Page 45 of Ignition Rites

His face stills. “I’m aware.”

“You haven’t said one word about it.”

“No.”

“And now you’re congratulating me on Rafe?”

His gaze drops briefly to my mouth before returning to my eyes.

“I didn’t say I was pleased.”

There it is, small and controlled and still enough to make my heartbeat kick harder.

Across the room, Ash pushes his chair in, the scrape against the floor breaking whatever has narrowed between Cassian and me.

Cassian straightens. “Good night, Lorelei.”

Then he turns and leaves.

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?