Epilogue
Cassian
Ifind Rafe still standing in the service corridor nearly twenty minutes after Lorelei chose to stay with Ash and he went through the door alone.
For a while, I don’t announce myself. His hands are braced against the wall, head lowered between his shoulders, eyes fixed on a doorway that has since gone dark and quiet.
I have seen Rafe angry, reckless, bleeding, drunk, laughing hard enough to lose his breath, and I have never seen him look emptied out.
“You shouldn’t have gone in alone,” I say.
He startles, then turns his head toward me without taking his hands from the wall.
“I didn’t start out alone.” His voice sounds wrong, flat in places it usually bends. “She came as far as the corridor because I did. Ash asked her not to go farther, and she stayed.”
There is emphasis on asked, and I hear it.
“So he listened.”
“Yeah.” Rafe finally pushes away from the wall. “Apparently he can learn.”
Under any other circumstances there would be a smile attached to that, but tonight there isn’t.
“You still went in.”
“I wanted to see the actual thing.” His eyes return to the doorway. “Not the part everybody’s allowed to watch.”
“And now you have.”
His jaw tightens. I don’t ask him to describe it, because I already know, and Rafe looks at me then, not casually.
“You know.”
It isn’t a question.
“Yes.”
His expression changes, the emptiness giving way to something sharper. “How?”
I could lie. There are several lies available to me. Instead I say, “Because I’ve seen what comes after.”
Rafe stares at me. “When?”
“Years ago.”
“How old were you?”
“Too young for it to have taught me what it should have.”
His mouth opens, then closes, and I can see that answer rearranging me for him. Good. It should.
“You run this shit,” he says.
“The opener.”
“The rankings.”
“Parts of them.”
“And you knew where they were taking Marcus.”
“Yes.”
The word sits between us. Rafe looks toward the dark doorway again.
“You knew, and you still let me walk in there.”
“You said you needed to know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
He laughs once without humor and rubs both hands over his face, and for the first time I wonder whether what I have always considered preparation looks different from the other side.
“I thought Ash was wrong,” Rafe says after a moment.
“About what?”
“Stopping her.”
“He didn’t stop her.”
“I know.” He looks at me. “That’s the fucking point. He asked. She decided.”
I say nothing.
“He finally did what he keeps claiming he wants to do. Let her choose.” Rafe’s gaze narrows. “And then I walked through the door because I chose to.”
“You regret it.”
“No.” The answer comes too quickly to be uncomplicated. “I hate it. That’s different.”
That, I understand.
My right hand shifts at my side, silver catching under the corridor light, and Rafe’s eyes drop to the ring before returning to my face.
I think of Lorelei at the rail, staring first at Alistair’s hand and then at mine.
She saw the resemblance, of course she did.
The bands predate me, and they predate most of what Alistair now calls tradition; men selected for particular functions in the house have worn versions of them for longer than anyone bothers to explain publicly.
Mine was given to me by my father the year Ash and I came to this house, and I have spent years pretending that wearing it did not mean I belonged to the machinery that put it there.
Tonight Lorelei watched Alistair’s ring catch the light, then watched mine do the same, and afterward, knowing my father was watching, I handed her the cloth. I knew what the gesture would look like. I did it anyway, and Alistair knew that too.
“You gave her something in front of him,” Rafe says.
“Yes.”
“He saw.”
“Yes.”
“And you still did it.”
I look at him, and his mouth twists faintly. “Guess I’m not the only coward who likes making shit public instead of saying it.”
Under different circumstances, I might object. I don’t.
“Apparently not.”
That almost gets a smile. Rafe exhales and looks down the corridor.
“Get some sleep.”
“You first.”
Neither of us moves for another few seconds. Then Rafe pushes away from the wall completely and heads toward the stairs, and I watch him go.
I had stopped coming to the chapel at night.
For several nights I managed it, but tonight I end up there before dawn anyway, not because I believe the stone will give me an answer, since I learned better than that, but because there are habits that survive long after faith stops justifying them, and Marcus Deering’s mother is still begging somewhere in the back of my mind.
So I kneel again. Lorelei’s lace mask is still where I left it, small and dark against the altar, and I don’t touch it.
My right hand rests against the stone instead, the ring pressing cold between my skin and the altar, and I think of Alistair’s hand beneath the floodlights, the same plain silver, the same inheritance disguised as ritual.
Lorelei noticed. More importantly, Alistair noticed where her attention went, and then he watched me cross the space between us and give her the cloth anyway.
That was not private kindness. Nothing done in front of him is private, and I knew that before I moved.
At dinner, Lorelei told me I did not get to speak as though nothing had happened between us. Tonight I gave my father proof that I agreed, and that realization should make me more afraid than it does.
Instead I keep thinking about Marcus, and about Rafe standing in the corridor afterward, and about the fact that I knew exactly what waited beyond that doorway because I had stood in another one years ago and learned what this family does when obedience stops being useful.
I told myself then that knowing made me safer.
Later, I told myself helping run the system meant I could control which parts of it reached the people I cared about.
Both explanations have served me well, and neither survived tonight.
My father built a design meant to survive contact with anyone who might complicate it. Lorelei has complicated Ash, Rafe, me, even Talia in ways I did not predict, while Marcus’s mother begged a house that had already decided her son no longer mattered.
The design was never built to survive being loved back.
It was built to survive being obeyed.
Alistair called her Lorelei Vale tonight, and she corrected him. Of course she did. That’s not my name. And he smiled. Not yet.
I understand now that the sentence was never merely a threat.
It was a countdown.
Somewhere upstairs, Lorelei is probably awake with the cloth I gave her and crescents pressed into her palms, replaying the same corridor the rest of us are trying and failing to leave behind.
I press my hand harder against the altar until the edge of the ring bites into my skin, and for once, I don’t ask God to make me want less.
I wonder instead how much time Alistair thinks he has.
The season’s over.
The real one hasn’t started yet.