11. Kill the Lights
Chapter eleven
Kill the Lights
Rafe
Second race of the season, and I still can’t feel my hands right when I know she’s in the crowd somewhere behind the rail.
The track isn’t the problem. I’ve run this strip enough times that my body does it without asking my brain for permission anymore — clutch, line, apex, out.
It’s not knowing where she’s standing that has my pulse jumping every time the floodlights catch a dark-haired girl in the wrong section of the crowd.
It doesn’t help that I haven’t stopped thinking about two nights ago.
Her mouth against my neck at a red light.
The way she said my name when I was inside her.
The way she looked at me afterward like she was trying to decide whether what we’d done had changed anything.
I keep waiting for the version of myself that goes back to normal after something like that, and apparently he’s busy.
I find her eventually. Third row back, arms crossed against the cold, a mask doing nothing to hide how hard she’s watching the pits, like she can memorize enough of this place to stop it from surprising her. She hasn’t seen me yet, so I let myself have one clean second of looking before she does.
One second turns into three.
“You’re gonna eat it in heat two if you keep getting distracted,” Nico says behind me.
My brother, in from the Liore branch, is crouched beside the rear tire with a pressure gauge, checking it with the kind of precision that makes the rest of us look like we’re guessing. Nico has always liked things he can wire, time, trigger, or make fail exactly when he wants them to. I like fire.
Between us, destruction mostly comes down to personal preference.
He’s also the reason I know there’s a difference between something breaking and something being made to look boring enough on paper that nobody asks a second question. I try not to remember how young we were when he started teaching me things like that.
“I’m not distracted.”
“Your bike’s idling like it’s nervous. Bikes pick up on their riders. Basic physics.”
“That’s not physics.”
“It sounded convincing, though.” He straightens and gives me the look he’s been giving me since we were kids, the one that says being older apparently grants him supernatural insight.
“Tu regardes la fille, pas la piste.”
I look at him. “Occupe-toi de tes pneus.”
He snorts. “Go check on her before you kill yourself out there thinking about it instead.”
I’m already heading her way when I hear the girls.
There are three of them near the concession stand, all masked, probably somebody’s approved guests from the college crowd.
The circuit isn’t open, exactly, but invitation chains get long when rich people want an audience.
Somebody knows somebody, a name gets added, and suddenly half the people pretending not to gossip have matching lace over their faces.
They’re close enough to the rail that Lo is almost within arm’s reach.
One of the girls looks vaguely familiar. Same lecture hall, maybe. Hallway face. Somebody I’ve passed a hundred times without needing to remember.
“That’s her, right?” she says. “The Vale stepsister. The one everybody’s been talking about.”
“With, like, three of them? At once?”
“I heard it’s a whole thing. Some family cult situation.”
The laugh that follows is careless, and Lo flinches so slightly I might’ve missed it if I didn’t know what her mother told her about where she came from.
“God, imagine,” the first girl says, grinning at her friends. “Sign me up. What do I have to do, get brainwashed? Because if that’s what it takes to land two hot guys, honestly—”
I’m moving before she finishes.
Lo has gone rigid beside the rail, spine straight, arms locked across herself. She hasn’t turned around, either because she doesn’t want to give them the satisfaction or because she can’t yet.
I get there first.
“You lost?” I ask.
Easy voice. Almost friendly.
The girl’s smile flickers when she realizes I’m talking to her.
“We’re just talking.”
“Yeah, I heard.” I stop beside Lo, close enough that nobody has to wonder whose side I’m on. “Funny thing to joke about, somebody’s family right in front of her. Real classy.”
“We didn’t know she could hear.”
“Ah.” I nod. “So it would’ve been hilarious six feet farther away.”
One of her friends grabs her sleeve. The first girl holds my eyes for another second, trying to decide whether there’s a version of this where she wins, then thinks better of it and lets herself get pulled away.
They don’t go far, because nobody at these things ever really leaves when there might be something better to watch later, but it’s enough for Lo’s shoulders to drop half an inch.
We stand there quietly until she says, “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
Her jaw is tight.
“But I wanted to.”
“I could’ve handled it.”
“I know that too.” I lean back against the rail without crowding her. “Doesn’t mean I’m gonna stand there and watch when I can make somebody shut up for free. That’s excellent value.”
That gets the smallest breath of a laugh before it disappears again.
“They said cult.”
