Page 56 of Cassian is Getting Out

Felix was right. He had to be; he seemed so certain of himself. Cassian would go on the pull, and he’d find a six, and the six-or-higher would buy him a drink and tell him he was beautiful, and Cassian would kiss someone who wasn’t Ruari, and it would be fine.

He’d do it tomorrow, or the day after, once his body stopped feeling so sad.

The television had long since auto-played past Victor’s motorcycle brooding and into the next episode. At some point, Diwa had pressed a loaded plate into Cassian’s hand, and then taken it away empty. The living room was dark except for the screen’s glow, and the house had gone quiet around him.

The front bell rang, and Cassian didn’t go bounding for it, as he normally would. Diwa’s footsteps came down the stairs. The front door opened, and there was a long pause. Cassian lifted his head.

Diwa came into the room holding a brown paper bag the size of a small child. Two tubs of gelato were visible at the top: pistachio and salted caramel, from the place in Chelsea that Felix had introduced to the MOAN chat with a photo captioned the only shop in London that deserves my money. Beneath the gelato, a jar of Biscoff spread nestled against a bag of freeze-dried raspberries, a tin of honeycomb shards, and a small glass bottle of something Cassian couldn’t identify but suspected was expensive.

A card sat on top of the whole arrangement, handwritten in Felix’s sharp capitals: EAT THIS AND STOP BEING PATHETIC.

Diwa set the bag on the coffee table. He looked at Cassian’s face, which was doing a poor job of pretending he wasn’t on the verge of crying.

“Cassian.” Diwa dragged a chair up close and positioned it at the end of the sofa. “What’s happened?”

Cassian looked at him. Diwa was an alpha who had presumably, at some point before Colin, gone to places where omegas gathered, and acquired one for sex through whatever rituals the non-cult world used for this purpose. He was also categorically fuckable (he’d received a rating of 8 from Felix based on a goofy video of him blowing raspberries into Tala’s tummy, was bumped up to 9 in consideration of the billions in his bank account, and an assumed high IQ thanks to his tech pedigree) which meant he’d probably been good at it.

“Diwa,” Cassian said. “Take me on the pull.”

Diwa laughed, letting out a surprised bark that he smothered almost immediately behind his fist, but the damage was done, because Cassian was not joking.

“I’m serious, Diwa. I’m looking for a new alpha.”

“Okay.” Diwa dragged out the word. “Walk me through this. What’s your actual objective here?”

“To get a new alpha,” Cassian repeated.

“Do you need one?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Cassian squeezed the cushion. He needed the right words for this, and found them in a celebrity gossip segment he’d watched with Diwa last week: a footballer’s wife delivering her statement about her impending divorce.

“Ruari and I are no longer together. Our relationship has run its course, and I think it’s time for me to move on and explore other options.”

“And he said that to you? Ruari told you it was over?”

“No.”

Diwa sat with this revelation for a long time. “I’m not taking you on the pull, Cassian.”

“Okay. Is it because I have to get him to say it first? So it’s official, and then you can take me?”

“Say what?”

“That we’re broken up. Because he hasn’t actually said it yet, Diwa. He just stood there with his arms crossed and didn’t kiss me back, which felt extremely like a breakup, but nobody said the words out loud.” Cassian sat up straighter, working through the logic as he spoke. “When the Lumineer chose Charles for me, the Lumineer said Charles’s name, and that made it real. So maybe Ruari and I aren’t actually broken up until one of us says so, and if I go back and get him to renounce me properly, then it’s official, and then you’ll take me on the pull.”

Diwa pressed his fingertips together and held them to his mouth. “Well, no. You don’t want him to renounce you. You want to clarify and confirm, rather than assume.”

“What’s the difference?”

“One of those is a conversation, and the other is you walking into Proving Ground and asking Ruari to perform a ceremony that ends your relationship. You had a fight, Cassian. People fight. It doesn’t automatically mean the relationship is over, but it also doesn’t mean everything’s fine. You have to talk to him and find out where you both are.”

“Oh. I have to talk to him carefully, since I’m not really clear on what alphas are thinking,” Cassian said. “On account of me not having a knot, so I don’t know how to think with my knot like you alphas do.”

Diwa bit down hard on his bottom lip, and started coughing.