Chapter Eighteen
Cassian lay in the dark and picked at the shape of his own thinking, the way you’d work at a knot in a piece of string, testing each loop to see which one would give first.
Uriel wanted him to go back to Charles.
The alpha who should have been his Evermate, the man whose name had burned in his chest every night he’d spent bound to the Bayswater bed, that alpha was not offering to take Cassian away from the hurt. He was offering to help ease Cassian back into it.
He was volunteering to prepare him and teach him how to please Charles, as though the problem had always been Cassian’s technique and not Charles’s fists.
The ceiling fan turned overhead in slow, clicking revolutions, and Cassian tracked the shadow of its blades across the plaster while the thought completed its circuit.
If Uriel was willing to do that, to coach Cassian’s body into receiving the man who’d left bruises all over him, then Uriel hadn’t really come to Melbourne out of love for him. He’d come on an errand.
And yet…
Uriel was the Lumineer’s son, which meant that everything he did was done with his face tilted towards the sky, because that was how the Lumineer had raised him: chin up, heart open, every action offered to the Light as an act of praise towards its glory.
The Fourth Principle taught that the illuminated could speak in the language of shadow when they moved through the territories of the unilluminated.
Uriel had told Hamish and Lysander what they’d needed to hear.
He had navigated the darkness so that the Light could reach Cassian in an act of ministry.
Cassian should listen to Uriel. The doctrine was clear, and the doctrine had been his compass since before he could speak.
He pressed his face into the pillow and breathed through the cotton until his lungs ached.
The problem was that he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to listen to Uriel, and he didn’t want to return to Charles. For the first time in his life the two desires were not in competition with doctrine but simply there, sitting on the surface of his consciousness and refusing to be smoothed over.
? ? ?
Lysander was sitting at the kitchen island with his mobile propped against the fruit bowl, dark circles under his eyes that hadn’t been there yesterday. He didn’t look up from the screen when Cassian came in from the garden.
Cassian stood in the doorway in his blue robe and waited.
Pancakes didn’t materialise, and Lysander’s attention didn’t shift from the screen. Instead, the older omega pointed at the pantry without a word.
Cassian got the muesli down from the shelf and poured himself a bowl. He added his usual Greek yoghurt and honey slurry, and carried it to the island, settling onto the stool opposite Lysander with his bare feet hooked around the legs.
His mouth was tight at the corners, and the thumb scrolling his mobile had a jittery, compulsive quality that Cassian recognised from the nights when Lysander stayed up too late talking to his family in London.
Stephen was weeks away from his due date, and Colin was on bed rest with a pregnancy that had everyone on edge.
He could ask Lysander what he thought about Uriel. Whether Uriel was still worth the ache. Whether the things Uriel had said at the café meant what Cassian thought they meant, or whether there was another way to read them that Cassian couldn’t see on his own.
Lysander’s thumb stopped moving. He stared at whatever was on his screen, and the muscle in his jaw tightened.
Cassian put a spoonful of muesli in his mouth and chewed quietly. He ate his breakfast, and he didn’t ask.
? ? ?
He kept meeting Uriel because the alternative was to stop, and stopping meant accepting that the name he’d carried since he was fourteen had been written into him by his own wanting and not by the Universe at all.
Cassian wasn’t ready to accept that yet.
They met at cafés, because cafés were safe and busy with other people.
He chose the places Lysander had taken him to before, and he texted Lysander each time, the way he’d promised.
The messages were scrupulously detailed.
Im at brown sugar with uriel. He has ordered a long black and I have ordered a flat white because im a coffee person now. he is wearing a green jumper.
Lysander’s replies were always brief and always the same. Good lad. Keep me posted.
Uriel talked a lot about the Light. He managed to weave The Universal Principles into everything. The First Principle when Cassian mentioned missing the compound’s garden. The Seventh when Cassian talked about the library. The Third whenever Cassian said anything at all about Lysander or Hamish.
“The omega contaminates you with his worldliness, Cassian. Every café he takes you to, every choice he forces you to make for yourself, is a step further from the Light’s plan for your life.”
Cassian stirred his flat white and watched the foam spiral into nothing. “Lysander doesn’t force me to do anything. He just won’t do things for me that I can do myself.”
“Because he doesn’t understand the role of a Calyx. Your purpose is to receive, not to act. The vessel doesn’t fill itself.”
“I’m not a vessel, Uriel. I’m a person who’s learned that he likes coffee.”
Uriel’s mouth thinned, and his hand found Cassian’s across the table. Cassian’s fingers curled into Uriel’s palm instinctively.
This was the part that worked against him. The doctrine slid off Cassian’s mind now. He could hear the words without believing them, recognising the shape of a teaching and picking out the flaws within it. But Uriel’s hand on his was something he was yet to build a defence against.
