3. Built To Obey
Chapter three
Built To Obey
Cassian
The words have to sit correctly in the mouth before they mean anything, and Alistair has never once let me forget it.
“Again,” he says. “From the vessel does not choose the altar.”
We are in his study, the room arranged the way it is every year around this time — three chairs, no more, because a fourth would suggest the conversation could be interrupted, and nothing about this conversation is meant to allow for interruption.
Dominic sits to my left, a glass he won’t drink from turning slowly between two fingers. Alistair stands at the window with his back to both of us, an instruction in itself: recite the doctrine to a man who isn’t watching, so the words have to hold without an audience willing to forgive a stumble.
“The vessel does not choose the altar,” I say. “The altar is chosen for the vessel, by the hand that built it, for a purpose the vessel is not required to understand, only to complete.”
“Slower on complete.”
I say it again, slower.
“Better.” He still hasn’t turned around. “You’ve had three weeks with this language. It shouldn’t sound memorized anymore.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Then stop carrying it like something separate from yourself.”
I don’t answer that. There isn’t an answer that doesn’t cost me something to give, and I’ve learned not to spend where I don’t have to.
Dominic sets his glass down without making a sound.
“He’s ready.”
“You said that before Marcus.”
“Marcus was no one to her then. Now he has a name.”
“Names aren’t the variable that matters.”
“No,” Dominic agrees. “But they’re the variable the girl notices.”
The line of Alistair’s shoulders tightens. It isn’t a flinch, nothing so unguarded. The stillness simply goes colder before settling back into place.
He turns around.
There’s no performance in his face, which is the thing about my father no one outside this room ever fully understands. He isn’t hiding anything behind the calm.
There is nothing behind it to hide.
“Then Cassian will make sure she notices the right things.”
He looks at me when he says it, and I understand what’s being handed to me before he finishes.
Not a suggestion.
An assignment phrased as though I have a say.
“You’ll officiate alongside me,” he says. “Not physically. A father doesn’t compete for what is already owed to him. But the language is yours to carry into the room. If it fails to land, it fails because you delivered it poorly, not because the structure was flawed.”
“Understood.”
“Say the closing line.”
I say it.
He listens the way he listens to everything — total, unblinking, catching every fraction of hesitation — and I make sure there isn’t one.
“Good.”
He turns back to the window.
Meeting over.
Dominic walks out with me and waits until we’ve cleared the hall before speaking.
“You did well in there.”
“I recited a sentence correctly.”
“That’s what doing well looks like in that room.” He says it without irony, which is somehow worse. “Don’t let it cost you more than it has to.”
“It doesn’t cost me anything.”
Dominic looks at me the way he looks at Rafe sometimes, the way he looks at anyone he suspects of lying to themselves more successfully than they’re lying to him.
“No,” he says. “Of course not.”
He leaves it there.
I let him.
I find Talia in the east garden an hour later.
For one unguarded second before either of them notices me, I watch her laugh at something Lorelei has said, head tipped back, easy and unhurried.
My first instinct is to assess it.
That is probably its own problem.
Lorelei says something else — I don’t catch it, don’t need to — and Talia’s hand goes to her arm, brief and warm, the exact gesture a real friend makes without thinking about it. Lorelei leans into the touch like she trusts it.
That was the point originally.
Not the trust itself. The appearance of it.
I paid Talia to stay close to Ash, to redirect where necessary, to make observation resemble familiarity well enough that nobody questioned her presence. Lorelei was never part of the arrangement.
And yet here she is.
Lorelei doesn’t trust easily. I’ve watched her test every hand before she lets it near her, and somehow Talia has become one she no longer thinks to test.
I dislike how difficult it is to tell which parts of that I paid for and which parts grew after the money stopped mattering.
More than that, I dislike that the distinction matters to me.
Talia spots me before Lorelei does, her posture changing by less than an inch, and I recognize it because I know her well enough to recognize almost everything.
Almost.
“Cassian.” Lorelei doesn’t look thrilled to see me, which is at least consistent. “Didn’t know this was a public garden.”
“It isn’t,” I say. “I live here.”
“Could’ve fooled me. You spend more time in your father’s study than you do in any room with windows.”
“The study has windows.”
“Windows he stands in front of so nobody else gets to use them. Not the same thing.”
I don’t have an answer that doesn’t concede the point, so I don’t offer one.
Talia watches us with an expression I can’t fully read anymore.
There was a time I believed I could.
That unsettles me more than it should.
“I should go,” she says, standing and brushing invisible dust from her skirt. “Kiwi’s expecting me.”
“Tell her I said hi,” Lorelei says.
She means it plainly.
Talia smiles at her.
The smile is real.
I know that before I can stop myself from knowing it.
Then she leaves.
I watch her go and think, with increasing irritation, that I never instructed her to care.
That is the problem.
Not that she exceeded the assignment.
That I still think of it as one.
“You two know each other?” Lorelei asks.
“We’ve met.”
“Weird energy.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means weird energy, Cassian. I don’t know how else to translate it into whatever language you people speak.”
I let that one go.
She folds her arms and looks at me the way she looks at anyone she’s decided to interrogate whether or not they agreed to the interview.
“So. The Offering. What am I supposed to wear to a thing nobody will explain to me?”
The question catches me unprepared, mostly because of how casually she asks it, like she’s discussing logistics for a wedding she’s mildly annoyed about attending rather than the ritual whose language I spent this morning reciting in my father’s study.
“Something formal,” I say. “White, if you have it. If not, pale enough to read as white under the lights.”
“Very specific for a not yet.”
“Preparation starts before explanation does in this house.”
Her expression sharpens.
“That sounded terrible even by your standards.”
“I’m aware.”
“So tell me what I’m preparing for.”
I could repeat the approved answer.
For once, I hear how it sounds before I say it.
“That isn’t something I’m permitted to explain yet.”
“Permitted by who?”
I don’t answer.
This time the silence costs me because I can see exactly what it looks like from where she’s standing: a man who knows more than she does and has chosen, again, to keep it that way.
“Cassian.”
“You’ll know what you need to know before the rite begins.”
Her face closes immediately.
“That’s the worst sentence anyone in this house has said to me, and I live with Alistair.”
“I know.”
The words leave before I decide whether I should give them to her.
Lorelei pauses.
So do I.
Neither of us does anything useful with the moment.
Then she turns and leaves.
No goodbye.
I stay where I am, alone in the garden where Talia became Lorelei’s friend without my instruction, with my father’s closing line still sitting perfectly in my memory.
I said it correctly this morning.
I could say it correctly again now.
That does not mean I believe it.