Page 53 of Redline Communion

“Then let the first claim be witnessed.”

So I witnessed it. I watched Rafe occupy the place assigned to me, delivered every response on time, and kept my face neutral while Lorelei confirmed, repeatedly and without ambiguity, that choosing him first had not been an accident. I told myself precedence was administrative, that both claims entered the same record and first and second meant nothing beyond choreography. That argument might have lasted longer if the second did not mean blood.

Rafe knows it too. His eyes find mine when my father closes the first section of the Book of Ashes, and for once there is nothing competitive in the look. His arm tightens around Lorelei before he catches himself, and she feels it.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

A poor lie. Even altered, she knows him well enough to hear it.

Alistair turns the page.

“Communion.”

The word reaches my body before it reaches the room. My palm remembers the weight of the blade, and my stomach recognizes the second measure of flower before Helena has crossed half the distance toward us. I had intended to go first, and that fact feels less like preference now.

Helena approaches with the cup, and Rafe says no before Lorelei has fully focused on it.

My father does not acknowledge him. “The first measure opens the vessel. The second carries her through the blood claim.”

Lorelei lifts her head from Rafe’s shoulder and looks at me. Her pupils are already too wide, but the suspicion inside them remains precise.

“Blood what?”

The flower does not take intelligence. It simply makes keeping hold of it more expensive.

Helena presents the cup to me, and I take it, which is enough to make Lorelei step backward. Rafe moves with her automatically, one hand staying at her waist while his gaze remains on mine.

“She’s had enough.”

“You know why it’s required.”

“I know what it does.”

So do I. The second measure is not intended to make her unconscious, since that would defeat the purpose. Communion requires participation, and the house simply prefers that participation soften around the edges, that memory arrive later and out of sequence, that the body remain easier to guide after the mind begins rejecting what it has been asked to survive. Mercy, my father calls it, and mercy is an extraordinarily flexible word in this family.

Lorelei looks from Rafe to me and understands enough to dislike what she sees.

“Cassian.”

I bring the cup closer, and she turns her head. My hand settles behind her neck, and the contact gives me a sudden, unwelcome memory of touching her there under entirely different circumstances: no chanting, no witnesses, no blood waiting beyond the next page. I almost lower the cup, but almost has never carried much weight in this house.

“Drink.”

Her eyes cut toward mine. “You’re getting very repetitive.”

The sarcasm is familiar enough that relief moves through me before I can prevent it. Then she takes the first swallow, and the second requires pressure from my hand. I feel the difference between the two, and I do it anyway.

By the time Helena retrieves the empty cup, Lorelei is working her tongue against the bitterness.

“You people make terrible cocktails.”

Rafe exhales through his nose, and I nearly answer, but the side door opens before I can.

Marcus Deering walks into the annex.

Lorelei goes still against Rafe. The house has prepared him carefully: clean clothes, trimmed hair, no restraints, no bruises, nothing the record would later be forced to explain. Entered voluntarily. The phrase will appear somewhere beneath his name before dawn.