Chapter Thirty-Eight
Lysander surfaced when the mattress dipped behind him and the duvet lifted on a draught of cool air.
Hamish slid in, and instead of settling on his back the way he usually did, he gathered Lysander in and turned him, so that Lysander came fully awake already tucked under his chin with his face against the warmth of Hamish’s throat.
Then came the kisses to his forehead, his temple, the arch of his cheekbone, the corner of his mouth, in a quick flurry that Hamish only ever gave when something had got under his skin and he needed reassurance.
Lysander went pliant in his arms and let him work through it, and by the time Hamish reached his jaw, he already knew the alpha had listened to every second of the recording.
“What did you think?” he asked, his voice still rough with sleep.
Hamish pressed one more kiss to his hairline, then spoke into the crook of Lysander’s neck, his beard rasping on the skin there. “It’s brilliant, Lysander. Content-wise, it’ll make waves.”
“I fucking hate it,” Lysander said. “It’s heaps better than the solo recording.
I know it is. Meredith’s going to hear it and lose her mind, and she’ll be right to.
Dane in the room is the whole show. That’s the difference between a decent podcast and a number one, and now I’ve got it, sitting on a hard drive. ”
Hamish waited, the way he always did, letting the quiet do the drawing out of his words.
“But it feels slimy.” Lysander made himself say the word.
“Sitting across a table from him, working him, angling for the take I needed. That’s the exact job I used to do for him, except I’ve swapped one camera for a microphone.
Point it, get the shot, cash the cheque afterwards.
” His fingers curled into the front of Hamish’s shirt.
“Only now the shot is me telling the truth about what he did, and I still had to make content with Dane to get the best thing I’ve ever recorded. I hate it, Hamish.”
Hamish’s thumb traced a slow line down the knobs of Lysander’s spine and back up again.
Lysander waited.
This alpha was one of the smartest people he knew. He’d built a career on sitting across from people who’d done terrible things and finding the question that cracked them open. Lysander trusted him the way he trusted Stephen and his daddy.
So Hamish would know what he needed to do. He’d listened, heard Dane charm his way through ninety minutes without once sounding sorry, and he’d know whether the right move was to use it, to take the guaranteed hit, or to bin the lot of it and go back to the solo take.
“Tell me what you think,” Lysander said.
Hamish kissed his forehead instead.
“Hamish!” Lysander said insistently.
Another kiss, to the bridge of his nose this time, soft and deliberate and absolutely fucking useless as a response to the question Lysander had asked him.
Lysander pulled back far enough to see his face. Hamish’s expression was entirely neutral.
“You’re not going to tell me,” Lysander said.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you already know what you want to do about this, Sander.”
Lysander’s palm connected with the centre of Hamish’s chest hard enough to thump.
“Tell me what you think, Hamish. I’m asking you.
I need you to tell me what to do, because I can’t make up my own mind.
I don’t trust myself to get this one right.
Everything I know about making content, every instinct I’ve got, comes from seven years of Dane teaching me how to package myself for an audience.
I can’t tell whether I’m making a smart decision or just running the same programme he installed in me.
” His voice cracked on the last word. “So tell me. Please.”
Hamish caught his hand and held it to his chest, his fingers wrapping around Lysander’s fist.
“I could tell you,” Hamish said. “And you’d do whatever I said, because you trust me, and because right now you’re scared and you want someone else to carry the choice for you. But that’s not what you need from me, Sander. If I make this call for you, it’s my decision. Not yours.”
“I don’t care whose decision it is.”
“Yeah, you do.” Hamish’s grip on his hand tightened. “You care enormously. That’s the whole point of the podcast.”
“You know what you sound like right now?” Lysander sat up, the duvet pooling around his waist, the cool air hitting his bare chest. “You sound like a budget Louis Theroux. Standing back, watching, chin on your fist, never getting your hands dirty. That’s your whole fucking act, isn’t it, Hamish?
You observe. You ask your clever little questions.
