Page 85 of That Defining Moment

“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.