“I heard.”
“My mother spent half her life running from one, and now people are standing ten feet away joking that I signed up for another because the men are hot.”
There isn’t a joke good enough to put over that.
“Yeah.”
She stares toward the track. “And the fucked-up part is I can’t even tell myself they’re completely wrong.”
“About the cult part?”
She looks at me.
“Rafe.”
“Right. Bad time.”
“Very.”
I rub a hand over the back of my neck.
“I’m not gonna tell you nothing’s happening to you, because that’d be bullshit and you’d know it. The Reaping is real. The rankings are real. Alistair turning people into positions on a board is real. I told you that already.”
Lo’s arms tighten around herself.
“What I mean is I don’t want whatever happens between you and me to become one more thing somebody else gets to decide for you. That part has to be yours.”
Her gaze comes back to mine.
“I don’t know what this is either,” I say. “I know it isn’t a punchline. I know you aren’t one.”
She watches me for a long moment.
“That’s the first time anyone’s defended me like that,” she says. “Out loud. Where people could see.”
“Get used to it.”
“That’s a big statement for a guy who won’t even tell his own best friend what’s going on.”
I wince. “Okay, rude.”
“Was it inaccurate?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
Her mouth twitches.
“Ash is gonna hear about this conversation whether I tell him or not,” I say. “This crowd has the information-security standards of a group chat.”
“Comforting.”
“I aim to soothe.”
The speakers crackle overhead with the call for the next heat. Engines answer from the pits.
I look at the track, then back at her. There are maybe ninety seconds before somebody comes looking for me — probably Nico, possibly with violence.
“I have to go.”
“Good luck.”
“You gonna be okay?”
She takes the question seriously, which I’m starting to realize is one of the things I like most about her. She doesn’t hand me the answer that gets me out of the conversation fastest.
“Getting there.”
I should leave, but instead I stay because she said where people could see, and something about that lodged under my ribs.
Two nights ago she chose me in private. I’ve spent six years failing to say certain things to Ash unless we can hide them inside a joke, a fight, a car, a garage — anything except words.
And I know exactly what a public gesture means here.
The Reaping turns everything into evidence: who stands beside whom, who touches whom, who gets escorted into which room, who walks away wearing whose attention.
A kiss at the circuit isn’t just a kiss.
Somebody will put it in the record, even if the record is only Alistair’s memory, and Ash will hear about it before the night is over.
Maybe that’s part of why I want to do it here, and the fact that I recognize that about myself should probably make me walk away.
I don’t.
I step closer, and Lo watches me come, her eyes dropping briefly to my mouth.
“Tell me no,” I say quietly.
She uncrosses her arms, catches the front of my jacket, and leans in.
I meet her halfway.
The kiss is nothing like the one outside the restaurant, with no surprise left in it and no question about whether she wants me touching her. Her mouth opens under mine, and for a few seconds I forget the crowd entirely.
Then I remember, and that’s the ugly part: some cowardly piece of me knows Ash will understand this faster than anything I could manage to say to his face. I kiss her because I want to, and I let people see because saying it myself scares me more.
Both things are true.
When we separate, Lo stays close enough that her fingers are still twisted in my jacket, her eyes searching mine.
“You planned that.”
“I wish I were that organized.”
“You absolutely knew what you were doing.”
“Toward the end, yeah.”
She laughs softly and lets me go.
Movement catches my eye above her shoulder.
Cassian’s box.
The dark glass gives me nothing, but if he saw that, he knows exactly what everyone else just saw — and unlike the college girls, Cassian knows what public claims mean inside this family.
A ripple moves through the crowd. Phones rise and fall. A whistle comes from somewhere near the pits, followed by somebody laughing like they’ve been waiting for this longer than I have.
Nico’s voice cuts through the rest.
“Well. That answers that.”
I finally look his way.
He gives me two thumbs up.
“Enfin,” he calls.
I give him one finger.
“Très mature.”
“Je t’aime aussi.”
“Rafe!” somebody shouts from staging.
“Coming!”
Lo laughs again.
Worth it.
I squeeze her hand once before I go.
Then I run my heat, and for the first time all season, my hands are steady the whole way down the strip.
Ash is waiting directly in front of my bike when I pull back into the pits, arms crossed so there’s no pretending he happened to be standing nearby.
I cut the engine, and the quiet afterward lands harder than the race noise.