Chapter Twenty-One
Hamish couldn’t stop touching them. His hands moved between Lysander on the bed and Cassian in the plastic chair beside it, checking and rechecking each of them, because both of his omegas smelled wrong and the Royal Melbourne’s emergency department was full of alphas.
He stood beside Lysander’s bed in the curtained-off bay, his fingers working through Lysander’s hair, finding the edges of the swelling at the back of his skull.
The lump was enormous, a hard ridge of tissue that started behind his left ear and ran diagonally across the occipital bone, hot to the touch and already darkening to a livid purple.
Lysander flinched when Hamish’s thumb grazed the centre of it, and Hamish snatched his hand away.
“Sorry.” His voice came out raw. “Sorry, Sander.”
“It’s fine.” Lysander was sitting upright against the raised back of the hospital bed, his left ankle immobilised in a temporary splint that made his foot jut out at an angle beneath the thin blanket. His eyes were glassy and too bright, unable to focus on Hamish. “Stop apologising.”
Cassian was in the moulded plastic chair beside the bed, folded into himself.
His nose had stopped bleeding, but the blood had dried in a dark crust along his upper lip and down the side of his jaw.
His left cheekbone was swollen and discoloured where Uriel’s hand had connected.
The robe’s lapel was smeared russet where he’d pressed his face into it.
Hamish crouched in front of him. He pushed back the white-blond hair from Cassian’s forehead.
He licked his thumb and wiped some of the dried blood from beside Cassian’s nostril.
Then Hamish was standing again, because Lysander had shifted on the bed and hissed through his teeth.
His hand found Lysander’s thigh through the blanket and pressed down.
Cassian sniffled and wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, and Hamish’s heart tried to tear itself in half. He couldn’t be beside both omegas at once, and it was killing him.
He had to settle for splitting the difference. He kept his left hand on Lysander’s leg, his palm flat against the warmth of his thigh, and reached his right hand back to rest on Cassian’s shoulder, his fingers curling over the synthetic fleece of the robe.
The two police officers stood against the opposite wall of the bay, just beyond the curtain’s edge, both alphas.
One was tall and broad with a shaved head, the other shorter and dark-haired with a notebook open in her hands.
They’d introduced themselves when Hamish arrived, and they’d been watching him ever since.
“Mr McNally,” the one with the shaved head said, “we understand this is difficult —”
“Can you step back, please?” Hamish asked, a sharp edge to his tone. “Both of you. Step back from the bed.”
They were too close, standing four metres from two injured omegas who stank of fear and blood, and Hamish wanted them on the other side of the building.
The younger officer’s arms unfolded, his weight shifting forward.
“I need you to step back,” Hamish said again, and the hand on Cassian’s shoulder tightened, gathering the robe into his fist. “Please.”
The officers exchanged a glance. Then shaved head took a step back, and his colleague followed.
They gave their statements in pieces, passing the account back and forth across the bed like it was too heavy for either of them to carry alone.
Lysander began, and when his voice caught, Cassian took up the thread.
Hamish stood between the bed and the chair, a hand on each of them, and did the only thing left to him: he listened.
He had been in the city buying batteries and gaffer tape while a man he’d sat across a dinner table from put his hands on both of them.
Cassian had gone still. He was watching Hamish’s face. Then the chair legs scraped against the lino, and he pressed himself into Hamish’s side, tucking his head beneath Hamish’s arm and bringing his own across Hamish’s waist.
Here was Cassian folding himself around Hamish to make him feel better. Things were going so completely the wrong way round that Hamish couldn’t find a single thing to say.
He turned his head and pressed a kiss into Cassian’s hair, careful of his bruising.
“I twisted my ankle kicking him.” Lysander was looking at the blanket over his knees rather than at Hamish. “He was already on the floor. He wasn’t getting back up, and I kicked him in the ribs anyway and went straight over on it. So that part’s my own fault, really.”
The taller officer shook his head. “You had an intruder assaulting two people in your own home. Whatever you did to get the pair of you out of that room, that’s not something you need to be feeling bad about.”
Lysander didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t argue.
Cassian’s hand curled around Hamish’s forearm.
His fingers moved over the muscle in slow, kneading strokes, and his voice came muffled against Hamish’s shirt.
“You’re a good alpha, Hamish. You came straight away.
You dropped everything and you came, and now you’re here.
” The strokes went on, patient and certain.
“Such a good alpha. The best one. You always look after us. But today, we looked after ourselves.”
Hamish shut his eyes and let the omega’s words ground him. “I’m proud of you, Cass…”
Cassian squeezed Hamish tight. “I know where to kick alphas now. I’m learning so much from Lysander’s mistakes. You don’t kick in the ribs, you kick in the balls. He kept telling me that in the ambulance.”
After the officers had left, the hospital food arrived on a beige plastic tray that looked like it had been designed to lower expectations before you’d even lifted the lid.
