Page 52 of Redline Communion

Around us, the last of the chanting has disappeared completely. Moans, breath, bodies moving against bodies, the slick sounds of sex filling the circular room until worship and fucking become impossible to separate.

Rafe’s rhythm stutters.

“Fuck, Lo.”

His hand slides between us, thumb finding my clit.

The pressure knocks another sound out of me.

I’m already too sensitive from Cassian’s fingers, the flower, the oil, Rafe filling me over and over, and now every sensation seems to arrive twice.

“Come on, Little Birdy,” he says against my ear. “Come for me.”

I do.

The orgasm tears through me hard enough to arch my back from the altar, every muscle locking around him while my voice breaks somewhere between his name and a cry.

Rafe groans, hips losing their rhythm.

Then he comes inside me.

Cheers erupt around us.

For a second I can’t tell whether I’m shaking from the orgasm or the fact that people are applauding it.

Probably both.

Rafe pulls out slowly, breathing hard, and before I can decide whether I need a minute, Cassian’s hands are already on me.

He rolls me onto my stomach and draws my hips upward.

“My turn.”

I should be spent. Maybe under any normal circumstances I would be.

Nothing about this is normal.

The coke is still racing beneath my skin. The flower has turned every touch into something delayed and doubled. Fear keeps sharpening sensations that should already be fading, and somewhere inside all of it my body still wants more even while another part of me is trying to understand where the wanting ends and everything else begins.

Cassian’s hand slides over my hip.

And through all of it, one thought keeps returning, bright and bitter enough that even the drugs can’t soften it.

Ash isn’t here.

Chapter twelve

The Offering, Pt. II

Cassian

Her hand is smaller than I remember.

A strange detail to keep from a rite I have spent most of my life learning to conduct, but memory rarely respects hierarchy. I remember the warmth of her fingers in mine, the looseness of them after the flower, the way she looked at my uncovered face as though seeing me beneath the mask had changed something she was not prepared for. I registered it as trust because trust was the most convenient word available.

Then she chose Rafe.

There is no second reading of that sentence, and I know because I spent the entirety of his claim looking for one. She disrupted the prescribed order to say it, and my father absorbed the rebellion before the witnesses had time to decide whether they had seen one: one sentence from him, and her refusal became sanctioned variation.