Chapter Seventeen
The avocado toast was disgusting. Cassian had ordered it because the menu at Soleil described it as smashed, which had sounded like food a modern omega who was learning to make his own decisions would eat in public with great confidence.
What arrived was a thick green paste spread across sourdough, and when Cassian pressed his fork into it, the paste yielded with the texture of something that had already been chewed.
He bit into the toast. The avocado collapsed against his tongue in a slippery, vegetal mush that clung to the roof of his mouth, and he had to wash it down with a gulp of coffee before his gag reflex kicked up.
The coffee was a different matter entirely.
Lysander had been buying him hot chocolates for weeks, sweet and milky and safe.
But this morning Cassian had pointed at the menu board behind the counter and said, “I’ll have what that man is having,” because the man in question had been drinking something that smelled dark and bitter and adult.
The first sip had been dreadful. The second, marginally less so.
By the third, something was happening behind his eyes that he couldn’t quite account for.
His thoughts were arriving faster than usual, overlapping at the edges, and the café seemed louder and sharper and more detailed than it had thirty seconds ago.
He picked up his mobile and typed with his index finger, the predictive text trying to turn avocado into avoidance.
im at soleil with uriel. I am eating avocado toast. the avocado is a mushy abomination but i am persevering. i also had coffee and my brain is doing something new
The reply came back almost immediately. Good lad. Keep me posted.
Cassian set the mobile beside his plate and drank from his coffee cup, grimacing through the bitterness until it passed and the strange, crackling alertness kicked in again.
His knee was bouncing under the table, a new development.
So he reached for the mobile again to tap out another message for Lysander.
“Cassian.”
He looked up. Uriel was watching him, his own plate of eggs, no toast and absolutely no avocado, pushed to one side. His eyes settled on the mobile in Cassian’s hands.
“You’ve been on that thing since we sat down,” Uriel said. “When an alpha is present and giving you his time, the respectful thing to do is to be present in return.”
Cassian’s thumbs stilled over the keyboard. The half-written message to Lysander: coffee makes my brain go fast and my knee go bouncy, blinked at him from the screen.
“Sorry, alpha.” He turned the mobile face-down on the table, pressing it flat against the wood with both palms. His fingers lingered on the case before he drew them back into his lap.
He picked up his fork and took another bite of the avocado toast, partly to occupy his mouth while the silence settled, and partly because he wanted to give it a second chance now that he’d told Lysander about it. The universe might have recalibrated his taste buds in the interim.
It had not.
Cassian swallowed with effort and set his fork down.
Uriel’s posture had relaxed, his shoulders dropping away from his ears now that the mobile was gone.
He reached for his water glass, and the movement brought his forearm into the bar of sunlight that fell across their table, turning the fine hairs on his skin to gold.
“Lysander and Hamish have given me rules,” Cassian said.
Uriel’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth.
“Because they want to take care of me,” Cassian continued, folding his hands neatly the way he used to during the evening readings when he had something important to contribute.
“They want me to tell them where I am and what I’m doing whenever I’m with you.
And they want me to text them, so they always know.
” He paused, making sure he’d got it right, because Lysander had been very specific and Cassian had committed the terms to memory.
“I can bring you to the cottage, but only when one of them is home.”
Uriel set his glass down. A crease appeared between his brows and deepened as Cassian watched.
“They’re controlling you, Cassian.”
Cassian shook his head. “They’re giving me structure and guidance to keep me safe,” he said, and the words came out steady. “Like the Family of Light used to.”
Uriel’s eyes went soft and sad in a way that made Cassian’s stomach drop, because he’d seen that expression on the elders’ faces when they spoke about the lost, the ones who’d wandered too far from the Light to find their way back.
“They’ve turned you against me, Cassian.” Uriel’s voice was barely above a murmur. “Already.”
“What? No!” Cassian’s voice came out so loud that the couple nearby turned to stare. “They said they liked you, Uriel. Lysander thought you were very polite. He told me so this morning over pancakes, and Lysander doesn’t lie to me about things.”
Uriel leaned forward, planting his forearms on the wood, and his voice dropped into the low, patient register that he used to deliver teachings.
“They’ve made you feel unsafe enough around me that you’ve agreed to report what we’re doing every second we’re together.
They’re monitoring your movements, Cassian.
They’re causing you to stray further into the shadows with them. ”
“They’re trying to show me how to live outside the Family of Light, Uriel,” Cassian corrected. “I thought that’s what you wanted as well. You were saying the other night, at dinner, that that’s why you came to find me. Hamish and Lysander are kind. They’ll help both of us. I know they will.”
Uriel’s jaw set hard. “The Fourth Principle of the Universal Doctrine states that the bearer of Light may employ the language of shadow to navigate the territories of the unilluminated,” he said.
“Sometimes you have to meet the outsiders where they are, Cassian. Speak their language. Tell them what they need to hear so that they’ll open the door and let you through.
