5. The Leash He Calls Home
Chapter five
The Leash He Calls Home
Rafe
Dominic keeps a study at the house for appearances, but this is the office he actually works from.
No chapel-adjacent hush, no doctrine hanging in the air like incense, just floor-to-ceiling glass thirty stories up, Marazul’s skyline doing its best impression of a normal city, and the low hum of a trading floor two doors down that never quite stops even after hours.
He built this place from nothing, or that’s the story he tells when he wants to remind somebody what he’s capable of. I’ve never checked if it’s true. Doesn’t matter either way. He acts like it is, and that’s usually enough.
He didn’t call me in here to talk about money.
“Sit,” he says, not looking up from his monitor.
“I’ve got somewhere to be.”
“You’ve got nowhere that matters more than this.” Now he looks up. “Sit, Rafael.”
Nobody calls me that except him, and only when he wants me small. I sit.
He turns the monitor slightly, like he’s about to show me something, then doesn’t. He just leaves his hand resting on the edge of it, patient, the way he does everything.
“Cassian tells me the reporting’s gotten thin.”
“The reporting’s been fine.”
“The reporting’s been you telling me what I already know. She went to class. She came home. Nothing to note.” His voice stays flat, no accusation in it yet, which is worse. “That’s not reporting. That’s a boy protecting a girl he’s supposed to be watching.”
“I am watching her.”
“Watching isn’t documenting.”
I know where this is going before he says the rest, and I hate that I know it. Hate the part of me already calculating how bad it’s about to get.
“Cassian wants more than notes,” he says. “Photos. Video, where you can get it. He needs to see what he’s dealing with — her, Ash, the girl.” A pause. “Talia.”
“You want me to film her.”
“I want you to do the job you agreed to.”
“I agreed to keep her safe.”
“You agreed to report on her.”
His voice doesn’t rise. It never does. That’s the whole trick of him: he doesn’t need volume when he has decades of being obeyed sitting under every sentence.
“Those were never two different jobs, Rafael. You just liked believing they were.”
Something in my chest goes tight and mean. I make myself sit still with it instead of doing anything a camera in this room might catch and use later.
“And if I say no?”
“Then somebody else does it. Somebody who won’t be careful with her the way you would.” He lets that sit. “I’d have thought you’d want it to be you.”
That’s the part that gets me. Not the threat, because a threat I can hate clean; it’s that he says it like he’s doing me a favor, and some old, stupid part of me almost believes him before I catch it.
I don’t answer right away. Dominic lets the silence stretch because he already knows which way it’s going to break, and the worst of it is that he’s right about the part I can’t argue with.
If somebody is going to point a camera at her, I would rather it be somebody who knows which doors not to open.
So I bargain, because bargaining is the only thing I’m still allowed to do.
“Not her apartment,” I say. “Nothing behind a closed door. Nothing from inside her room.”
“Nothing she wouldn’t do in front of the house.” Dominic considers it as though he’s the one being generous. “Agreed.”
It isn’t a win. It’s the price of keeping the camera in my hands instead of somebody else’s.
“Fine.”
The word tastes wrong, too close to agreement and not close enough to refusal, and I already know I’m going to hate myself for how easily Dominic can make compromise sound like protection. It’s too late to take it back.
“Good.”
He goes back to his monitor like the conversation has already been filed and forgotten, which for him it probably has. Then, almost as an afterthought, he says, “Nico’s coming back.”
I go still.
“Coming back where?”
“Here. Marazul. Next month.”
“Why.”
“Because I asked him to.” Dominic looks at me again, and there’s something in his face I don’t get shown often. Not pride exactly. Not just calculation either. “He wants to see how the preparation’s coming along. Before the Offering. Before anything gets decided that can’t be undecided.”
“Preparation for what.”
“You know for what.”
I do, and I hate that I do.
“He’s not part of this,” I say. “He’s not even here.”
“He’s family. Family gets a say in outcomes that touch the whole branch, whether they’ve been around for the buildup or not.
” Dominic says it like scripture, like something he has recited before to somebody else a long time ago.
“Nico’s opinion carries weight in this house.
More than yours does right now, given how thin your reporting’s been. ”
That lands exactly where he means it to, and I don’t give him the satisfaction of showing it.
“He barely knows her. He’s never even met her.”
“That’s precisely why he’s coming.” A small, humorless almost-smile. “You should be glad. Good for you to watch somebody else do this job for once. Might teach you something.”
I don’t have anything to say to that that won’t get me in worse trouble than I’m already in, so I don’t.
I find out the rest by accident, the way I find out most of what actually matters in this family: standing outside Dominic’s office ten minutes later, waiting on the elevator, when his voice carries through the door he didn’t fully close.
He’s on the phone, and I don’t catch who with; what matters is the sentence that lands on the back of my neck like a hand, casual and certain and not meant for me at all.
“—the one she’s supposed to choose. Or his father will be disappointed.”
I don’t move, and for a second I don’t breathe either.
His father.
Not Alistair, and not Dominic talking about me, Nico, Cassian, or Ash.
Somebody else’s father, and somebody else’s son, which means Nico isn’t the only one coming.
He’s not coming to visit. He’s coming to watch somebody audition for a place beside her, and somebody has already decided how it’s supposed to end.
I’m supposed to stand there and let it happen while I film her laughing at something Ash said, log it, hand it over, and call it a job.
The elevator opens, and I get in. I don’t remember pressing the button for the ground floor, but the numbers start falling anyway.
It was never a job to me, not the way Dominic means it.
Not the bike, not the first honest conversation either of us had in weeks, not the night she fell asleep against my shoulder and I sat there for two hours without moving because I didn’t want to be the reason she woke up.
None of that shows up in a photo, and none of it is what Cassian is asking for.
So whatever I hand over from here isn’t going to be real.
It’ll be a version of her small enough to fit in a file.
I get in the car and don’t start it right away. I sit there in the parking structure, hands on the wheel, jaw tight enough to ache, running the same four seconds of Dominic’s voice on a loop until it stops meaning anything and becomes noise.
Eventually, I turn the key.
I don’t feel any better for having waited.