Chapter Thirty-Three
Cassian chose the seat with its back to the wall, which put the large alpha behind the counter directly in his line of sight. This was sensible. You kept alphas where you could see them, especially ones built like industrial machinery.
Although this particular alpha did smell really, really good. Like browned butter and cinnamon sugar, with a warmth underneath it all that Cassian couldn’t separate from the baked things surrounding him.
“How’s your Chelsea bun, Cass?”
Cassian held the bun in both hands and laid his tongue flat against the glazed surface. The sugar syrup was tacky and sweet, coating his taste buds in a single long stripe, and he dragged his tongue from the base of the spiral to the top in a slow, deliberate pass before going back for a second.
“Good,” he murmured, eyes half-closed, already angling the bun for a third lick.
“Okay.” Lysander’s voice had gone tight. “Maybe stop doing that, Cass.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t lick food that isn’t ice cream.”
This was new information. Cassian considered it, gave the glaze one final lick out of principle, and then bit into the bun properly.
The inside was even better than the outside. Soft dough that pulled apart in layers, currants bursting against his teeth, and cinnamon so warm it spread through his sinuses. He squirmed against his chair, his shoulders rolling, a pleased hum vibrating in his throat.
He took another bite, and the hum came again, louder this time, because the taste of lemon zest had arrived and it was beautiful.
Lysander waited until Cassian had finished chewing before he said anything else, which was how Cassian knew this talk was going to be serious.
“Cass, I need you to know that I wasn’t angry at you this morning.” Lysander turned his latte cup on its saucer, leaving a wet crescent on the concrete tabletop. “That was about me being wound up about something that’s got nothing to do with you. I was just taking it out on the nearest person.”
Cassian licked a curl of sugar glaze from his thumb. He’d already known this, not from any particular insight, but from the notebook on the kitchen table that Lysander had been scribbling away in.
“Is it because you’re about to go and see your ex?” Cassian asked.
Lysander’s cup stilled mid-rotation. “How do you know about that?”
“You left your notebook open one time.” Cassian ate another mouthful of the Chelsea bun. “And I read it.”
Lysander pressed his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose and squeezed. “Brilliant.”
“Did he hurt you when you were with him?”
Lysander didn’t flinch or shut down, but his face did a strange scrunch around his eyes and mouth.
“Not exactly, Cass.” He set his cup down and flattened both palms on the table. “It didn’t feel like it at the time. He never hit me…but we weren’t good together. I was with him at a time when I wasn’t strong enough to make my own decisions, so I was happy to be led into some really bad things.”
“Like getting filmed being penetrated?”
Lysander let out a breath that was just on the edge of laughter.
“That. And I let myself forget everything my daddy ever taught me, started only caring about money, my fancy flat and car.” His thumb traced the side of his coffee cup.
“That’s why I didn’t take Stephen seriously when he called me and told me he was scared about a fan of mine who was stalking him.
I only cared about me and keeping the money coming.
It took Stevie getting hurt to shock some sense back into me. ”
Cassian stayed quiet. He’d always wanted to know what had happened to Lysander before Melbourne, and he knew from the lambs that if you sat still enough, the skittish ones came to you eventually.
“The thing about Dane,” Lysander said, “is that he was fucking gorgeous. Tall, blond, built like he lived in a gym.” His mouth twisted.
“You know the feeling when you stand too close to a bonfire during a really cold night and the heat makes you stupid because it feels so warm and so good, that you want to edge just a little bit closer? That’s what being near Dane was like.
I couldn’t think straight around him. And the sex was —” He exhaled through his teeth.
“Cass, the sex was amazing. He knew exactly what he was doing with my body, and I was eighteen, horny as anything. I couldn’t believe someone like him thought Lysander Huxley was worth bothering with.
So I let him do whatever he wanted, because it felt incredible and because saying no to him never even occurred to me as an option. ”
Cassian set his Chelsea bun down on the plate. The glaze stuck to his fingertips, and he wiped them on his joggers without thinking.
“He had this gorgeous flat in Knightsbridge,” Lysander continued, his gaze fixed on a point past Cassian’s shoulder.
“The bathroom was all marble clad. He had a car that cost more than my daddy earned in ten years of cleaning offices. And he paid for everything. Every meal, every taxi, every bit of clothing I wore. He’d hand me his card and tell me to buy whatever I wanted, and I thought that meant he loved me. ”
Lysander’s jaw shifted, his teeth grinding once, loud enough for Cassian to hear from across the table.
“It wasn’t until I’d completely fallen for him that I found out his credit cards were maxed out.
All of them. He was drowning in debt, and I was the revenue stream he wanted to dip into.
He’d already spent a fortune on me, so I owed him, didn’t I?
That’s how he put it. We just needed to make a few more videos to cover costs.
Just you and me, babe, nothing weird, just help me dig us out of this hole. ”
Cassian watched Lysander’s thumb press hard enough into the ceramic cup that the nail went white.
“Our first video was already out, and it had millions of views, so what was one more? It was nothing I hadn’t already done.
Then he introduced toys. Then another alpha.
Then I’d walk into the flat and find three alphas I’d never met sitting on the sofa waiting for me…
” Lysander’s throat bobbed. “Dane would say, ‘Babe, they’re fans, be nice,’ as if saying no was the rude thing to do.
By the end, it was twenty alphas during one heat.
All filmed. All monetised. And I did it, Cass.
I did all of it, because by then I couldn’t see a way out of it. ”
Cassian tore a piece off his Chelsea bun, the soft dough pulling apart between his fingers, and reached across to place it in Lysander’s open hand.
Lysander looked down at the piece of bun in his palm.