You tilt your head at exactly the right angle so people think you’re listening, and then you do absolutely nothing with any of it. ”
Hamish didn’t say anything to defend himself.
Hamish’s gaze stayed steady on him.
“And you know what the worst part is? This is just how you are.” Lysander threw the duvet off and swung his legs over the side of the bed, his bare feet hitting the carpet.
“You did this with Cassian. You spent months filming the Family of Light. You sat across from him while he told you about being given to his fucking Evermate, and his sacred duties and spouting all that batshit doctrine. You smiled, nodded, asked your fucking questions. But you knew — you absolutely knew — that something in that compound was completely fucked, because you’re not thick, Hamish, you’re one of the sharpest people I’ve ever met, and you still didn’t do a single thing about it. ”
He was on his feet now, facing the bed, his pulse hammering in his throat.
“Cassian had to turn up on your doorstep. He had to walk out of his husband’s mansion, after being kept like a pet by a man who hurt him every time he touched him, and drag himself across Melbourne to find you, because you couldn’t — or you wouldn’t — make the call to do something when it mattered.
” His nails bit into his palms. “You just watched, and then you took care of him afterwards, because that’s the part you’re comfortable with, isn’t it?
The aftermath. Where you get to be the gentle hands and alpha provider of the raisin-free muesli.
But the bit before that, the bit where someone has to actually step in and make a decision that might cost them something?
You don’t want anything to do with that. ”
His chest was heaving. The bedroom was too warm and too quiet, and Hamish was still lying on his side with one arm bent beneath the pillow.
“You fucking coward.” The words came out ragged. “You couldn’t make the call then, and you can’t make it now.”
Hamish reached across the mattress, took Lysander’s hand where it hung at his side, and pressed his mouth to his knuckles.
“You know that’s not true,” Hamish said.
Lysander snatched his hand back and walked out of the bedroom.
The corridor was dark and cool after the heat of the bedroom, and Lysander stood outside the closed door in his boxers with his pulse still up and the echo of his own voice ringing in his ears.
Quiet humming drifted from the end of the corridor, and Lysander followed it.
The nursery door stood open. The nightlight cast its amber glow across the room, and Colin sat in the rocking chair by the window with Tala tucked against him, her head in the crook of his elbow, her mouth working around the teat of a bottle he held at an angle that kept the air pocket at the base.
His robe had slipped off one shoulder, and his free hand rested on the arm of the chair.
Lysander leaned on the doorframe and watched his father feed his baby sister, and the fury that had propelled him out of the bedroom drained away so completely that for a moment he couldn’t remember what he’d even been angry about.
A year and a half ago, the idea that Colin Huxley might one day sit in a Notting Hill nursery in a cashmere robe, feeding the baby he’d had with his boy-toy alpha, would have been laughable.
And yet here he was, with his daughter’s fist curled around his little finger.
“Lysander,” Colin said, without looking up, “are you being awful to your alpha?”
Lysander opened his mouth to answer, and no response that he could think of sounded anything other than ridiculous.
He was furious, because the alpha who’d never once tried to control him had declined to start now.
He couldn’t say that out loud to his father, the man who’d raised twins alone from the age of fourteen, who’d never had an alpha to defer to.
He crossed to the rocking chair and lowered himself to the floor beside it, settling his back on his father’s shin. Colin’s hand came down to the top of his head without hesitation, his fingers threading into Lysander’s hair.
Tala’s sucking was the only sound in the room for a while. The bottle clicked softly against her gums with each pull, and the rocking chair creaked in a slow, hypnotic rhythm beneath Colin’s weight.
“Did you get what you needed from Dane today, love?” Colin asked mildly.
“Yes,” Lysander said. He pressed his head back into his father’s knee, let the word sit for a moment, and then turned it over. “No.”
“Which is it, Sander?”
Lysander drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them.
“I got everything I needed out of the recording. It was brilliant, Daddy. Properly brilliant. People are going to fucking hate him when they hear how cocky he sounds, talking about filming me during my heat like he was describing a smart property investment.”
Colin’s fingers kept their slow, steady path through his hair. “But?” he prompted.
