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The stranger glanced at Colin and dismissed him in the same motion, laughing. “Oh — of course someone who can’t spell tortured would need his omega daddy to bring him to his therapy appointment.”

“I am someone who will absolutely stuff my daughter’s dummy down your throat to get that notebook back,” Colin said. “She’s an eight-month-old who still isn’t sleeping well, so you’d want to factor my worryingly sleep-deprived state into your decision about what you do next, lad.”

The notebook landed in Cassian’s lap.

“Thank you,” Cassian said, gripping it tight in case the man made another lunge for it.

The omega sat three seats away without another word. His knee was bouncing as Colin’s eyes stayed on him.

The only other occupant of the waiting room had been watching the whole exchange without any reaction crossing his face.

He sat against the far wall, almost completely hidden behind a lush plant whose top leaves scraped the clinic’s ceiling, with his legs crossed at the ankle. He was pale and blond, sitting so still that Cassian hadn’t noticed him until now. His hair was even lighter than Cassian’s own, cropped close at the sides and falling forward over his forehead.

“English is a very stupid language,” the blond omega said. He had an accent that lifted the end of each word. “Very strange spelling. Like throwing nonsense letters together and hoping the mouth can make sense of it.”

His scent reached Cassian a second after his voice did. He was an omega as well, but he smelled sweeter than any Cassian had encountered, almost saccharine, with a heavier base under it that Cassian recognised as alpha. Like he’d been scented recently. He’d seen Diwa do that, nuzzling his neck against Colin’s pulse point when Colin was anxious, and pressing his scent into his mate’s skin until Colin’s shoulders dropped.

“English has o-u-g-h that makes six different sounds and a k in front of knife that you are supposed to pretend is not there.” The blond omega shook his head. “It is a language designed by very drunk people.”

Cassian risked a glance at the blond. “What languages do you speak?”

“Västervikska. Nordiska. English, as you can hear, badly. Deutsch.” He counted them off on his fingers, four taps against his knee, and looked at Cassian with polite expectation. “And you?”

“English,” Cassian said, quietly enough that the dark-haired omega shouldn’t be able to hear. “And there are some words in Australian that are different from the London ones. I had to teach them to Colin and Diwa, because I was confusing them.”

Even with the mention of his Australianness, his list sounded very thin next to the blond’s four languages.

“It is very hard, English,” the blond said. “Really, it counts for two languages, all that nonsense spelling.”

Cassian beamed at him. This guy he liked.

He was tucking his notebook into Colin’s nappy bag when the door at the end of the corridor opened and Dr Emma Carlisle stepped through.

She was tall, with short dark hair and tortoiseshell glasses pushed up on top of her head. She held a manila folder in one hand and a takeaway coffee in the other, and she took a long sip before she looked at any of them.

“Right,” Dr Carlisle said, lowering the coffee. “Felix, Ivar, and Cassian. Shall we start?”

Colin gave him a small nod of encouragement as he turned to follow Dr Carlisle down the corridor. Cassian reached down as he passed and touched Tala’s fist for luck.

Dr Carlisle held a door open at the end of the hall. The walls of this room were a soothing sage green, the armchairs and low sofa upholstered in oatmeal linen, and a monstera in the corner had leaves so glossy they looked hand-polished.

He chose the armchair nearest the monstera and tucked his legs underneath him. The cushion was deep enough that he sank into it. The dark-haired omega, Felix, took the other armchair while the blond one, Ivar, folded himself onto the sofa.

Cassian’s gaze moved between them. In his twenty-two years inside the Family of Light he had been the only male omega in the Melbourne compound, constantly trotted out at gatherings like a holy artefact as proof that the Universe still made miracles.

Meeting the Huxleys had felt like a statistical miracle all on its own. Colin himself and his identical twin sons were all male omegas, and he’d thought the Universe had spent its entire supply of miracles on that one family. Now Dr Carlisle had put two more in a room with him, and the maths of his life had stopped making sense.

The Lumineer would have said his Light was drawing like to like. A Calyx’s radiance called to others of his kind across vast distances, the way a flame called moths. It was nonsense, obviously.

Lysander had explained the statistics to him. Male omegas accounted for one in three hundred thousand male births, so there were probably around a hundred in the whole of the UK, and statistically most of them would end up in London. That was how cities worked, drawing people in to the best resources. And Dr Carlisle was the best resource around for male omegas who’d had bad things done to them.

She took the remaining chair by the window and set her coffee on the side table without a coaster. If Colin had been with them, he would have said something about rings on wood.

“I’ve spoken with each of you about what the goal is individually, but with how tense you’re all looking, I think you could all do with a bit of reminding as to why the three of you are here today,” Dr Carlisle said. “This isn’t group therapy. I’m not going to ask you to share anything, or try to process things together.”

Cassian smiled. He had a good smile, and he deployed it now at full force. He wanted Dr Carlisle to like him.

“What this is,” she continued, “is an introduction. There are very few male omegas in this country. You three are living in Greater London, you’re roughly the same age, and I thought you might benefit from knowing each other.” She glanced between them. “That’s it. Whatever you do with this introduction is your business. If you leave this room and never speak again, fine. If you swap numbers and end up meeting for coffee every month, that’s also fine.”