Page 30 of That Defining Moment

Not if I’m standing with you.

Cassian wanted to believe it the way he’d wanted to believe in the Evermate doctrine, but Uriel was the Lumineer’s son.

i need you to protect me Uriel. I need you to go to your father and tell him that you’re the one thats meant to be with me. That he made a mistake

The dots appeared. Cassian curled his body around the mobile as though he could hold Uriel’s answer in place.

That’s a very serious claim to make, Cassian.

i know

You’re asking me to challenge my father’s naming. To tell the Lumineer, the vessel of the Universe’s truth, that the Universe got it wrong.

im asking you to tell him the truth. That my heart has always been yours

The dots reappeared and held steady for so long that Cassian began to worry they’d frozen. Then the message arrived in a single, dense paragraph that filled the bubble from edge to edge.

I can only do that if you’re with me. Not across the city, hiding in a house full of outsiders. You need to be with me, Cassian. In person, where I can speak for you properly. The Lumineer won’t hear this through a screen. This is the kind of truth you deliver on your knees, face to face, with the one you’re claiming beside you. You want to see me again, don’t you? Because I want to see you. I have wanted to see you every single day since you left.

Cassian pressed the heels of both hands into his eyes until colours burst behind his lids.

of course I do

Then listen to me carefully. If you truly must stay in that house, for now, then this is what you tell the omega and the alpha.

Cassian lowered his hands from his eyes and waited, the cursor blinking in the white field of the chat, while Uriel’s instructions assembled themselves on the other side of the city.

✦ ✧ ✦

The knock came a couple of hours later. “Cass.” Lysander’s voice came through the wood. “Can I come in?”

Cassian had been lying on his side, staring at the wall and running Uriel’s instructions through his head until he’d memorised them.

“Yes,” he said.

The door opened and Lysander stepped in, pausing just inside the threshold to take in the room with a glance that moved from the empty plate on the tray to Cassian’s swollen face. He crossed to the bed without comment, kicked off his shoes, and lay down on his side facing Cassian, close enough that their knees were almost touching.

“Uriel found me the night of Hamish’s screening,” Cassian said.

Lysander’s eyes didn’t move from his.

“In the bathroom. After the Q&A.” Cassian’s thumb found the scar on his left wrist and traced it. “He’d come to the cinema and waited for me. He left the Family of Light, Lysander. He left everything he’s ever known, because he wants to be with me.”

There was a tightening in Lysander’s expression, a compression of his mouth that was there and gone in a moment.

“I think —” Cassian stopped, and the correction rose in him with a certainty that a single word couldn’t contain. “I know he’s my Evermate. I’ve loved him since I was fourteen. I sat across from him at dinner one evening and his scent reached me and it changed everything. It was like the whole world had been slightly out of focus until that moment, and then suddenly it wasn’t. I was so sure he was the one for me. Everyone could see it. The way he looked at me, the way he spoke to me. And when the Lumineer gave me to Charles instead…that’s why it all felt so wrong.” He swallowed. “When Uriel found out that I’d left Charles, he was so happy that he came to find me.”

Lysander’s gaze held.

“He needs help too, Lysander.” Cassian’s fingers curled into the duvet between them. “He’s staying with a friend who also came from the Family, but they haven’t got much money. We’ve been meeting up and I’ve been feeding him, taking him to the cafés the way you took me.” A flush crept up his neck. “He’s the Lumineer’s own son, and he walked away from all of it. For me.”

“And you didn’t tell us.”

Cassian shook his head. “I was afraid you’d stop me seeing him. You and Hamish. You’d have told me it was dangerous, and maybe you’d have been right, but I couldn’t —” His throat closed around the words. “I couldn’t risk it. Not when I’d only just found him again.”

Lysander reached out and pushed Cassian’s hair back from his forehead. His fingers combed through to the ends and then stayed against the side of Cassian’s head.

“Do you trust him, Cassian?”