“But he wouldn’t apologise.” Lysander’s thumbnail found a loose thread on the knee of his boxers and worried at it. “He was charming as anything when he told me he wasn’t sorry for a single thing he’d done. He said it was the best business decision either of us ever made.”
Colin was quiet for long enough that Lysander tipped his face up to check he was still awake. His father’s face was half-lit by the amber nightlight, his gaze fixed on the far wall.
“Do you need him to apologise?” Colin asked. “Will that improve your current lot in life in any way at all?”
Lysander stared at the carpet between his feet as he thought about it.
“No,” he said, and the truth of it rearranged everything that had been churning in his chest since he’d walked out of that recording booth.
Dane’s apology wouldn’t undo the video. It wouldn’t unfilm his first heat, or subtract a single one of the twenty alphas from that room, or give him back the years he’d spent confusing revenue for love.
An apology from Dane Nordgren would be worth exactly as much as everything else the man had ever promised him.
And a hit podcast with Dane’s name on it, his voice threaded through the pivotal debut episode and his charm pulling in the downloads, would keep him tethered to the man who’d used him for the rest of his professional life.
He thought about the solo cut sitting on Diwa’s hard drive. Meredith had said the podcast worked without Dane, even if it wouldn’t be an instant number one on the charts.
He didn’t want Dane to be a part of his story anymore, not even as a footnote that explained where Lysander Huxley came from. Because in the great scheme of things Dane wasn’t important.
His father was Colin Huxley, who’d gone into the care system at three.
Stephen had been his constant companion from the moment they came into existence.
They, the alphas they’d chosen to bring into their lives, and the children they’d made: those were the only people inextricably linked to his story.
And Cassian, of course, who was probably asleep downstairs with the television still on.
Dane Nordgren mattered only as much as Lysander let him.
“I’m going to bin the recording with Dane,” Lysander said. “I’m going to do it on my own.”
Colin’s hand stilled on his head, then resumed its slow passes. “Good boy,” he said.
Tala’s bottle slipped free of her mouth with a wet pop, and she turned her face into Colin’s robe, her fist uncurling on the cashmere. Colin shifted her higher on his chest.
“I’m going to tell my own story,” Lysander said. “The whole thing. From the beginning.” He dropped his head back on Colin’s knee. “But Daddy…you know you’re a big part of that, right?”
Colin’s fingers stilled in his hair. The rocking chair creaked once and settled.
“I know,” Colin said, and his voice was very quiet.
“Do you trust me?” Lysander turned to look up at him. “Would you? To tell it properly?”
Colin didn’t answer straight away. The chair took up its slow rhythm again, and his gaze moved between his two children as he considered what he was willing to give away about himself.
“I do,” he said. “I trust you’ll tell it well. For all of us.”
Lysander got to his feet. He leaned down and pressed his lips to Tala’s head first, breathing in the powdery, biscuity warmth of her, then kissed his father’s temple where the skin was thin and cool.
Colin’s hand found his wrist and squeezed once before letting go.
Lysander took the stairs two at a time, his feet silent on the carpet, past the shut door of the bedroom where Hamish was, past the guest room where Cassian’s television murmured through the gap beneath the door, and down to the narrow door beside the utility cupboard that led to Diwa’s basement.
The studio lights came on when he flicked the switch at the top of the stairs. Lysander dropped into the chair before the monitors. The leather was cold through the thin cotton of his boxers, and he pulled his knees up, tucking his feet beneath him.
He opened a new session. The waveform stretched clean and flat across the screen, waiting for him.
He sat with the silence for a moment. The room was so thoroughly soundproofed that he could hear his own pulse in his ears as he thought about how to start.
“My father was fourteen,” Lysander said, “seven months pregnant with twins, and struggling to breathe because my brother — who has always been the more inconsiderate of the two of us — was sitting on his lungs. So the staff at his care home cleared out a storage cupboard, put a bed in it, and moved him in there. For his own good, they said. To keep the other kids from having a go at him.”