Page 3 of Ignition Rites

“Why do you always call me that?”

“It’s your name.”

“So is Lo.”

“No.” He looks at me directly, and something about having all of his attention at once makes me wish I hadn’t asked. “Lo is what people make of it.”

“And Lorelei?”

“The name your mother gave you.”

Something in my chest tightens that has no business tightening.

“That sounded almost sentimental.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Good. I was worried about you.”

He gets out before I can decide whether that tiny movement at the corner of his mouth was real, comes around, and opens my door before my hand even finds the handle — not chivalry, something colder than that, like he’s testing whether I’ll let him.

I do.

“I could’ve done that myself,” I say once I’m standing.

“I know you could.” He doesn’t move out of my space. “That’s not why I did it.”

He walks me to my door and stops at the threshold, close enough that I can feel the height of him without touching, far enough that nothing actually happens. Somehow, the restraint unsettles me more than contact would have.

“Get some sleep, Lorelei.” A beat, like he’s deciding whether to say the rest. He decides to. “You have a long season ahead of you.”

Then he’s gone — down the steps, into the car, taillights swallowing themselves into the dark — and I’m standing in my doorway with my heart doing something erratic and humiliating, replaying the way he says my full name, wondering what family business looks like lit up gold at midnight, and hating that some small, unforgivable part of me already wants to find out.

Chapter two

Ignition

Ash

The Camaro’s been sitting in bay two for three days, and it still won’t turn over clean, and that’s the only thing in my life right now that makes sense — a problem with a wiring diagram, something I can actually fix with my hands instead of just staring at.

“You’re gonna strip that bolt,” Rafe says from somewhere behind me, half-buried in the frame of a bike that isn’t his yet. “Third time you’ve gone back at it like it owes you money.”

“It does owe me money. In labor.”

“Cute.” He drops the wrench and wipes his hands on a rag that’s already too greasy to do anything but move the dirt around. “You hear back from your dad about the season opener?”

“Alistair’s already got it locked. Two weeks.”

I stopped calling him Dad years ago. Rafe gave up correcting me long ago too.

He goes quiet, the kind he gets when he’s deciding whether to say the thing or swallow it. He swallows it, wheeling the bike upright instead and checking the throttle like it’s more interesting than whatever he almost said.

The shop smells like it always does — oil and rubber and the ghost of my mother’s cafecito, which doesn’t make sense because she hasn’t set foot in here in years, but some memories just live in a building whether the person does or not. I keep half-expecting to look up and see her in the doorway with a thermos, telling both of us you’re going to lose fingers being careless, mi amor, and neither of us listening.

I don’t look up, because she’s not there, and she’s never there.

“So,” Rafe says, too casual, the tone he uses right before he says something he already knows I won’t like. “Your stepsister. She’s moving in this week, yeah?”