“You looked sad,” Cassian said. “Eat it.”
Lysander smiled. He put it in his mouth and chewed, and Cassian waited.
“I’ve been going to therapy,” Lysander said, after he’d swallowed.
“Since I came to Melbourne and Hamish talked me into it. The thing my therapist keeps coming back to is that the asks never start out big. Nobody walks up to you on day one and says, ‘Right, I’m going to film you being fucked by twenty strangers during your heat.’ That would be mad.
You’d run.” He brushed a crumb from his lip.
“It starts with something small. Something you can say yes to without thinking about it. And then the next thing is only a little bigger than the first thing, and you’ve already said yes once, so what’s one more yes?
And then the next ask comes. And the next.
Until you’re standing in a room full of people you don’t know, doing something you never thought you would, and you can’t point to the exact moment it went wrong because there isn’t one.
Every small yes was a brick in the wall, and by the time you see the wall, you’re on the wrong side of it. ”
“Sander,” Cassian said carefully. “I think that’s what the Family of Light did with me, too.
They got me to say a bunch of small yeses, all the way down.
I said yes to the morning practice. To the work schedule, and all the preaching.
So by the time they gave me to Charles, I didn’t know how to say no. ”
Lysander reached over and thumbed a smear of sugar from the corner of Cassian’s mouth. “You’re never going back there, Cassian.”
The first time Lysander had said them, on a Melbourne footpath with sirens closing in and blood drying on both their faces, they’d been a wall thrown up against a crisis. This time, it was a settled fact.
Cassian grinned. “No, I’m not.” He licked the last of the glaze from his fingertip. “And I know how to say no now, Sander. I say no all the time to the bad foods you try to give me.”
Lysander’s eyes rolled so far back that Cassian could see the whites. “Vegetables aren’t bad foods, Cass.”
“They taste green.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?”
“Like grass. Like they’re still alive and angry about being eaten, so they make my tongue do this weird thing where it dries up and feels like it’s shrivelling.”
Lysander opened his mouth to argue, then seemed to decide that debating the point at seven in the morning wasn’t a productive use of his time. Instead, he leaned over and took an enormous, uninvited bite out of what remained of Cassian’s Chelsea bun.
Cassian’s hand flew to the plate. “That’s mine.”
“Consider it a tax for emotional labour,” Lysander said, chewing.
Cassian snatched the bun off the plate and stuffed the entire rest of it into his mouth in one go.
His cheeks puffed out like a hamster hoarding for winter, and a curl of cinnamon dough escaped the corner of his lips before he sucked it back in.
He chewed with his mouth closed, because Lysander had taught him that, maintaining furious eye contact throughout.
Lysander laughed. He drained the last of his coffee and pushed his chair back from the table.
“Right, come on. Let’s head home.” He fished in his pocket for the fold of notes and handed them once more to Cassian.
“We’ll pick up some bits for the others.
And yes, before you ask, you can get one more thing. ”
Cassian was already on his feet and hurtling back towards the counter and the display of pastries. He pressed himself against the glass and stared, eyes going straight to the pastéis de nata.
“These are beautiful,” Cassian breathed.
The alpha baker glanced over at him. His expression didn’t shift. “Thanks. It’s a new batch. Want one?”
“I want twenty.” Cassian peeled notes from his bundle and slid the fifty-pound note across the counter.
“We’ll have ten,” Lysander said, appearing at his shoulder.
“Ten?” Cassian rounded on him. “That’s two each, Sander. Two. For five people.”
“We both know you’re going to bat your eyes at Hamish until he surrenders his, and Diwa will offer you one before you’ve even finished the first. That’s four for you, Cass.”
Cassian considered this. The maths checked out, which was annoying: Lysander was right, and four was still not enough pastéis de nata for a person who had only recently discovered they existed and felt strongly that the universe owed him compensation for the twenty-two years he’d spent without them.
He turned back to the alpha, who stood watching them.
“What’s your name?” Cassian asked, tilting his head up to meet the alpha’s gaze. He made his eyes go wide and liquid.
“Ruari.”
“Ruari.” Cassian let the name sit in his mouth for a moment. “We’ll have fourteen.”
Ruari reached for the display case without comment. Cassian caught the quick glance he threw towards Lysander, who had produced such a spectacular eye-roll that his entire head had tipped backwards with the force of it.
Ruari’s hands were enormous. Each pastry disappeared into his grip as he transferred them from the display tray into a cardboard box, his fingers deft despite him having knuckles the diameter of walnuts.
Fourteen pastéis de nata, nestled into their box in two neat rows, the custard tops blistered dark gold.
Then he reached back in, lifted a fifteenth, and held it out to Cassian on a square of waxed paper.
“On the house,” he said.
Cassian took it. The pastry was warm in his palm, the custard still soft. “Thank you, Ruari,” Cassian said, immediately stuffing it into his mouth.
“And six plain croissants,” Lysander added, leaning past Cassian to scan the rest of the display. “Two pain au chocolat.”
Ruari pulled a second box from beneath the counter and began filling it.
Cassian gathered both boxes against his chest, stacking the pastéis de nata on top of the croissants and clamping the whole arrangement in place with his chin. The cardboard was warm against his collarbone.
“Thank you, Ruari!” he called over his shoulder as Lysander steered him towards the door with a hand between his shoulder blades.
The bell above the door chimed as they stepped onto the pavement. Portobello Road was filling up now, the early stalls trading, and the morning light hit the wet cobblestones at an angle that turned them silver.
Cassian hugged the boxes tighter and matched Lysander’s stride, already calculating which of the fourteen he would eat first.