13. What’s Left of Marcus
Chapter thirteen
What’s Left of Marcus
Lorelei
The flashes started the night of the Offering and haven’t fully stopped.
I don’t trust them. That’s the first thing I need to be honest about, even if I’m only admitting it to myself three days later, sitting in my room with the curtains drawn against a sun that feels aggressively unearned.
I know what was in my system that night. Coke first, then the flower, then more flower at some point, though I remember the bitterness better than I remember actually drinking it. Knowing the ingredients doesn’t make anything my brain kept reliable.
The problem is what it kept. Rafe’s mouth. Cassian’s bare face under candlelight. Oil warming beneath somebody’s hands, my fingers twisted into black fabric.
Rafe laughing when I threatened to choose somebody else just to make him stop asking whether I was sure.
I choose you.
That one comes back perfectly.
Of course it does. My brain looked at an entire night of chanting relatives, drugs, ritual sex, and whatever else happened in that room, and decided the footage worth preserving in high definition was me interrupting Satan’s book club to announce which man I wanted first.
Useful.
Rafe’s hand at the back of my neck. Cassian saying my name close enough that I felt it more than heard it.
The edge of something hard beneath my back, candlelight doubling above me, a mouth at my throat, my own laugh, though I can’t remember what was funny.
Then the moment pleasure hit hard enough to empty everything else out of my head.
Then there’s nothing for a while. Not blackness exactly, because I don’t remember losing consciousness.
It’s simply missing, one memory sitting beside another with no bridge between them — Cassian’s hands, then Rafe, then someone chanting, then heat, then Cassian looking at me like he was angry about something neither of us had said.
Then I’m somewhere else in the night entirely.
I can remember the wanting better than I can remember how the Offering ended.
That feels obscene. Not because I didn’t want them — I did, but whatever else was in my bloodstream was the problem.
I remember choosing Rafe specifically because Alistair said I couldn’t.
I remember wanting Cassian even while being furious with him.
I remember reaching. What I don’t remember is everything around it.
Apparently my body has no problem keeping the fun parts while deleting the minutes that might explain why I’ve woken up every morning since with the feeling that I forgot something important.
The flashes come at three in the morning.
In the shower. Once while I’m brushing my teeth, which feels particularly rude.
I’m staring at myself in the mirror with toothpaste drying at the corner of my mouth when Cassian’s thumb appears against my jaw so clearly that my skin tingles where I remember him touching me.
Then Rafe’s hand closes behind my neck, warm and firm, and for half a second I’m back beneath the candles.
The worst part is that the memory doesn’t frighten me. My stomach flips because I’m turned on.
I spit toothpaste into the sink hard enough to splatter the faucet.
“Jesus Christ.”
My reflection looks as irritated with me as I feel.
That’s the part nobody tells you about trauma, apparently. Sometimes your brain hands you tits and candlelight instead of useful information.
I rinse my mouth. The feeling that something is missing stays.
I hear the rest by accident, the way I hear everything that matters in this house.
Helena is in the linen room off the east hall, the door open just enough for her voice to carry. She’s talking to one of the women from my dress fitting — the same one who went quiet when I asked about Marcus, before anybody had decided what version of his disappearance I was allowed to know.
I’m walking past when I hear his name.
I stop.
“—surprised all of us,” Helena says. “Nobody expected him to offer himself like that. He thought it might spare the family the worst of it.”
The woman shakes open a sheet. Fabric snaps through the room.
“Did it?”
“Not him. Not them. They were sent to France anyway. Whole family relocated within the week.”
“So it bought him nothing.”
“No.”
More folding.
That’s it. No lowered voices, no grief, just linen being stacked while they discuss the end of a person.
“Waste, really,” the woman says. “Boy had talent on the circuit.”
“Fastest qualifying time his branch ever produced.”
“Mm. Shame.”
I grip the edge of the doorframe. Neither of them notices.
He offered himself. I’d had that wrong too. Marcus wasn’t taken or caught; he made a trade — his life for his family — and the house took his life, sent them away anyway, then carried on long enough for Helena to discuss the whole thing while matching pillowcases.
Marcus was a good racer. That’s the entire eulogy this house has bothered to write for a boy who gave them everything they asked for and still couldn’t buy his mother a week.
I step away before they see me. Neither calls after me.
By the time I reach the stairs, my chest feels too tight. Not grief exactly — not only grief.
Offered himself. The phrase keeps catching against the Offering even though there’s no reason it should.
Everything in this family is offering, claiming, giving, receiving; they’ve never met a terrible thing they couldn’t improve with ceremonial vocabulary.
Halfway up the stairs, Alistair’s voice flickers through my head with the beginning of a sentence — What is offered— but the rest refuses to come.
I grip the banister and remind myself that he spoke for most of the night.