” His gaze was steady and pale. “I told the documentarian and his omega what they wanted to hear, because that was the only way they’d let me spend time with you. ”
The café noise carried on around them, but inside Cassian’s head there was a silence so complete that he could hear his own pulse.
“So none of it was true.” His voice came out thin. “You don’t really want to leave the Family of Light?”
“Why would I?” Uriel reached over and covered Cassian’s hand with his own, his thumb settling over Cassian’s knuckles with a pressure that was warm and certain.
“The Family of Light is the culmination of my destiny, Cassian. My father’s mantle will pass to me, and I will carry his work forward into the next generation of the illuminated.
” His grip tightened, not enough to hurt, but enough that Cassian could feel the bones of his fingers pressing together.
“But you’re a part of that future too. You’ve always been a part of it.
You’re a Calyx — the youngest ever named.
The Light doesn’t let go of its chosen, and neither do I. ”
Cassian pulled his hand free. The movement required more effort than it should have, because every instinct in his body was screaming at him to leave it there, to let the warmth of his alpha’s hand smooth over the hurting thing that had just broken open inside him.
He turned the mobile face-up. The half-finished message to Lysander was still on the screen. Coffee makes my brain go fast and my knee go bouncy. The cursor blinked at the end of the sentence, waiting for him to finish.
“Cassian.” Uriel’s voice had gone soft again. “Come back to us. Come back with me. You trust me to take care of you, don’t you?”
Cassian nodded. He picked up the avocado toast and took an enormous bite, because his mouth couldn’t betray him if it was full, and the disgusting green paste had finally found its purpose.
“You belong to me, don’t you, Cassian?”
The avocado sat glued to the roof of his mouth. Cassian chewed and thought about Lysander, who had laughed so hard he’d nearly choked on his coffee when Cassian had once commented that Lysander belonged to Hamish.
Lysander had corrected him in terms so blunt that Cassian had blushed: No, I don’t fucking belong to Hamish, thank you very much, Cassian.
Hamish doesn’t own me, and I don’t own him, and if you ever catch me behaving like a man’s property you have my full permission to throw something at my head.
Then Hamish had come up behind Lysander and pressed a kiss into his hair and said, It’s enough that he tolerates me, and the two of them had smiled at each other in a way that made the word belonging seem entirely beside the point.
“Don’t you, Cassian?” Uriel prompted again.
Cassian kept his eyes on his plate. “Yes, alpha.”
Uriel’s hand settled over his again, covering it completely. “And because I belong to the Family of Light, doesn’t it make sense to you that you also belong with the Family?”
Cassian bit into the toast and chewed with excruciating thoroughness, grinding the sourdough to paste between his molars while the silence stretched taut.
He could feel Uriel’s gaze on the side of his face, and the café noise thinned around them until there was nothing left but the scrape of his own jaw working and the steady pressure of Uriel’s thumb against his knuckles.
He chewed, and chewed, and chewed.
“I need an answer, Cassian.” The warmth had left Uriel’s voice.
Cassian swallowed. The avocado went down like wet cement. “I want to be with you, alpha,” he whispered. His fingers curled beneath Uriel’s hand. “But I can’t go back to Charles. You have to promise me that, alpha. You have to promise.”
Uriel’s expression settled into a configuration that Cassian had seen on the Lumineer’s face a hundred times as he prepared to deliver a difficult teaching.
“The Lumineer has been in talks with Charles,” Uriel said.
Cassian’s breath stopped.
“Charles has repented, Cassian. He’s come before the Light and acknowledged that he didn’t treat you as well as he could have.
” Uriel’s thumb traced a slow circle over his knuckles.
“But he sensed that your heart wasn’t with him, and that knowledge caused him great pain.
The pain of an alpha whose omega has turned away from the bond. ”
The café kept moving around them. The woman with the pram was paying her bill one-handed. A barista was grinding beans with a sound like gravel pouring, and a man near the window was laughing into his mobile. All of it carried on as though the ground beneath Cassian’s chair hadn’t just opened up.
“Cassian.” Uriel leaned closer. His scent thickened between them, and Cassian hated how much his body still reached for it.
“I have good news for you. Charles is willing to forgive you. He understands that you were confused and frightened, and he’s prepared to welcome you home with an open heart.
” His grip on Cassian’s hand tightened. “The Lumineer has asked me to work with you. To help you prepare your heart to receive your Evermate, so that the bond can take root properly this time.”
The words arrived and Cassian heard every one of them, but their meaning took longer to come together.
The Lumineer has asked me to work with you.
Not: I left everything for you, or I came to find you because the Universe wrote your name in my heart.
The Lumineer had sent Uriel. The Lumineer, who did not make mistakes, had dispatched his son across the city with a set of instructions to return a wayward vessel to the man who’d paid for the compound’s new meditation hall.
“You’re my Evermate, Uriel,” Cassian said. He held Uriel’s gaze, searching his eyes for any sign he believed it too.
Uriel’s expression softened. “Eat your breakfast, Cassian,” he said gently. “You need your strength.”