9. French Exit
Chapter nine
French Exit
Lorelei
Somewhere in the weeks since Marcus disappeared, the Offering stopped being a threat nobody would explain and became a date everyone assumes I know.
Helena has written it on three calendars. On one of them, a second date sits circled in red farther out, with no label at all. Odette has scheduled another fitting. Carmen keeps finding reasons to be elsewhere whenever anybody mentions it.
I’m looking for Rafe because he promised to drive me back to campus and is now twelve minutes late, which is just long enough to be irritating without being long enough to justify the speech I’m preparing.
I find a stranger instead.
He’s in the east sitting room, the one nobody uses because the light is wrong for reading and the fireplace has never once been lit in the entire time I’ve lived here.
He stands at the window with his back to the door, hands in his pockets, looking out at the garden like he’s deciding whether it was worth crossing an ocean to see.
“You’re not Rafe.”
Possibly the least intelligent thing I could have opened with.
He turns, and he has Rafe’s eyes, which is what does it.
The rest of him takes another second to arrive: older than I expected, broader through the shoulders than the photograph I half remember, dressed like somebody collected him directly from an airport lounge and forgot to let him change.
French sits neatly around his vowels when he speaks, careful enough that I wonder whether it always sounds that way or only when he wants it to.
“No,” he says. “Though we do share a father. Apparently not a sense of punctuality.”
“Nico.”
“I’m relieved someone remembers.”
“I saw a picture once.”
“Was it a good one?”
“No.”
“That sounds like my father’s taste.”
He says it so plainly that I laugh before I decide whether I should. His mouth shifts at one corner, not quite a smile but close enough to let me know he noticed.
“Nobody told me you were coming.”
“I was given a room and a schedule. Everything else was apparently meant to be discovered.” He glances toward the empty doorway behind me. “This family has always been particular about who learns what, and when.”
I hate how quickly that gets through.
“You’ve noticed.”
“I’ve been here twenty minutes.”
“That’s usually enough.”
He moves away from the window and gestures toward the chairs. “You can sit. Or keep standing in the doorway if it makes you feel safer. I won’t be offended.”
“I’m not worried about offending you.”
“Good. That would make this dull.”
I don’t sit, but I don’t leave either. Nico takes the chair nearest the cold fireplace and leans back like he has nowhere else to be. He doesn’t ask me again, and somehow that works better than asking would have.
“You were looking for Rafe,” he says.
“He’s supposed to drive me back to campus.”
“And instead you found the less useful brother.”
“I don’t know enough about you to rank usefulness.”
“Give it time.”
There’s enough dry humor in it that I almost relax.
Almost.
“So,” I say. “Did Dominic give you a briefing before he sent you up here to inspect us?”
“He gave me several.”
“Of course he did.”
“They were impressively thorough.”
“And?”
“Mostly useless.”
That gets me to sit.
I take the chair across from him, leaving the little table between us. It holds a dead plant, two coasters, and nothing anybody could reasonably use as a weapon without embarrassing themselves.
“What did the briefings say?”
“What everyone expects from you.” His gaze stays on my face. “Very little about what you like.”
The answer catches me off guard. Nico notices but doesn’t pounce on it. He reaches over and turns the dead plant a few inches toward the window, as if better lighting might still save it.
“What do you like, Lorelei?”
“That’s a suspiciously normal question.”
“I can make it stranger if that helps.”
“It might.”
“What would you rescue first from a burning theater?”
“A person.”
“Boring.”
“The costumes, then.”
“Better.”
I smile despite myself, and he waits.
That might be the trick, more than anything he says. Nobody in this house waits for my answers. They supply them, correct them, or decide I’ve taken too long and move on.
“I sing,” I say. “Choir, mostly. Musical theater before all of this.”
I wave a hand at the room, meaning the house, the family, the ritual, and possibly my entire life since my mother got married.
“What kind of roles?”
“Whatever they gave altos with good projection and no fear of ugly costumes. My school was very committed to putting me in a nun’s habit.”
“Were you convincing?”
“Devastatingly.”
He laughs, a real laugh this time, brief and lower than I expected.
I like the sound of it.
I like that I made it happen more.