Any one of those sentences could have contained the word.
I could be manufacturing the connection because Helena just used the same language.
It is a perfectly reasonable explanation, which would be more useful if repeating it made me feel any better.
By the time I reach my room, another flash has already taken over — Rafe beneath my hands, my mouth against Cassian’s, someone’s fingers gripping mine tightly enough to hurt.
I stop. That one is different. I wait for the rest.
Nothing comes. Just pressure. My hand enclosed in somebody else’s. Then Cassian kissing me.
I look down at my fingers. They’re clean, obviously — three days have passed. I flex them anyway. The pressure disappears.
“What the fuck?”
Nobody answers.
I sit on the edge of my bed. There’s a whole stretch of the Offering I can’t account for. I know that now — not because I suddenly remember what belongs there, but because I can finally see the edges.
I remember Rafe. I remember Cassian. I remember sex, and the flower making the room soft while the coke kept every voice sharp. I remember wanting things I’d spent weeks refusing to name. I remember pleasure.
Then pieces are simply gone.
Afterward, I remember Helena’s folder. I think. Maybe. Cream stock under candlelight, Cassian signing something — or maybe I’m borrowing that from every other folder this family has shoved into my life. I press my palms against my eyes. Nothing useful comes.
The worst part is that I know my brain can remember.
It just keeps choosing the wrong things — Rafe saying Little Birdy, Cassian looking at my mouth, his hand at my waist, Rafe steadying me, my own body responding while half the room watched.
All of it passed whatever fucked-up quality-control system runs my memory.
Whatever happened between those things didn’t.
I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling.
Marcus is dead. That fact is real now. I don’t have to guess anymore. Whatever happened after the Reaping ended with his family grieving, him offering himself for them, and the house taking the bargain without keeping its side.
I still don’t know how. Nobody said.
That should be enough to make me furious. Instead, my brain keeps drifting back to the Offering — Cassian’s mouth, Rafe’s hands, the way the room moved around us.
I roll onto my side hard enough to make the mattress complain.
“Stop.”
Nothing stops.
The memory of being wanted is easier to access than the memory of whatever else happened to me that night. I hate that most.
I consider asking someone. Carmen first — she’ll tell me she doesn’t have an answer that won’t terrify me.
Cassian will tell me it isn’t the time, or that the details wouldn’t change the outcome, or some other sentence polished enough to survive being engraved on a mausoleum.
Rafe might answer, and that possibility is somehow worse — because if I ask him what I forgot and his face changes before he speaks, I’ll know there’s something to remember.
Alistair isn’t an option at all; he’d explain the gaps as mercy and then make me feel ungrateful for having them.
So I don’t ask.
Maybe that’s cowardice. Maybe I’m finally learning from everyone else in this house and deciding ignorance counts as protection when I’m the one choosing it.
I stay in my room until evening. The memories keep coming. None of them are Marcus.
That should make me feel better. It doesn’t. If anything, it makes the empty parts louder.
What happened in those minutes? Why can I remember Cassian’s mouth but not how I got from one side of the room to the other? Why do I remember Rafe holding me up? Was I that high? Did I pass out? Did I say something humiliating? Did they?
There are entire sections of my own night being kept from me by my own head.
Apparently the family has competition.
By eleven, I’m tired of sitting inside it. I find Talia a little after midnight. She opens her door, takes one look at my face, and steps aside.
“Bad day?”
“Bad everything.”
She locks the door behind me. I sit on the edge of her bed while she opens the top drawer of her dresser — the small mirror beneath a stack of shirts, the baggie tucked inside a jewelry box with a broken hinge. Her hands move quickly. She cuts two lines. One is longer.
“Do you want to talk first?”
“No.”
She looks at me. Not pushing. That nearly makes me change my mind. Then Cassian’s mouth flashes through my head again, followed immediately by the blank space after it.
“No,” I repeat.
Talia pushes the mirror toward me. I bend over it.
The coke burns up my nose. The drip reaches the back of my throat a moment later, bitter and familiar. My gums start to numb. My heart, sluggish for three days, kicks hard enough to make me sit straighter.
Marcus doesn’t disappear. Neither does the Offering.
That isn’t what the coke does. It just makes everything move — the memories stop sitting in one place long enough for me to stare at the holes between them.
Rafe’s mouth can become Cassian’s hands which can become music then can become Talia asking whether I need water, before any one image gets enough time to turn into a question.
My thoughts stop dragging and begin to run.
Good. I can work with fast.
Talia cuts another line before I ask. I watch the card move through the powder and feel something in my chest loosen.
She knows what I came here for. I don’t want answers tonight. I want enough distance from the questions that I can stop feeling the shape of every missing minute.
I bend over the mirror again.
For tonight, that will have to be enough.