5. Saving Her Soul
Chapter five
Saving Her Soul
Rafe
Dominic’s office smells like cedar and old paper, with the faint bite of whiskey underneath both.
I’ve been standing outside the door for two full minutes before I knock, which is two minutes longer than I usually give myself for anything, long enough that I’ve counted the grain lines in the wood three separate times.
“Come in,” he says before I’ve even touched it. He always does that. Some fathers know their kids’ footsteps, but mine knows the exact pause before a hand becomes a fist against a door.
He’s behind his desk, sleeves rolled to the forearm, papers stacked in a way that isn’t neat so much as defended, nothing overlapping, like disorder is a language he’s decided not to speak anymore.
He spent twenty years as Alistair’s right hand, which is why his office is in this house and why I grew up underfoot in it.
A glass of whiskey sits at his elbow, untouched long enough that the ice has gone flat and clear. He doesn’t look up right away, and when he finally does, he sets his pen down and studies me the way he studies everything, like he’s already three moves ahead of whatever I’m about to say.
“You’ve been quiet all week,” he says.
“I’m always quiet.”
“You’re always loud. Loud is your quiet.” Something close to a smile moves through his face and doesn’t quite land. “What is it?”
I sit in the chair across from him without being asked. He lets it slide, which tells me more than anything he could’ve said out loud. The leather’s cold under me, and somewhere behind him a clock ticks loud enough to fill the silence I’m leaving there on purpose.
“Alistair’s stepdaughter,” I say. “Lo.”
His glass turns a quarter inch beneath his fingers. “What about her?”
“She doesn’t know what she’s walked into.”
“No,” he agrees, easy, like I’ve said something as obvious as the weather outside the window. “She doesn’t.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
He looks at me long enough that I watch him actually weigh the answer instead of reaching for one already assembled, which is rarer from him than almost anything else he does.
“Everything about this situation bothers me,” he says finally. “I’ve made my peace with being useless about most of it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have today.” He turns the glass another quarter inch, a habit I’ve never once seen him break, like the desk itself needs managing as much as anything on it. “Why are you asking me and not Ash?”
“Because Ash would tell me to leave it alone.”
“And you think I won’t?”
“I think you’re the only person in this family who’s ever told me the truth, even when you make me pay for it.”
His hand stops on the glass.
“Careful,” he says quietly. “That’s not a small thing to say to me.”
I lean back in the chair. “Then I’ll pay for it.”
He watches me a moment longer before his shoulders loosen enough to touch the back of his own chair. “You want to protect her,” he says, and it isn’t a question.
“If you think you can’t do anything, what chance do I have?”
“That’s never stopped you from anything in your life.” He almost smiles, and this time it nearly reaches his eyes. “You decided you liked her the second you saw her, and nothing will stop you. That’s just who you are.”
I don’t have a defense for that, mostly because it’s true.
“She’s going to find out eventually,” I say. “What this family actually is. Better she hears it from somebody who isn’t trying to convince her it’s normal.”
Dominic studies me, and something passes behind his eyes that looks almost like grief, old and worn smooth from handling.
“Be careful what you tell her,” he says. “Not because you’d be wrong. Because being right, in this house, has terrible consequences, and I’d rather you learn that the easy way than finding out for yourself.”
“Is that what happened to you? To Mom?”
He doesn’t answer. He lifts the glass instead, finally drinks, and I watch his throat move once before he sets it back down exactly where it was.
That’s answer enough, and I leave before he can change his mind about anything he’s already given me.
I find Lo in the garden the next afternoon, sitting on the low stone wall near the roses, phone forgotten in her lap, shoes kicked off into the grass like she’s daring anyone to argue about it.
The sun’s low enough to throw everything gold and long-shadowed, and there’s a bee working the same climbing rose over and over like it hasn’t figured out the flower’s already given up everything it has.
“You look like you’re plotting world domination,” I say, dropping down beside her without asking, close enough that our shoulders almost touch.
“I’m plotting a nap. Big plans.” She squints at me, sun in her eyes. “You look like hell. Got a lot on your mind?”
“I do, and to be honest, it feels like too much sometimes.”
For a moment neither of us says anything. She picks at a loose thread on the hem of her shorts while I watch the bee finally give up on the rose and lurch toward the hedge. I rehearsed this all morning in a dozen versions, and every one of them sounded better before she was sitting here.
“Can I tell you something?” I ask. “And you have to actually let me finish before you decide I’m lying.”
Her fingers stop on the thread, and she turns toward me. “That’s an ominous way to start a sentence.”
“Well, it is kinda heavy, not gonna lie.”
I start with the part that sounds least insane. “The circuit isn’t just racing. They call it the Reaping. Every season, the family keeps score — wins, losses, claims, who follows the rules and who doesn’t. Alistair uses it to decide where people stand.”
Her eyebrows pull together. “Stand how?”
“Protection. Freedom. How much say you get in your own life. How useful they think you are.”
“So, ranks?”
“Basically.”
She stares at me for a moment. “And the masks?”
