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Diwa’s gaze moved between his omega and Cassian. “I don’t think that’s exactly—”

“That’s beautiful.” Cassian put his hand over Diwa’s. “You’re such a good alpha. That kind of patience is amazing! And it paid off, Diwa. Look at what you and Colin have built together. The house, and Tala, and your family Obsidian vault where you put all your thinking!”

Colin picked up Tala’s spoon and took over feeding her.

“Thank you, Cassian.” Diwa did not look at Colin.

Cassian found out that Gavin’s bedroom was very tidy after five dates. One hundred dates had been out of the question, since he’d been spending a worrying amount of time wanking. In his bed. In the shower. Once, in the empty kitchen, after he’d smelled the burnt-sugar scent of pastéis de nata that Diwa had brought home for him from a bakery that was not Proving Ground.

Gavin’s sheets were navy blue and smelled of fabric softener, and his hands were warm when they found Cassian’s waist. He kissed well, his mouth moving against Cassian’s with competence, and his breath was sweet.

Cassian guided Gavin’s hand between his thighs. He knew how to ask for that now. Gavin’s fingers found him wet and open, and ran through exactly the right sequence of things to make him more so. Gavin was attentive and responsive, adjusting his angle when Cassian shifted, keeping his weight braced on his forearms so Cassian could breathe. He came with Gavin’s hand wrapped around his cock and Gavin’s cock still moving inside him, and the orgasm was a genuine body clencher.

It was definitively good sex, and now he wanted to go home and watch something on his tablet.

The orgasm had happened, and it hadn’t rearranged a single thing inside him. Charles had taught him that sex was pain. Ruari had taught him that sex could be good. Gavin had just taught him that it could be good and not matter.

The doctrine had covered union as sacred. It had not covered coming hard around an alpha’s cock and immediately wanting to be somewhere else, with someone else.

Gavin’s fingers were tracing the curve of his hip again, moving with renewed purpose.

“I have to go,” Cassian said, sitting up and reaching for his joggers at the foot of the bed. “I want to help Diwa make dinner.”

He dressed quickly, kissed Gavin on the cheek, which seemed polite, and let himself out of the tidy house.

The February air bit at his neck. He hopped the wall, let himself in through the kitchen door at Ledbury Road, and sat at the table with his notebook.

Under THINGS I KNOW, he added a new line in his steadiest handwriting:

I am grateful for Ruari. Still.

I want him. Still.

He underlined both ‘stills’, capped the space pen, and went to find his tablet.

✦ ✧ ✦

Morty Fenwick had been selling picture frames from a stall on Portobello Road since before Cassian was born. He was eighty-one, wind-cured to the texture of a walnut, and in possession of opinions about absolutely everything, which he delivered whether or not anyone was listening.

Cassian had no use for picture frames. He owned nothing worth framing, had never printed a photograph in his life, and could not have told a gilt finish from a spray-painted one if his nullity petition had depended on it.

He now owned nine of Morty’s frames.

The first purchase had been accidental, a panic buy. Morty’s stall sat thirty metres south of Proving Ground’s front door, on the opposite side of the road, angled so that the queue at the bakery counter was just out of sight behind a vintage clothing rail. Cassian had been walking past on his way to Felix’s when his legs had stopped working on the stretch of pavement where the smell of proving dough still leaked through the extractor vent and settled across the market stalls.

Morty had caught him standing motionless in the flow of foot traffic, mistaken the paralysis for interest, and launched into a pitch for a reclaimed oak frame with dovetail joints. Cassian had bought it for forty-two pounds and walked the rest of the way to Belgravia carrying it under his arm like a shield.

The second frame was a deliberate purchase. The third was strategic. By the fourth, Morty had stopped trying to sell him anything and started offering him a fold-out stool and a cup of tea from his thermos. That was how Cassian discovered that Morty Fenwick knew everything about everyone within two hundred metres of his pitch, and would share it with anyone prepared to sit on a stool and listen to him talk for twenty minutes about the disintegration of English craftsmanship first.

“Your baker’s doing well,” Morty said one Saturday in March, unprompted, while Cassian sat on the stool with both hands wrapped around a thermos cup and the tea going cold in it. “Good lad. Brought me a thing the other day, some sort of miso situation. Experimental, he said. I told him it tasted like the sea had an argument with a toffee, and he seemed pleased about that.”

Cassian bought a frame.

April brought news of football. Morty had played Sunday league until his seventies and regarded the decline of his knees as a personal betrayal by a body that had otherwise served him adequately. “He’s playing five-a-side,” Morty reported, adjusting a display of watercolour frames. “Saturdays. I could hear them from the leisure centre when I was packing up last week. He’s still got the touch, that one. You don’t lose a left foot like his.”

May: the bakery was expanding. Ruari had hired two more people and taken on a commercial kitchen space for event catering, separate from Proving Ground. Some young lad at Arsenal, Morty couldn’t remember the name, had booked him for a party, and the orders hadn’t stopped since. “He’s run off his feet,” Morty said. “But he’s got help now. That quiet one’s still there. Raf. He brings me out a coffee or a treat most days. Good lad.”

In late May it was Ruari’s family, none of whom Cassian had met. Ruari had taken a full week off, the first in the four years Morty had known him, and gone to Cornwall with his mum, his sisters and the little girls. Morty knew this because Ruari had brought him back a saffron bun from a bakery in St Ives.