Chapter Twenty #2
A raw, animal snarl ripped up out of Lysander’s throat, and he threw himself at Uriel.
His nails gouged into Uriel’s cheek and dragged down, tearing through skin, leaving three livid welts before his hand had cleared the alpha’s jaw.
Uriel’s head jerked back. His fist closed in Lysander’s hair and wrenched, hard enough that Lysander’s neck bent at an angle that sent white sparks across his vision.
Uriel’s free hand came for his throat. Lysander’s teeth clamped down around the meat of it before the fingers could close, his jaw locking with a force he didn’t know he had in him, and the taste of blood flooded his mouth, hot and copper-bright.
His own or the alpha’s, it didn’t matter.
Uriel let out a bark of pain and his grip tightened until the roots tore.
Uriel’s knee drove up into Lysander’s stomach.
The air left him in a single, wrenching gust that took his vision with it.
His legs buckled and he doubled over Uriel’s knee.
Then Cassian was there, launching himself onto Uriel’s back.
His arms locked around the alpha’s neck and his bloody nose mashed into Uriel’s hair while his fist drove into the side of the alpha’s skull, once, twice, a third time.
Uriel reared back. His hand caught Cassian’s arm and swung him like a rag, slamming the omega’s back into the wall hard enough that the plaster cracked behind the point of impact and the framed photograph fell from its hook in the corridor outside, its glass shattering against the floorboards.
Cassian slid down the wall, his body folded at the waist, his bare legs splaying across the carpet.
Lysander, casting around for a weapon, found Cassian’s tablet on the bedside table.
He didn’t think. Uriel had already turned back towards Cassian, his shoulders squared, his whole body angled away from Lysander as though the omega behind him had ceased to register as a threat.
Lysander seized the tablet in both hands, jumped, and brought the flat of it down on the back of Uriel’s skull with everything he had.
The tablet’s screen splintered under the force.
Uriel’s knees buckled inward, the rest of him following, his body folding forward onto the carpet in a heavy, graceless collapse that shook the floorboards.
Lysander kicked him in the ribs before he’d finished falling.
His foot connected with solid muscle and bone, and the jolt travelled up his leg and twisted his ankle in a white-hot flare.
Fuck.
He threw the ruined tablet in the general direction of Uriel’s head, and grabbed Cassian’s wrist. Cassian was still on the floor against the wall, his nose bleeding freely down his chin, his eyes unfocused and his breath coming in short, hitching gulps.
His legs were bare beneath the rucked-up t-shirt, and Lysander didn’t care.
He hauled Cassian upright by the arm and dragged him out the bedroom door, over the broken glass from the photograph frame and down the corridor.
Lysander’s ankle buckled on every other step.
There was a grinding wrongness in the joint that sent sparks up his shin, but he kept his grip on Cassian’s wrist and kept moving.
His own mobile was where he’d left it, on the kitchen counter.
Cassian’s light-blue robe hung on its hook by the back door, the fleece still carrying the faint chemical sweetness of fabric softener from last week’s wash.
Lysander snatched the robe off the hook and threw it around Cassian’s shoulders one-handed, yanking the lapels together across his chest. Cassian’s fingers clutched the fleece closed, smearing blood across the fabric.
Then Lysander grabbed his mobile, shoved his way out the front door, and half-dragged, half-carried Cassian down the garden path.
The gate banged shut behind them. Lysander’s ankle screamed with each stride, his weight pitching sideways so that he lurched against Cassian. The two of them staggered down the footpath like drunks holding each other vertical.
He was already dialling. His thumb found the numbers from muscle memory and sheer bloody-mindedness, because his eyes were blurring at the edges and the back of his skull throbbed where Uriel had torn his hair out by the roots.
He pressed the mobile to his ear and heard ringing, distant and tinny, as though he were hearing it underwater.
“We need — we need you.” His voice cracked, skidding up in pitch and in volume. “We’ve been attacked. There’s a man in our house. He hit —” The words jammed. Cassian was shaking so hard against his side that Lysander felt it in his own ribs. “He hit us. Please. Please come.”
The operator on the other end of the line asked him for an address. Lysander opened his mouth and the street name wouldn’t surface. He knew it. He’d been living here for months. The jasmine was right there, behind the fence, and the banksia, and the —
People were gathering. A woman in running gear had stopped on the opposite pavement.
A man came out of the terrace two doors down, still holding a tea towel.
Someone was talking to him, calm and measured, and he couldn’t process a single word of it because the adrenaline had curdled into something thick that sat between his ears and let nothing in.
A hand eased the mobile from his fingers. The woman in running gear brought it up against her own ear and started talking, rattling off the street name and the suburb and a description of injuries that Lysander hadn’t realised were visible.
So he stopped trying. He stopped trying to think or stand without listing sideways, and wrapped both arms around Cassian instead.
His robe had slipped off one shoulder, exposing the pale skin beneath, and Lysander tugged it back into place, pulling the fleece tight around the younger omega’s trembling frame.
“You’re never going back there.” He said it into Cassian’s hair, which was matted with blood, dark against the blond. “Do you hear me, Cass? You’re never going back there.”
Cassian’s fists were balled in the front of Lysander’s t-shirt, his knuckles grinding against Lysander’s sternum. He kept his face buried in the crook of Lysander’s neck.
“You’re never going back there,” Lysander said again, because it was the only sentence left in him, and he held Cassian on the footpath outside Hamish’s cottage while the sirens grew louder.