It came off to reveal a grey-brown slab sitting in a puddle of gravy so thin it could have been mistaken for dishwater, flanked by carrots that had been boiled into a state of total submission.
Lysander scowled at it. “No,” he said.
Hamish picked up one of the carrots with a fork and mushed it into the tines with the slightest pressure of his finger. He set the fork down.
“Absolutely not.” Lysander pushed the tray to the far edge of the bed, his lip curling. “I’ve just been assaulted and hospitalised and they want me to eat something that looks like it died twice.”
“It might taste better than it looks.”
“It won’t, Hamish. Stop being such a fucking optimist.” Lysander ignored Cassian’s scandalised gasp and folded his arms across his chest. “I want Nando’s.”
Hamish was already reaching for his jacket. “What do you want?”
“A whole chicken. Lemon and herb. Halloumi. Corn on the cob. Two garlic breads.” Lysander ticked each item off on his fingers. “And the frozen yoghurt. Not the cheesecake: the frozen yoghurt.”
“Right.” Hamish pulled his jacket on and turned to Cassian. “Cass, you coming?”
Cassian looked torn between the two fixed points of his existence.
“Go with him, Cass.” Lysander’s eyes were already drooping, his head sinking deeper into the hospital pillow, the adrenaline finally loosening its grip. “Make sure he gets us a good dessert.”
Cassian stood and crossed to the bed. He leaned down and pressed his mouth to Lysander’s temple, his lips resting against the one small patch of unblemished skin above Lysander’s eyebrow.
Hamish watched them from the doorway and committed the image to memory: Cassian standing over Lysander in a bloodstained dressing gown, tucking him in beneath fluorescent strip lighting in a curtained bay of the Royal Melbourne, both of them battered and bruised and still, somehow, looking after each other.
He held the curtain aside for Cassian, and the two of them walked out together.
Cassian stayed close enough to Hamish’s side that their elbows knocked together every few steps all the way to the car park. Hamish held the car door open and waited while Cassian folded himself into the passenger seat, the light-blue robe pooling around his bare legs.
The buckle of Cassian’s seatbelt wouldn’t catch. Cassian jabbed it into the latch, missed, and then sat there pressing it against the wrong part of the mechanism.
Hamish reached across and guided the metal tongue into the slot until it clicked home.
“Thanks,” Cassian whispered.
Hamish pulled out of the car park and turned onto Royal Parade, heading south towards Fitzroy. The traffic was light enough that he could have made it in ten minutes, but the amber lights caught him twice on Nicholson Street and he didn’t push through either of them.
Cassian’s fingers went to the seatbelt buckle again. He pressed the release button with his thumb, felt the mechanism give, then pushed the tongue back in. Click. Release. Click. Release.
“You doing okay, Cass?”
Cassian nodded so vigorously that his fringe fell into his eyes. His thumb pressed the release button again. Click. Release.
Hamish let a block pass. “You sure?”
Cassian’s teeth closed over his lower lip, pressing hard enough to blanch the skin beneath the dried blood. His hand stilled on the buckle. He fixed Hamish with a look far too intense for how close they were sitting.
“Lysander said something to me,” Cassian said. “Before the medical people came.”
Hamish kept his eyes on the road and his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. “He was hurting, Cass. Whatever it was, if it was about kicking balls, or gouging someone’s eyes out, that’s because of how upset he was. Don’t let it get to you.”
“He said I was never going back there.” The words came out in a rush, tumbling over each other. “He kept saying it. Over and over. On the footpath, with all those people standing around us, he just kept saying it.”
Hamish indicated left onto Johnston Street and waited for a gap in the oncoming traffic. “That’s right,” he said. “You’re never going back there. You’re never seeing Charles or Uriel again, Cass. Sander and I will make sure of that.”
The indicator ticked in the silence. Cassian’s hand had left the seatbelt buckle and settled in his lap, both palms turned upward on his thighs.
“So I can stay with you?” His voice had gone quiet. “Forever?”
Hamish turned into Johnston Street and drove past a pub whose outdoor tables were crowded with people who were all having far better evenings than he was.
“Not forever, Cass.” He glanced across and found Cassian watching him, his bottom lip quivering.
“Not because we don’t want you with us, but because it’s mine and Sander’s job to make sure you know you can go and be out there on your own.
That you don’t need us to function.” He slowed for a pedestrian crossing where a woman was dragging a reluctant terrier across the road.
“But until you decide what you want to do, where you want to be, and who you want to be with — yeah. You’ll stay with us. ”
Cassian straightened in his seat, smoothed his robe across his knees, and turned to Hamish.
“Can I have two halloumi chicken wraps?”
Hamish laughed and nodded. “You can have that, and whatever sides you want, Cass.”
Cassian pressed his palms together beneath his chin and closed his eyes, and Hamish drove them towards the Nando’s on Smith Street while the last of the daylight bled out of the sky behind them.