13. Let Her Sleep
Chapter thirteen
Let Her Sleep
Cassian
My phone lights up at eleven, almost exactly when I expect it to.
Talia: He walked me out after Carmen went back inside. Kissed me again.
A second message follows.
Talia: Twice. Smiled after.
Then:
Talia: I think I have him.
I sit with that one for a moment, turning it over for what it tells me and what it doesn’t. Ash has always confused attention with safety, and give him something consistent enough and eventually he stops checking where it came from, usually.
Me: Good. Keep him soft.
Three dots appear, disappear, then return.
Talia is rarely impulsive, which is one of the reasons this arrangement has lasted as long as it has, and tonight at dinner was an exception: I hadn’t asked her to prod at the circuit gossip in front of everyone, and she knew it.
Apparently she wanted to see what moved.
Talia: He barely ate at dinner. Kept looking at the stepsister.
I already knew that. I was at the table watching him do it.
Me: Irrelevant, as long as he’s looking at you when it matters.
Her reply comes almost immediately.
Talia: And if it stops mattering to him?
I set the phone down. There are answers I can give her, and there is the answer I should give her, and then there is the one I don’t want to examine too closely, because it requires admitting I no longer know what happens when Ash’s attention drifts somewhere I cannot redirect.
I have spent years arranging people around one another and calling the result stability, and lately none of them are staying where I put them.
The house is quiet the way it always is after midnight, engineered enough that every small sound carries: a door closing somewhere, a television running low upstairs, too faint to become words.
I don’t go to bed. For several nights habit would have taken me to the chapel, and tonight I stop in the corridor outside it and keep walking, because prayer has already given me its answer and I simply disliked it.
The memory waiting for me instead is dinner: Lorelei beside the table, anger bright enough to cut through every careful thing I had prepared to say.
You don’t get to say that like nothing happened.
She was right. You haven’t said one word about it.
Then, with a disbelief I can still hear, And now you’re congratulating me on Rafe?
And my own answer, I didn’t say I was pleased, which was the closest I came to honesty tonight and possibly the closest I’ve come in years.
I had watched Rafe kiss her at the circuit from behind dark glass, watched her catch his jacket and lean into him, watched the crowd understand what they were seeing.
By the time everyone began pretending it was merely gossip, the gesture had already entered the only record that matters in this family: who noticed, who approved, who objected, and who believed they had just witnessed a claim.
I noticed. I objected. That distinction is becoming inconvenient.
My phone buzzes again.
Talia: You never answered. What happens if he wants her more?
I read it twice. Talia knows what she was hired to do, and she also knows Ash well enough now to understand that whatever exists between them stopped being entirely contractual some time ago.
Perhaps that is why she asked. Perhaps dinner frightened her, or perhaps she simply wants to know whether I have a contingency for the moment one of my brothers stops cooperating with the future I selected for him.
I don’t, and the admission comes with considerably less ceremony than I expected.
Me: I don’t know. Too many things I thought were fixed have stopped behaving like certainties.
The typing indicator appears.
Talia: That’s the most honest thing you’ve ever said to me.
I almost tell her that isn’t true, then remember the standard she is comparing it against.
Me: Don’t get used to it.
Talia: That's the Cassian I'm used to.
I put the phone away. The chapel door is still behind me, and I don’t turn around. Instead I walk toward the residential wing, which is new, and so is admitting why.
Ash is somewhere in this house after walking Talia out and kissing her twice.
Rafe is probably sleeping better than either of us because he has never understood the value of suffering quietly when he can simply make a mess in public and deal with the consequences afterward.
Lorelei is behind one of these doors, and for the first time since the opener I am not going to kneel on stone and ask God to make wanting her disappear. I already know He won’t.
I stop outside her room. There are easier memories available, like the car, weeks ago, when I told her, The name your mother gave you, and watched something in her expression shift because she had expected me to give her less than the whole thing.
I don’t choose that one. My mind gives me the box instead: gold light, her lace mask, my right hand against her skin, the moment I removed my own mask afterward and made certain there could be no confusion about who had touched her, and her face when she understood.
I left her mask on the altar, and that should disturb me more than it does. A relic would be the wrong word, and so would trophy, and I have stopped pretending I don’t know why I cannot throw it away.
I stand outside Lorelei’s door with one hand at my side and the other curled loosely around my phone.
The house is quiet enough that if I knocked, I would hear her move inside.
If she is asleep, I could wake her, and if she is awake, she could open the door, and neither possibility is harmless anymore.
At dinner she told me I didn’t get to say it like nothing happened, and she was right.
My hand lifts and stops inches from the wood.
Let her sleep, I tell myself, and for once I can’t decide whether it’s an excuse or the truth. If I knock tonight, it should be for something more honest than jealousy, so I lower my hand, and I let her sleep, and I walk away.