“So nobody has to own what happens afterward. You know the church downtown, the one with Alistair’s face on the banners?”
“The megachurch? He has me ushering there every time I’m home from campus.” She frowns. “That’s the same family?”
“That’s the version everyone’s allowed to see. Cameras, livestreams, a congregation that thinks he’s a rich guy who found God. The circuit is what’s underneath, same doctrine with the cameras off.”
“That’s insane.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s actually insane, Rafe.”
“I know.”
“No, you clearly don’t, because you said that way too calmly.”
Despite everything, I almost laugh. “I’ve had longer to get used to how fucked up it sounds.”
Her gaze drops to her hands. “What happens if somebody ranks badly?”
“People fall out of favor. Stop getting invited. Stop showing up. Nobody gives you a clean explanation.”
Lo’s face changes. “People disappear?”
“Sometimes people leave. Sometimes they get pushed far enough out that there isn’t much difference from the inside.”
She’s already shaking her head. “Lo — ”
“No. My mom wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t put me anywhere near something like that.” Her voice sharpens, and it feels like I’ve hit a wound older than this afternoon. “I get that this place is weird as fuck, but you’re wrong.”
“I’m not saying she knew.”
“You don’t know my mom.” Her knuckles go pale around her own shins. “She already did this once. She got out of something like what you’re talking about.”
That isn’t what I expected, and it must show, because she looks away before I can ask.
“What do you mean, got out?”
She starts picking at the loose thread again, unraveling it inch by inch.
“My mom grew up in…” She looks out toward the roses.
“A group. A — I don’t even know what to call it.
She doesn’t talk about it. I only know because I found pictures once, in a shoebox, and she cried when she saw me holding them.
Actually cried. She told me just enough that I stopped asking. ”
I don’t say anything, because she’s finally talking and I’m afraid of doing something that makes her stop.
“She met my dad there. They ran before I was born.” The thread comes loose in her hand. “My dad died when I was little. She’s spent my whole life making sure nothing like that ever touched me again. So when you tell me she basically married into a cult — ”
“I’m not saying she knew.”
“Then what are you saying?”
I look at her and realize every honest answer makes the house around us darker.
“I’m saying I don’t think anyone here has as much choice as they pretend to.”
Lo looks away, jaw working while she stares toward the hedges. “I don’t want to believe you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re right.”
“That’s for you to decide.”
She’s quiet for a long time, and when she speaks again her voice is smaller. “Why are you telling me this? Like, what’s the point?”
Dominic’s warning comes back to me exactly as he gave it.
Being right, in this house, has terrible consequences, and I’d rather you learn that the easy way than finding out for yourself.
I think about Ash telling me to keep my hands off until she understood what this place was and had a real choice.
“Because you deserve the chance to choose,” I say. “And because I’d rather be standing next to you when everything goes to shit than watching you walk into it blind.”
She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t move away either. The sun drops another degree, and eventually her shoulder settles against mine, and I stay exactly where I am.
I find Ash in the shop that night, bay two, half his body swallowed by the Camaro’s open hood while he chases an electrical problem that’s been pissing him off for over a week.
“I told her,” I say.
His head comes up. “Told who what?”
“Lo. About the circuit, the Reaping, enough for her to understand what this family actually is.”
Ash straightens out of the engine bay and wipes his hands on the rag hanging from his back pocket, spreading the grease more than removing it. “You had one rule.”
“You gave me a condition.” I cross my arms. “Hands off until she knew what this place was and could make a real choice. Now she knows.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“Then you should’ve said what you meant.”
He tosses the rag onto the bench. “How much did you tell her?”
“Enough.”
“Rafe.”
“The Reaping. The rankings. The masks.”
“Jesus Christ. You don’t know what Alistair does when somebody starts asking the wrong questions.”
“So that’s the problem?”
“That’s one of them.”
I wait for the rest, and he doesn’t give it to me.
“Right,” I say. “You made the rule, Ash, and I followed the part you actually said out loud.”
“You told her alone.”
So that’s it. I push off the neighboring bay. “You wanted to be there?”
“I wanted to know before you dumped this on her.”
“She handled it.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is?”
His jaw jumps, and I know him well enough to see the answer before he decides whether to give it to me.
“You wanted her protected,” I say. “Fine, I get that. But you also didn’t want anyone close enough to matter until you’d figured out whether you wanted to be the one she chose.”
“This isn’t about me wanting her.”
“Isn’t it?”
He looks away, and I let the silence sit long enough to answer for him.
“I want to keep the wolves off her,” I say after a moment. “Not because I own her. Because somebody should be able to care what happens to her without turning it into another move.”
Ash grips the edge of the workbench, the anger in him thinning into something harder to read. “Is that what you really want?”
“Yeah.”
“You gonna keep breaking the rules to have your way?”
I think about Lo in the garden, the thread unraveling between her fingers while she argued with every word I gave her.
“Every chance I get.”
Ash turns back to the Camaro. For a few seconds there’s nothing but the click of his meter against a connector, then the ring of a ruined bolt hitting the scrap tray beside him, and neither of us says anything about it.