Forbidden Communion at the Redline

1. Not Yet

Chapter one

Not Yet

Lorelei

The house is doing the thing it does right before somebody decides something.

An expensive kind of quiet, like everyone is holding their breath just to see who exhales first. No Helena clicking her way down the stairs.

No light under Alistair’s study door. No one checking on the girl who asked out loud where they were taking a boy in front of half of Marazul, then stood in a corridor beside Ash and chose not to look through the door while a mother begged for her son’s life.

Nobody came to check on me.

That should have felt like mercy. Instead it felt like being filed away like data.

Cool. Great system. Very sustainable.

By morning, the crescents my nails carved into my palms have scabbed over into four neat, stubborn commas on each hand.

Every time I close one around the banister on the way downstairs, they tug hard enough to make me wince, which I refuse to make audible on principle.

I could have cleaned them properly last night. I could have slept, too.

Apparently we don’t always get what we want.

Cassian’s already busy in the kitchen when I enter.

Two mugs sit on the counter, both full. Mine is set across from him — cream, too much sugar, exactly right — like he clocked my footsteps on the stairs and had it finished before I hit the last one.

I take a sip and savor it for a beat too long because I’ve stood in this exact kitchen with this exact man before, watching him lose a fight with a coffee machine like it had personally insulted his mother.

It was the one time I got to see him be a person instead of a doctrine with good bone structure.

This isn’t that.

This is a man who already knew the shape of my whole morning before I did and built the set for it.

Same tile. Same kitchen. Same watery morning light through the window.

Somehow the sameness doesn’t feel like a memory.

It feels like déjà vu, like I’ve already lived this exact five minutes once and got robbed of the receipt.

In this light, Cassian feels like an entirely different man.

Or maybe he isn’t different at all. Maybe I just liked the first version better.

“You didn’t sleep,” he says without looking up from his phone.

“Neither did you, apparently, if you had time to run a whole barista shift.”

“I don’t sleep well after the Reaping.”

“Understandable. Must be exhausting, ruining somebody’s life on a schedule.”

His gaze lifts.

I expect annoyance, maybe correction. Instead, the corner of his mouth moves the smallest possible distance before he sets the phone facedown.

“I didn’t ruin Marcus Deering’s life.”

“No. You just stood there while somebody else handled the paperwork.”

The almost-smile disappears.

Good. I should feel better about that than I do.

“Sit,” he says. “Drink before your coffee gets cold.”

My legs make the decision before my pride can object. I lower myself onto the stool across from him, more tired than I’m willing to admit.

His eyes drop to the hand wrapped around my mug, then to the small crescents I didn’t bother hiding.

“Did you clean those?”

“Did you ask me down here to discuss wound care?”

“I didn’t ask you here.”

“You made me coffee.”

“Because you were going to come downstairs eventually.”

“And you know that because?”

“Because you’ve never once let a bad night end quietly. I heard you get up twice before you actually came down. You don’t do anything the first time you decide to.”

The problem with Cassian is that he can say something that sounds almost like a compliment and still make it feel like he’s been taking notes on me.

I wrap both hands around the mug. “What does not yet mean?”

He doesn’t answer immediately.

“Real answer,” I add. “Not one of those sentences you people dress up and send out pretending they have jobs.”

Cassian turns his mug a quarter inch against the counter, buying himself time. I clock it instantly, delighted despite myself. Dominic does the exact same thing with his glass when he’s deciding how much truth a person can survive.

Careful men. Expensive habits.

I decide Cassian is stalling because he already knows the answer and doesn’t want to give it to me. It’s easier than wondering whether he doesn’t know how.

“It means you still have a lot to learn,” he says.

I stare at him.

“Wow. Incredible. Truly nothing I couldn’t have gotten out of a fortune cookie.”

“It’s the truest answer I can give you.”

“It’s a cop-out.”

“I didn’t say it was interesting.”

I hate that I almost laugh, mostly because he notices. There’s the faintest shift in his expression, quick enough that I couldn’t pretend I imagined it if pretending had been working out particularly well for me lately.

“Your father called me Lorelei Vale.”

“He called you that because he wanted to see how you’d react.”

“And?”

“Now he knows.”

“That I don’t like people changing my name without asking?”

“No. He knows that you’ll correct him in front of an audience.”

I think of the floodlights. Helena’s folder. The way the crowd kept cheering while Marcus vanished beyond the garages. I think of Alistair watching me as though I’d handed him information just by refusing his name.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It’s something he’ll remember. Whether that’s good is still to be decided.”

“Is that supposed to scare me?”

“No.”

“You could at least lie better. For sport.”

“I don’t lie for sport.” He pauses. “Besides, I wouldn’t dare.”

It should sound sanctimonious. Instead, it just sounds tired, which is somehow worse because it makes me want to keep pulling at him instead of letting it go.

“Good. Threatening me before breakfast feels a little ambitious, even for this family.”

“Again, I’m not threatening you.”

“You’re doing a remarkably accurate impression.”

Cassian looks at me for a long moment.

Then he says, “I brought you a clean cloth.”

The shift catches me off guard.

“What?”

“Last night.” His gaze drops briefly to my hands again. “You’re asking what I did while Marcus was being taken away. I brought you a clean cloth.”

