Page 22 of That Defining Moment

After that evening, Cassian had spent three years collecting evidence that he was meant to be Uriel’s. The way Uriel’s gaze found him during the morning practice, settling on Cassian’s upturned face. The way Uriel brought him water after the planting days without being asked, the cup held out in his long brown fingers, his knuckles still dirty from the soil. The way Uriel called him Calyx with a softness that turned the honorific into something private between them.

These were not coincidences because the Universe did not deal in coincidences.

So when the elders had come for him on the morning of his twenty-first birthday, their white robes bright against the wet grass, and led him barefoot across the compound to the Lumineer’s house, Cassian had gone willingly. He’d gone joyfully. He’d walked through the low wooden door into the Lumineer’s study with his pulse thrumming and his whole body vibrating with the complete certainty that Uriel would be waiting there for him.

The Lumineer sat behind his desk, backlit by the window that overlooked the valley. He was Uriel’s father, and Cassian had searched for Uriel in his face a thousand times, finding him in the high forehead, and the way the light caught the bridge of his aquiline nose.

“Calyx.” The Lumineer’s voice was deep and unhurried, a voice accustomed to speaking truths that other people received on their knees. “The Universe has written a name in your heart. You have carried it since birth. Today, I speak it aloud so that you may hear what you have always known.”

Cassian’s breath caught. His fingers were laced in his lap, his knuckles white, his whole body tipped forward on the edge of his chair.

“Your Evermate is Charles Townsend.”

Cassian heard it, and his mind did the thing it always did when reality diverged from doctrine: it smoothed the surface, closed over the disturbance, and waited for the ripples to pass.

Charles Townsend.

He didn’t know a Charles Townsend. The name had no scent attached to it, no memories of a past shared. Cassian sat very still in his chair while his brain cycled through every alpha he had ever met, searching for the one he’d missed, the one the Universe had apparently been pointing him towards while he’d been too busy looking at the wrong man.

The door behind him opened. Cassian didn’t turn around, because his body had gone rigid from the scalp down, and his breath stayed stuck high in his chest where it couldn’t quite reach his lungs.

A hand landed on his shoulder.

It was heavy, the fingers thick and soft, from hands that had never worked soil. The scent that came with it was artificial and sharp, nothing like sun-warmed skin.

“There he is,” the man said, from somewhere above Cassian’s head. “My Calyx.”

Cassian had tilted his chin up and looked into the face of Charles Townsend. The man was craggy-featured and smiling with every one of his teeth. His light-brown hair mixed in with a smattering of grey, that might have given him a distinguished look, if his eyes hadn’t been so dark, so flat, and so clearly hungry. His thumb moved on Cassian’s shoulder in a slow circle, pressing the fabric of his white linen shirt against Cassian’s collarbone.

The Universe provides. The Universe provides. The Universe provides.

Cassian had smiled back and called him “Alpha.”

He’d gone home with Charles that afternoon, to the house in Bayswater with its high ceilings and its marble floors. In the bedroom, the silk cords were already looped around the bedposts, but he was yet to learn what they were there for. He’d walked through the front door with his hands clasped in front of him, his eyes cast down, the name Uriel still burning in his chest like an ember that he’d forgotten to put out.

That was the part that Cassian couldn’t reconcile, even now, after everything. The Universe had written Charles’s name in his heart. The Lumineer had spoken it. The doctrine was clear and the doctrine was infallible. But if that was true, then why had Cassian’s heart been so full of Uriel that there hadn’t been room for Charles to fit?

He’d tried so hard to make room. He’d lain in the Bayswater bed with his wrists bound and his body still, receiving his Evermate’s blessing in the manner prescribed, and he’d told himself that the hurt was purification. That Charles’s roughness was correction. That the bruises on his inner thighs were the Universe burning away Cassian’s attachment to Uriel, searing out the wrongness so that the rightness could take root.

Charles must have sensed it. An alpha always knew when his omega’s heart was divided. Cassian had never spoken Uriel’s name in Charles’s house. But his body was a traitor. His body flinched when Charles climbed on top of him, and Charles was not a stupid man.

The hitting had started three months into the marriage. A backhand across the mouth at the dinner table because Cassian had looked at his plate instead of at Charles while Charles was speaking. Then a shove into the bedroom wall because Cassian had taken too long in the shower and Charles had wanted him clean and ready for him. Then came the things that weren’t hitting, exactly, but hurt nonetheless: the grip on his upper arm that left four fingerprint bruises, the yank of the silk cord when Cassian shifted on the mattress, the hand around his throat during sex that pressed just hard enough to make his vision sparkle at the edges.

Cassian had absorbed all of it. He’d thought of each incident as a correction and shelved it alongside the doctrine that explained why this correction was necessary. The Universe did not make mistakes, which meant the fault was in Cassian.

He had loved the wrong alpha. He had allowed Uriel’s scent to colonise a heart that had been promised to Charles since birth. And the pain that Charles delivered was the Universe’s answer to that betrayal, a burning-out of the contamination so that Cassian could one day become the vessel his Evermate deserved.

All of Cassian’s memories of the Bayswater house fell away the moment Uriel’s fingers carded through the careful coif that Lysander had helped him with in Hamish’s hallway, undoing everything in three strokes so that his hair fell across his brow.

“You look wrong like this,” Uriel said, frowning. His thumb traced the edge of Cassian’s hairline. “Like someone’s been dressing you up.”

Cassian couldn’t speak now that Uriel’s scent had found him again after all these months. Uriel’s hand settled on the curve of Cassian’s jaw and cupped it, tilting his face upwards. Cassian turned into the touch, pressing his cheek against Uriel’s palm as his eyes slipped closed.

“Everyone’s been absolutely frantic over you, Cassian,” Uriel said. “Charles more than anyone.”

Cassian opened his eyes at the mention of his Evermate’s name. “I’m all right,” he said.

“You were talking to a strange alpha.” Uriel’s jaw tightened, and his hand dropped from Cassian’s face. “In public while unaccompanied. You were laughing with him, and toying with his desire.”