Cassia | Games People Play

I know exactly what I'm doing.

That's the thing I need to be clear about, at least with myself. I am not confused. I am not running. I am not falling into something by accident or letting my guard down or being reckless in the way I used to be reckless, back when I was twenty-two and believed that loving someone hard enough was a kind of armour.

I know exactly what I'm doing and I'm making him watch.

It starts three days after the sparring ring.

Rhett finds me at breakfast, or I find him, which is closer to the truth, because I'd clocked his usual table two days ago and positioned myself accordingly. He looks up when I sit across from him, takes in the fact that I've brought two coffees, and grins with the particular delight of a man who has decided he enjoys being surprised.

"You're early," he says.

"I'm strategic." I slide one cup across. "There's a difference."

He wraps both hands around it and leans back, watching me with those warm, assessing eyes that don't miss much. "How are the twins settling?"

"Leo has decided he hates the pack training schedule." I settle into my seat. "Nova has decided she loves the kitchen staff. They're coping in their respective ways."

Rhett smiles, a real one, not the performance smile, not the slow-fire grin he deploys when he wants something. Just a smile. "And their mother?"

"Their mother is fine."

"Their mother is running a play." He says it without judgment, tilting his head. "I'm just trying to work out what my role is."

I meet his eyes. "Does it matter?"

"Depends on the play."

I consider him for a moment. Rhett is not stupid, that's what makes him useful and also what makes him slightly dangerous. He sees more than he lets on, files it away with that same easy manner, and produces it exactly when it will land. 

He's been in this pack long enough to know every current and undercurrent, every alliance and every fracture.

And he's been watching Kade for six years.

"I need to be visible," I tell him. Honest enough to get what I want, careful enough not to give more than that. "I need to have a presence here that isn't dependent on his goodwill. I need the pack to see me as someone who belongs, not as a rogue he let in on a legal technicality."

Rhett is quiet for a moment. "And spending time with me does that because…"

"Because you're trusted here." I wrap my hands around my cup. "Because if you treat me like I'm worth your time, they'll follow."

"Ah." He nods slowly. "And the fact that it makes the Alpha want to put his fist through things."

"Bonus," I say.

He laughs, sudden and genuine, loud enough to turn heads at the nearest table. I feel the ripple of it through the room. Eyes moving to us. The particular quality of attention that comes with watching someone unexpected be welcomed by someone established.

Exactly what I need.

"Alright," Rhett says, when he's done laughing. He leans forward, elbows on the table, and his expression settles into something that is still amused but also, something else. Something that I file away to examine later. "I'll play. But I want something in return."

"What?"

"The truth. Not all of it, I'm not asking for that. Just enough." His eyes hold mine. "Are those kids his?"

The cafeteria noise continues around us. Cutlery. Conversation. The smell of eggs and coffee and woodsmoke.

"That's not,"

"Part of the play?" He raises an eyebrow. "No. It's part of mine." He leans back again. "I've been watching Kade look at that boy for four days. I know what I'm seeing. I just want to know if you know too."

I hold his gaze for a long moment.

"Everyone in this pack is going to know," I say, carefully, "when I decide it's time for them to know."

Rhett considers this. "Okay," he says simply. And then: "Drink your coffee. I'll walk you to the training yard after."

By the third day it has a rhythm.

Breakfast together. Training in the morning, where Rhett is a genuinely good sparring partner; quick, creative, not condescending about the fact that I've spent five years training against necessity rather than with a proper partner. He pushes hard enough to be useful and knows when to back off, which is rarer than it should be.

Lunch with the twins, where Rhett is unexpectedly good with Leo and Nova. Patient with Leo's silences, delighted by Nova's non sequiturs, never once treating them like they're strange or too much. 

Leo accepts him with the considered neutrality he applies to most things. Nova tries to show him a beetle she's found and he examines it with total seriousness and declares it excellent.

I file that away too.

By the afternoon of the third day, I'm sitting on the fence rail of the outer paddock watching Rhett work one of the pack's horses through a training circuit, and I'm not thinking about Kade at all.

Which is when I feel him.

