Page 14 of Redline Communion

“You did well in there.”

“I recited a sentence correctly.”

“That’s what doing well looks like in that room.” He says it without irony, which is somehow worse. “Don’t let it cost you more than it has to.”

“It doesn’t cost me anything.”

Dominic looks at me the way he looks at Rafe sometimes, the way he looks at anyone he suspects of lying to themselves more successfully than they’re lying to him.

“No,” he says. “Of course not.”

He leaves it there.

I let him.

I find Talia in the east garden an hour later.

For one unguarded second before either of them notices me, I watch her laugh at something Lorelei has said, head tipped back, easy and unhurried.

My first instinct is to assess it.

That is probably its own problem.

Lorelei says something else — I don’t catch it, don’t need to — and Talia’s hand goes to her arm, brief and warm, the exact gesture a real friend makes without thinking about it. Lorelei leans into the touch like she trusts it.

That was the point originally.

Not the trust itself. The appearance of it.

I paid Talia to stay close to Ash, to redirect where necessary, to make observation resemble familiarity well enough that nobody questioned her presence. Lorelei was never part of the arrangement.

And yet here she is.

Lorelei doesn’t trust easily. I’ve watched her test every hand before she lets it near her, and somehow Talia has become one she no longer thinks to test.

I dislike how difficult it is to tell which parts of that I paid for and which parts grew after the money stopped mattering.

More than that, I dislike that the distinction matters to me.

Talia spots me before Lorelei does, her posture changing by less than an inch, and I recognize it because I know her well enough to recognize almost everything.

Almost.

“Cassian.” Lorelei doesn’t look thrilled to see me, which is at least consistent. “Didn’t know this was a public garden.”

“It isn’t,” I say. “I live here.”

“Could’ve fooled me. You spend more time in your father’s study than you do in any room with windows.”

“The study has windows.”

“Windows he stands in front of so nobody else gets to use them. Not the same thing.”

I don’t have an answer that doesn’t concede the point, so I don’t offer one.

Talia watches us with an expression I can’t fully read anymore.

There was a time I believed I could.