Page 73 of That Defining Moment

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.