The bond doesn't announce itself the way it used to, that warm, sure pulse of connection that used to feel like coming home. Five years of starvation has changed it into something more like a bruise, something I notice primarily when it's pressed. But when he's close, when the distance between us collapses below a certain point, it makes itself known regardless.

He's at the paddock gate.

I don't turn.

I count to five. Adjust my weight on the fence rail. Let Rhett finish the circuit before I glance over my shoulder, casual as I can make it, like I've just happened to notice.

Kade is standing at the gate with his forearms on the top rail and his eyes on me with an expression that would be unreadable to anyone who hadn't spent years memorising the terrain of his face.

To me it reads perfectly clearly.

He is furious. He is restraining it with everything he has. And underneath the fury, underneath the jaw and the controlled stillness, he looks like a man watching something he can't stop from a distance he can't cross.

Good.

Rhett brings the horse around, clocks Kade at the gate, and gives me the smallest glance of inquiry. I shake my head, barely.

He nods and turns back to the horse.

I face forward again, back to Kade, and after a moment I laugh at something Rhett says, something genuinely funny, as it happens, because Rhett is legitimately entertaining and that part requires no performance and I feel the bond spike.

Sharp. Hot. A flare of something that is not quite anger and not quite pain and has no clean name in human language.

I keep my face forward.

Keep laughing.

Keep breathing.

It's on the fifth day that it almost breaks.

I'm in the main hall after the evening meal, sitting on one of the long benches with Rhett and two of the younger female soldiers who've started gravitating toward us at meals, because that's how packs work, presence and proximity and the slow accumulation of social gravity. The conversation is easy, the fire in the central hearth is warm, and for approximately forty minutes I feel something I haven't felt in five years.

Normal.

Like a person who lives here. Like someone with a place and a table and people who look up when she walks in.

Kade comes in from the far entrance.

He scans the room the way Alphas do, a territorial sweep that catalogs and categorises before settling. He finds me in under a second. He always finds me in under a second.

He goes very still.

I'm leaning toward Rhett, close enough that our shoulders are nearly touching, sharing something on the small notebook I've been using to sketch out training sequences. Rhett says something, his head close to mine, and I look up at him rather than pulling back.

The fire crackles.

The hall continues its evening hum.

And Kade stands in the far doorway with something moving through him that I can feel from thirty feet away, something that makes the two wolves nearest him take a careful half-step sideways without fully understanding why.

His eyes find mine over Rhett's shoulder.

I hold his gaze.

One second. Two.

Then I look back at the notebook.

The sound that comes from the doorway isn't loud. It's barely even a sound more a pressure, a vibration, something that registers in the chest rather than the ears. But every wolf in the hall hears it.

Conversations dip. Bodies tense. Heads turn fractionally toward the source of it.

Rhett goes very quiet beside me.

I don't look up.

I hear Kade's footsteps, the specific rhythm of a man walking before he does something he can't take back, cross the hall and disappear through the interior door. The door closes with a click that, in the silence, sounds like a crack.

The hall exhales.

"Cassia." Rhett's voice is low. For me only. "Whatever point you're making."

"I know."

"Make sure you know the cost of it."

I close the notebook. Smooth the cover. Set it on the bench beside me.

"I've been paying costs," I say quietly, "since before you knew my name."

He's silent for a moment.

"Fair," he says. And doesn't push further.

Later, when the hall has thinned and the twins are asleep and the pack house has settled into its nighttime quiet, I sit on the windowsill of the guest room with my knees pulled up and watch the dark treeline at the edge of the territory.

The bond is quiet now. Dull and low, the way it gets when he's put distance between us, when he's gone somewhere and locked something down.

I breathe in the cold air coming through the gap in the window frame.

I know what I'm doing. I know the risk of it. I know that using Rhett as a chess piece makes him a target and I don't want that, genuinely don't want that, because Rhett has been decent to me and my children and decent is not something I take for granted anymore.

I know that every day I stay here is a day the council gets closer to moving.

And I know that the thing Kade is still not telling me, the something more, the thing he said was better understood slowly, is connected to the letter.

The one I've seen on Marcus's desk twice now.

The one with the council seal.

The one that nobody has mentioned to me yet.

I look at the treeline for a long time.

Then I go to bed.

Tomorrow, someone is going to have to mention the letter.

Whether they want to or not.