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Cassian looked at the door.

“He knows you don’t say no when someone offers you something. He knows where you came from. And he still put you in a pub full of men buying you drinks and didn’t once think to step in because he was too busy getting blotto.”

“But I’m fine now!”

“He should have been watching you, Cassian. He’s thirty-two years old. He’s twice your size, and he treated your first proper night out like a session with his football mates. That’s negligence.”

A thought arrived, not from his TV shows or his notebook or the doctrine he’d been raised on, but from Colin’s own rule that Cassian make up his own mind about things.

“Colin, you can’t tell me to make up my own mind,” Cassian said, “and then be angrier at Ruari than at me when I do just that.”

Colin didn’t have a comeback for that.

Cassian dug his thumb into the tape over his IV line and thought about it properly, one piece at a time, in order, the way Lysander had shown him.

Ruari had put the whisky in front of him and said down it, nudging the glass closer with one finger. Cassian had picked it up and tipped the whole thing into his mouth.

But Ruari hadn’t tied Cassian’s hands behind his back and forced his jaw open. He’d offered it with a grin and a nudge, with the absolute confidence that his offer was a good one.

Cassian knew what it felt like when someone didn’t give him a choice. His thumb went to his wrist under the hospital band. Ruari had given him a choice, and Cassian had chosen to drink that whisky, and the far more tasty cider.

He’d wanted to know what whisky tasted like when it wasn’t on Ruari’s tongue. Every time Ruari kissed him after a drink, Cassian tasted peat and smoke, and he’d wondered whether the whisky itself carried that warmth, or whether that was just Ruari.

“I wanted to see why Ruari likes drinking so much,” Cassian said. “The whisky was horrible, Colin. It tasted like a peat bog on fire. But Ruari wanted me to try it, so I did, because I wanted to be part of the thing he was enjoying.”

Colin’s jaw was still set, but he sat on the edge of the bed.

“Then the cider came, and it tasted like strawberries, and I drank each one they gave me because I liked it and because saying no to a gift felt rude.” Cassian swallowed against the rawness in his throat. “Nobody made me do any of that. So you can’t blame Ruari for choices I made on my own.”

“Okay, Cass,” Colin said eventually, and squeezed Cassian’s hand.

“I made my own choices.” Cassian turned his hand over so Colin’s fingers laced through his. “They were terrible choices. Genuinely awful. I’m probably going to be sick again just from remembering the taste of that whisky. But that’s something I have to figure out with Ruari, because I don’t make good decisions around him, and that’s my issue to sort out. Not yours.”

Colin smoothed Cassian’s hair back from his forehead and tucked it behind his ear.

“You’re learning,” Colin said.

Cassian nodded. The movement sent a pulse of nausea through him that he breathed through, because vomiting on Colin at this point in the conversation would undermine the maturity of his argument.

“Will you at least tell him I’m all right?” Cassian asked. “Ruari. He’s still out there, isn’t he?”

“He is.”

“Tell him I’ll see him as soon as they let me out. And that I’m fine, and that he shouldn’t sit in those horrible chairs all night, because they’ll destroy his knee.”

Colin sighed. “I’ll get Diwa to tell him, so Diwa can kick his arse on the way past.”

Cassian glanced across the room. Diwa stood by the window with Tala asleep on his shoulder, the set of his expression showing that he was prepared to do just that.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Cassian had been home for four hours, and Diwa had not left his side for any of them.

He’d been sitting on the sofa in the same position since Colin had settled him there with a blanket over his knees and a glass of water within reach. Colin had disappeared upstairs with Tala, leaving Diwa to keep him company.

“I need a new notebook,” Cassian said.

Diwa’s eyes fixed on him. “Notes.” He breathed in deep, a sign that he was readying himself for a discussion over a favourite topic. “You want a system for notes.”