Page 18 of Redline Communion

“Bold.” Her mouth curves. “I like it.”

“You like everything. You flirted with the bartender, the machine guy, and I’m pretty sure the jukebox.”

“The jukebox started it.” She hooks one finger loosely in the collar of my shirt, doesn’t pull, just leaves it there. “But I don’t mean it with them the way I mean it with you.”

“How do you mean it with me?”

“Come here and find out.”

Rafe’s name surfaces, and I push it back down before it can bring the rest of the house with it.

Then I go.

Her mouth is soft and certain and tastes like the cheap well vodka we’ve both been drinking too much of. For a moment there’s nothing in my head at all — no folder, no dress code, no Offering — just somebody wanting me without an agenda attached. Her hand slides along my jaw and down, careful and unhurried, and I lean into her touch, my fingers curling into the front of her shirt while the noise from the bar blurs into something distant.

It is easy in a way almost nothing has been lately, and that might be why it scares me.

Zaconia pulls back slightly, forehead resting against mine, both of us breathing harder now, and for one unguarded second the joke falls away and she looks like she wants this to mean something. Then she laughs before I can name what I saw and steps back, grin already returning, the performance sliding neatly into place.

“Okay,” she says, turning toward the noise. “Ten out of ten, would make out with you again, but Kiwi’s about to lose a truck-song fight and I refuse to miss it.”

She’s gone before I can decide whether I’m relieved or disappointed that she laughed first. I follow her back into the noise anyway, warm and buzzing and lighter than I’ve felt in days. Maybe I should figure out what that kiss means, or think about Rafe, or ask myself why being wanted without explanation felt like such a relief.

Not tonight. Tonight I get one thing I don’t have to understand, and I use it on her.

Chapter five

The Leash He Calls Home

Rafe

Dominic keeps a study at the house for appearances, but this is the office he actually works from. No chapel-adjacent hush, no doctrine hanging in the air like incense, just floor-to-ceiling glass thirty stories up, Marazul’s skyline doing its best impression of a normal city, and the low hum of a trading floor two doors down that never quite stops even after hours.

He built this place from nothing, or that’s the story he tells when he wants to remind somebody what he’s capable of. I’ve never checked if it’s true. Doesn’t matter either way. He acts like it is, and that’s usually enough.

He didn’t call me in here to talk about money.

“Sit,” he says, not looking up from his monitor.

“I’ve got somewhere to be.”

“You’ve got nowhere that matters more than this.” Now he looks up. “Sit, Rafael.”

Nobody calls me that except him, and only when he wants me small. I sit.

He turns the monitor slightly, like he’s about to show me something, then doesn’t. He just leaves his hand resting on the edge of it, patient, the way he does everything.

“Cassian tells me the reporting’s gotten thin.”

“The reporting’s been fine.”

“The reporting’s been you telling me what I already know. She went to class. She came home. Nothing to note.” His voice stays flat, no accusation in it yet, which is worse. “That’s not reporting. That’s a boy protecting a girl he’s supposed to be watching.”

“I am watching her.”

“Watching isn’t documenting.”

I know where this is going before he says the rest, and I hate that I know it. Hate the part of me already calculating how bad it’s about to get.