Page 29 of Redline Communion

Cassian

Dominic’s monitors take up an entire wall of the security office, which nobody in this house calls a security office. Six feeds cycle through hallways and gardens, and the underground bay where the cars stay quiet during daylight hours. I’ve been staring at them long enough that the footage has started to blur into something closer to weather than surveillance.

“Anything?” Dominic says.

He has been asking every fifteen minutes for the last hour, the way a man checks a pot he already knows isn’t boiling yet.

“Nothing new. Rafe’s material from last week is still the most recent upload.”

“He’s slow.”

“He’s careful. There’s a difference.”

Dominic makes a sound that isn’t quite agreement. He doesn’t trust careful. He has told me as much more than once. Careful is what a man calls himself right before he starts hiding something, and I’ve never fully decided whether Dominic believes that or simply finds it useful to say around people he expects to report to him.

I pull up Rafe’s last batch anyway, more out of habit than expectation.

Lorelei in the garage, laughing at something off-frame. Lorelei and Ash in the kitchen doorway, an entire estrangement rendered as a few seconds of two people refusing to look at each other. The footage catches none of what mattered in that exchange and all of what didn’t.

I minimize it before I have to watch myself sitting at that kitchen counter again with coffee going cold and reassurance I knew was inadequate while I was offering it.

I open the Offering file instead.

Alistair wants the rite’s requirements checked against the household’s current standing before the date is finalized. Most of it is language I already know, names matched against categories I’ve reviewed often enough that the work is usually mechanical.

Ash’s name appears on the eligibility list.

It should take seconds to confirm.

I check anyway because checking is what I do. Alistair trained that instinct into me so early that it rarely waits for permission anymore.

This time the answer is wrong.

I read the clause twice before I accept what it says.

A claim requires the claimant to hold no formal, unresolved attachment recognized by the household at the time of the rite.

Ash’s arrangement with Talia exists on paper as exactly that.

I arranged it. I paid for it. Formal recognition was necessary because anything less would have looked temporary, and temporary would never have been convincing enough to distract Ash for long. Nobody dissolved the arrangement afterward because nobody besides Dominic, Talia, and me understood that it had been created for any reason other than the one written down.

Now the same paperwork is doing exactly what it says it should.

Ash is ineligible.

My hand hovers over the field where I’m supposed to mark the finding.

I never intended this part.

The arrangement was meant to redirect Ash, not exclude him from anything that came after. At the time, the distinction seemed obvious enough that I never considered whether the house would care about it later.

It doesn’t.

Intent has no column.

“Problem?” Dominic asks.

He is watching me instead of the monitors now.