So Cassian leaned in the way he’d watched Lysander lean into Hamish. He let his whole body tip forward, his shoulder pressing against Uriel’s arm.
“I don’t want to go back to Charles,” Cassian said during a break in Uriel’s sermonising. “But I’d go anywhere with you, Uriel. You know that.”
Uriel’s thumb moved across his knuckles. “Charles has repented, Cassian. The Light has cleansed him, and he’s ready to be received by his Calyx once more.”
“I don’t care about Charles’s repentance.” Cassian shifted closer on the bench seat, pressing his thigh against Uriel’s under the table. “I want to talk about us. I want us to think about what might happen if we go to the Lumineer and tell him you’re my Evermate.”
“That isn’t how it works, and you know that.”
“We can make it work differently together, Uriel,” Cassian insisted. “You’re going to be the next Lumineer. You can change the doctrine.”
Uriel gave a tight shake of his head. “I can’t change the doctrine, Cassian. The doctrine is the word of the Universe. It doesn’t bend for wanting.”
“It bent for Charles’s money.”
Uriel’s hand clenched around his. “That’s a serious accusation, Cassian.”
“One that we both know is true.”
Uriel pulled his hand away. The absence of his warmth left Cassian’s fingers cold on the tabletop.
“The Universe tests us by imposing suffering on us, Cassian. Charles was your test. Your task was to find the Light within the difficulty, to open yourself fully to the path that was laid before you, and to trust that the pain would lead to purification.”
“I’ve heard every one of the Principles,” Cassian said.
“And none of the Principles explain why Charles hit me, Uriel. I’ve looked.
I’ve thought about every single one of them in my head, and there isn’t a Principle that says an Evermate should put his fist in your face because you started crying when he tried to push your legs apart on your first night together. ”
Cassian could see the gears turning behind Uriel’s eyes. “You should have been better prepared…” he admitted.
“Your father gave me to a man who hurt me,” Cassian said. “And you’re sitting here telling me that the Universe meant for it to happen. Do you actually believe that, Uriel? Because I need to know.”
“Yes,” Uriel said with little hesitation. “I believe the Universe’s plan is perfect, even when we can’t see its shape in its entirety.”
Cassian nodded. He’d expected the answer, but that didn’t lessen the shock of hearing it said out loud.
He kept talking to Uriel anyway.
They were at Soleil again, sitting in the back corner, when Cassian finally ran out of patience with him. Uriel was explaining the Ninth Principle’s position on contamination due to sustained contact with the unilluminated.
“—and the soul that lingers too long in shadow begins to mistake the dark for comfort, and the comfort for—”
Cassian kissed him.
He didn’t plan it. One moment he was sitting beside Uriel with his hands around his coffee cup, listening to him discuss the insidiousness of corruption, and the next he’d twisted round on the seat, put one hand on the side of Uriel’s face, and pressed his mouth against the alpha’s.
It was wholly different from their kiss at Cinema Nova.
That had been Uriel’s doing, a brief brush of their lips that lasted two seconds and left Cassian vibrating for days.
This little act of daring was Cassian’s, and he copied how he’d seen Lysander kissing Hamish: his tongue sliding against Uriel’s lower lip before pushing past it and dipping in to take his first taste of the alpha.
Uriel grunted against his mouth. Cassian’s hand slid from Uriel’s jaw into the short hair at his nape, his fingers digging in, and for three glorious seconds the alpha kissed him back.
Uriel’s scent thickened around him until Cassian could taste it on his tongue alongside the coffee, and his body opened towards it, his slick dampening his underwear in a sudden, embarrassing rush.
Then Uriel’s hands came up and gripped Cassian’s shoulders, pushing him away.
Cassian’s hand still tingled where it had held the side of Uriel’s face. The alpha’s chest was rising and falling too fast, his pupils blown so wide that only a thin ring of pale blue remained around the black, and a patch of colour had climbed up his neck above the collar of his shirt.
“Did Hamish teach you that?” Uriel’s voice came out rough. “Or the omega?”
Cassian wiped his mouth with his hand and looked at Uriel directly. “No,” he said. “I learned it from Charles.”
Cassian got to his feet, pushed through the café door and into the flat white glare of Lygon Street. He got halfway down the block before his hands started shaking.
He rounded the corner onto a quieter street lined with parked cars and terrace houses, their iron lacework casting complicated shadows across the footpath, and lifted his right hand, only to have Uriel’s scent hit him at full force.
He should wipe it on his jeans. If he made one pass of his palm down his thigh, it would be gone, absorbed into denim and sweat and the ordinary smell of him. Instead, Cassian put his hand in his pocket. His fingers curled closed around the scent of Uriel, and he kept walking home.