“It’s the one thing that feels like mine,” I say. “Singing. Everything else around here feels borrowed from somebody with better paperwork.”
Nico’s expression changes. The charm doesn’t disappear, but it loosens enough for something quieter to show through.
“You miss it.”
“I still sing.”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
The room settles around us. Downstairs, somebody closes a door hard enough to shake the glass in the cabinet. Nico glances toward the sound, then back at me.
His attention doesn’t feel like Cassian’s silence, waiting for me to incriminate myself, or like Ash watching for the next thing he needs to protect me from, or like Rafe wanting something he’s trying not to ask for.
Nico listens like he expects the answer to change what he does next.
That should not work on me as well as it does.
It works anyway.
“Why are you here?” I ask. “Really.”
“My father asked me to see how the preparation was progressing before anything was decided that couldn’t be undone.”
“Preparation for what?”
His mouth tightens slightly.
“You know he didn’t send me here expecting me to explain that.”
“Then you should also know how much I hate that sentence.”
“I do.”
At least he has the decency to look faintly ashamed of it.
“Is that all?” I ask. “You flew here to check a box for Dominic?”
“No.” His thumb passes once over the edge of his cuff. “That’s why he asked me to come. It isn’t why I agreed.”
“Why did you agree?”
“I wanted to meet you.”
“That sounds worse when you say it like that.”
“I could lie, if you’d prefer.”
“Everybody else does.”
“Then it seems unnecessary for me to compete.”
He says it lightly, but his eyes don’t match. There’s something else behind them, not softness exactly, something tired enough that I recognize it without knowing why.
“You talk like you know this house,” I say.
“I know houses like it.”
The answer is quiet enough to make me sit a little straighter.
“Are there many?”
“More than there should be.”
A chill moves over my arms. Nico looks toward the unlit fireplace.
“Marazul behaves as if it invented all of this,” he says. “The rules. The ceremonies. The language people use when they want obedience to sound sacred.”
“It didn’t?”
“No.” His mouth twists. “Families like ours rarely invent anything. They inherit, rename, and insist the new label makes it holy.”
“Ours?”
He looks back at me.
“Useful word, isn’t it? It can mean belonging or blame depending on who says it.”
“You’re avoiding the question.”
“I am.”
The admission is so clean it knocks some of the irritation out of me.
“At least you know.”
“I usually do.”
“What did they tell you I was?”
“A complication.”
“Cassian.”
Nico’s eyebrow lifts. “You said it, not me.”
“What did Rafe say?”
“Very little.”
“That sounds like him.”
“He did make it clear I was not to upset you.”
“Also sounds like him.”
“Do you need that?”
“What?”
“Someone else deciding what you can survive.”
The question hits hard enough that I sit back.
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
There’s no apology in it and no smugness either.
Just the answer.
“You’re very good at this.”
“At upsetting people?”
“At making it feel like you’re the only person in the room who has figured out what’s actually happening.”
“That would be an exhausting thing to fake.”
“Doesn’t mean you aren’t faking it.”
“No.”
He stands and straightens his cuff. The polished version of him returns so smoothly I almost wonder whether I imagined the tired man underneath it.
“Everyone in this house has taught you that attention comes with a price,” he says. “I won’t insult you by pretending mine doesn’t.”
“Then what’s the price?”
He looks at me long enough that I become aware of every small thing I’m doing: my hands folded too tightly in my lap, one foot hooked behind the other, the fact that I haven’t checked the time once since I sat down.
“I haven’t decided yet,” he says. “I’ll tell you when I have.”
Then he leaves.
No goodbye. No explanation beyond the soft click of the door closing behind him.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
Three messages.
Rafe: In the garage.
Rafe: You coming?
Then, four minutes later:
Rafe: Lo?
I came into this wing looking for him.
I forgot.
I sit beside a fireplace that has never been lit and look at the chair Nico left empty.
For weeks, I’ve treated everything happening to me — the Offering, the rules, the folder nobody has explained — like it belongs to this house.
Nico came from somewhere else and recognized every move before I explained one.
Maybe Marazul isn’t the whole thing.
Maybe it’s only the part close enough for me to see.
Whatever is happening to me isn’t unique.
It’s just local.