“In front of your father. Folded and everything. Very efficient.” I take another drink because it’s easier than admitting I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of my morning tracking the line of his jaw when he isn’t looking at me. “Didn’t say a single word to go with it.”

“I knew he was watching.”

The answer lands differently than I expect.

Cassian’s expression doesn’t change.

“Would the words have changed anything?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then say the point.”

I have an answer somewhere. Something reasonable and adult about human decency, or checking whether somebody is okay after something traumatic.

Instead what comes out is, “You could have said something.”

Cassian goes quiet, the real kind this time rather than the polished silence he wears while deciding how much of himself other people are allowed to see.

I look away first.

Annoying.

“You could have asked if I was okay.”

“I knew you weren’t.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t check on me.”

“No.” His voice lowers. “It doesn’t.”

I glance up.

Cassian is leaning against the counter, close enough for me to notice the rolled cuffs of his shirt and the faint shadow beneath his eyes. A plain silver band circles his right hand.

I used to remember it catching the streetlight the night he picked me up, how carefully he opened the car door, how he said my name like it belonged to him more than it belonged to me.

Now I’ve seen its twin flash on Alistair’s hand beneath the floodlights.

The memory doesn’t stay warm anymore. It turns into a question about who put that ring on Cassian’s hand, how long he has worn it, and what it means when both father and son carry the same piece of silver into rooms where everybody else is expected to obey.

Then I remember the private box.

Cassian’s mouth at my throat. His hand around my neck. The way neither of us said what we already knew.

That memory doesn’t disappear because the ring means something uglier now.

Apparently my brain is committed to making this difficult.

He’s close enough that I could count the individual threads catching the light on his sleeve if I were the kind of unhinged person who counted threads, which — apparently, this morning — I am.

Then it hits me, with real horror, that I’ve spent more of the last few minutes on the topography of his forearm than I have on Marcus, Helena’s folder, or the ten thousand more urgent things a person is supposed to be thinking about the morning after watching a boy disappear in the dark.

I’m with Rafe.

Whatever with means in this house, it’s real enough that I went to sleep wanting him beside me and he wasn’t there because he went through a door I chose to stay outside of.

I still don’t know what he saw.

And here I am cataloguing another man’s hands around a mug like it’s a personality trait I’ve been assigned to memorize for a test nobody warned me about.

I hate myself a little.

Not enough to look away.

Before I can decide whether that says something terrible about me, a shadow falls across the doorway.

Ash stops when he sees us.

His hair looks like he’s run both hands through it too many times, and there’s dark stubble along his jaw. He’s wearing yesterday’s shirt, or one close enough that I can’t tell the difference.

His gaze goes to my hands first, then the coffee, then Cassian.

He doesn’t come in. He leans against the frame instead, looking like sleep has been avoiding him the same way it’s been avoiding me.

“Lo.”

“Ash.”

Yesterday, four days of avoiding each other finally ended in a service corridor while somebody’s mother begged behind a door. I told him he didn’t get to decide what I was allowed to see.

He let go.

Then he asked me not to go in.

I stayed.

Now all of that sits between the two syllables we give each other across the kitchen.

“Can we talk?” he asks.

Quietly.

Almost, infuriatingly, like he’s asking permission instead of demanding it.

“I don’t think we have anything to talk about.”

“I think we have a lot to talk about.”

“Funny you didn’t think that before the Reaping.”

His face changes. Not dramatically. Ash isn’t dramatic when he’s hurt. He gets quieter, like if he can keep everything contained inside his body, nobody else will have to deal with the mess.

A small, exhausted part of me wants to make it easier for him.

Last night he asked instead of ordering. He let go when I told him to. When I chose to stay outside that door, he didn’t make the choice mean more than it did.

That should count for something.

It does.

It just doesn’t buy him this conversation yet.

I turn back to my coffee.

After a beat too long, I hear him peel away from the doorframe and leave, his footsteps fading down the hall.

Cassian watches the whole thing without a word.

“Not going to weigh in?” I ask.

“It’s not my place.”

“Since when has that ever stopped you?”

“Since you started keeping score.”

The corner of my mouth moves before I can stop it. I’m immediately irritated with myself.

“I wasn’t aware you minded losing.”

“I don’t.”

“Another lie?”

“Another question you won’t like the answer to.”

I get up to rinse my mug, more for something to do with my hands than because it needs it.

Something catches my eye through the kitchen doorway.

A folder sits on the hall table.

Cream stock. Brass corners.

The same kind Helena held at the rail when she read Marcus Deering’s name aloud.

I’m almost certain it wasn’t there last night.

Almost.

My hand tightens around the mug.

Behind me, Cassian doesn’t move or say anything.

I can’t tell whether he’s seen the folder. I can’t tell whether he put it there. I can’t tell whether the whole conversation we just had was meant to keep me occupied until I noticed it for myself.

I set the mug down carefully.

“Cassian.”

“Yes?”

I keep my eyes on the folder.

“What happens when I’ve learned enough?”

Cassian doesn’t look at me. If he has clocked that I noticed it, he has decided I don’t get to ask him about that either.

The silence between us stretches before he finally says, “You’ll find out.”

Not a warning.

Not an answer either.

I rinse the mug and set it down. I don’t look at the folder again, though I feel it the whole time the way you feel someone hiding in a room they don’t want you to know they’re in.

Whatever’s coming isn’t going to knock first.

It’s already in the house, waiting for me to notice.