they made together was the largest thing Cassian had ever committed to a surface outside his own skull.
The Lumineer did not make mistakes. The Lumineer was the vessel through which the Universe spoke, and to question his naming was to question everything Cassian’s world was built on.
But the doctrine said it shouldn’t hurt. The doctrine said you opened for your Evermate like a flower, and it felt like coming home. But none of it had felt like coming home with Charles. All of it had felt like rough hands closing around his wrists.
He sent the message. The reply was instant, as though Uriel had been holding the words ready.
You must not question the Universe.
He could stop here and accept Uriel’s indictment. He could type youre right and let the doctrine smooth his doubts. He could be a good Calyx, a receptive vessel, a man who trusted the Universe’s plan even when that plan left him hurting.
I think I should have been given you Uriel
The message sat in its little blue bubble on the screen, and Cassian stared at it, willing Uriel’s response to manifest.
The reply took nine minutes to come. Cassian counted them by the clock on the bedside table, each digit ticking over while the screen stayed dark and his pulse thudded in his ears.
Then the bubble appeared.
Come back to me, Cassian.
His breath left him in a rush, and he closed his eyes. Uriel hadn’t said come back to the compound or come back to the Family. He’d said come back to me.
Cassian typed with shaking fingers.
i want to. you have no ideu how much i want to but i cant go back to the Family of Light Uriel. I cant go back to Charles
Nobody is asking you to go back to Charles.
Cassian stared at the words. He read them again, and then a third time, because the sentence contained a promise so large that he didn’t trust himself to have understood it correctly.
thats what going back means. The Lumineer will send me to him.
Not if I’m standing with you.
Cassian wanted to believe it the way he’d wanted to believe in the Evermate doctrine, but Uriel was the Lumineer’s son.
i need you to protect me Uriel. I need you to go to your father and tell him that you’re the one thats meant to be with me. That he made a mistake
The dots appeared. Cassian curled his body around the mobile as though he could hold Uriel’s answer in place.
That’s a very serious claim to make, Cassian.
i know
You’re asking me to challenge my father’s naming. To tell the Lumineer, the vessel of the Universe’s truth, that the Universe got it wrong.
im asking you to tell him the truth. That my heart has always been yours
The dots reappeared and held steady for so long that Cassian began to worry they’d frozen. Then the message arrived in a single, dense paragraph that filled the bubble from edge to edge.
I can only do that if you’re with me. Not across the city, hiding in a house full of outsiders.
You need to be with me, Cassian. In person, where I can speak for you properly.
The Lumineer won’t hear this through a screen.
This is the kind of truth you deliver on your knees, face to face, with the one you’re claiming beside you.
You want to see me again, don’t you? Because I want to see you.
I have wanted to see you every single day since you left.
Cassian pressed the heels of both hands into his eyes until colours burst behind his lids.
of course I do
Then listen to me carefully. If you truly must stay in that house, for now, then this is what you tell the omega and the alpha.
Cassian lowered his hands from his eyes and waited, the cursor blinking in the white field of the chat, while Uriel’s instructions assembled themselves on the other side of the city.
? ? ?
The knock came a couple of hours later. “Cass.” Lysander’s voice came through the wood. “Can I come in?”
Cassian had been lying on his side, staring at the wall and running Uriel’s instructions through his head until he’d memorised them.
“Yes,” he said.
The door opened and Lysander stepped in, pausing just inside the threshold to take in the room with a glance that moved from the empty plate on the tray to Cassian’s swollen face.
He crossed to the bed without comment, kicked off his shoes, and lay down on his side facing Cassian, close enough that their knees were almost touching.
“Uriel found me the night of Hamish’s screening,” Cassian said.
Lysander’s eyes didn’t move from his.
“In the bathroom. After the Q&A.” Cassian’s thumb found the scar on his left wrist and traced it. “He’d come to the cinema and waited for me. He left the Family of Light, Lysander. He left everything he’s ever known, because he wants to be with me.”
There was a tightening in Lysander’s expression, a compression of his mouth that was there and gone in a moment.
“I think —” Cassian stopped, and the correction rose in him with a certainty that a single word couldn’t contain.
“I know he’s my Evermate. I’ve loved him since I was fourteen.
I sat across from him at dinner one evening and his scent reached me and it changed everything.
It was like the whole world had been slightly out of focus until that moment, and then suddenly it wasn’t.
I was so sure he was the one for me. Everyone could see it.
The way he looked at me, the way he spoke to me.
And when the Lumineer gave me to Charles instead…
that’s why it all felt so wrong.” He swallowed.
“When Uriel found out that I’d left Charles, he was so happy that he came to find me. ”
Lysander’s gaze held.
“He needs help too, Lysander.” Cassian’s fingers curled into the duvet between them.
“He’s staying with a friend who also came from the Family, but they haven’t got much money.
We’ve been meeting up and I’ve been feeding him, taking him to the cafés the way you took me.
” A flush crept up his neck. “He’s the Lumineer’s own son, and he walked away from all of it. For me.”
“And you didn’t tell us.”
Cassian shook his head. “I was afraid you’d stop me seeing him. You and Hamish. You’d have told me it was dangerous, and maybe you’d have been right, but I couldn’t —” His throat closed around the words. “I couldn’t risk it. Not when I’d only just found him again.”
Lysander reached out and pushed Cassian’s hair back from his forehead. His fingers combed through to the ends and then stayed against the side of Cassian’s head.
“Do you trust him, Cassian?”
“Completely.” The word came out without hesitation. “He kissed me. At the cinema. In the bathroom, after everyone had gone, and it felt —” The flush deepened, spreading from his neck to the tips of his ears, and he pressed his face half into the pillow. “It felt the way it’s supposed to feel.”
Lysander’s hand had gone still on Cassian.
“Don’t be scared, Lysander.” He said it gently.
“I wanted the kiss. I wanted it so much. And when it happened, I felt it all the way —” He took Lysander’s hand and moved it, placing it flat on his own stomach, just below his navel.
“Here. My whole body responded to him. The way the doctrine says it should when you’re with your true Evermate, when the vessel recognises who it’s been made to receive.
” His voice dropped to a near whisper. “I produced slick, Lysander. For the first time. With Charles it never happened, not once, and I thought there was something wrong with me, that I was broken or closed off. But with Uriel it just —” He pressed Lysander’s hand harder into his stomach.
“It came. Like my body already knew his touch.”
Lysander’s jaw had tightened, and the muscle at his temple was working, but he didn’t pull his hand away.
“Okay.” The word came out rough. “Okay, Cass. But Hamish and I need to meet him properly.”
Cassian wriggled forward on the pillow until his forehead was resting against Lysander’s collarbone, close enough that Lysander’s arm had no choice but to come up and settle around him. He tucked himself into the space beneath Lysander’s chin.
“You’ll like him,” Cassian said.
Lysander’s arm tightened around him. “I’ll be the judge of that, Cass.”