Page 58 of Redline Communion

The flashes come at three in the morning. In the shower. Once while I’m brushing my teeth, which feels particularly rude. I’m staring at myself in the mirror with toothpaste drying at the corner of my mouth when Cassian’s thumb appears against my jaw so clearly that my skin tingles where I remember him touching me. Then Rafe’s hand closes behind my neck, warm and firm, and for half a second I’m back beneath the candles. The worst part is that the memory doesn’t frighten me. My stomach flips because I’m turned on.

I spit toothpaste into the sink hard enough to splatter the faucet.

“Jesus Christ.”

My reflection looks as irritated with me as I feel.

That’s the part nobody tells you about trauma, apparently. Sometimes your brain hands you tits and candlelight instead of useful information.

I rinse my mouth. The feeling that something is missing stays.

I hear the rest by accident, the way I hear everything that matters in this house.

Helena is in the linen room off the east hall, the door open just enough for her voice to carry. She’s talking to one of the women from my dress fitting — the same one who went quiet when I asked about Marcus, before anybody had decided what version of his disappearance I was allowed to know.

I’m walking past when I hear his name.

I stop.

“—surprised all of us,” Helena says. “Nobody expected him to offer himself like that. He thought it might spare the family the worst of it.”

The woman shakes open a sheet. Fabric snaps through the room.

“Did it?”

“Not him. Not them. They were sent to France anyway. Whole family relocated within the week.”

“So it bought him nothing.”

“No.”

More folding.

That’s it. No lowered voices, no grief, just linen being stacked while they discuss the end of a person.

“Waste, really,” the woman says. “Boy had talent on the circuit.”

“Fastest qualifying time his branch ever produced.”

“Mm. Shame.”

I grip the edge of the doorframe. Neither of them notices.

He offered himself. I’d had that wrong too. Marcus wasn’t taken or caught; he made a trade — his life for his family — and the house took his life, sent them away anyway, then carried on long enough for Helena to discuss the whole thing while matching pillowcases.

Marcus was a good racer. That’s the entire eulogy this house has bothered to write for a boy who gave them everything they asked for and still couldn’t buy his mother a week.

I step away before they see me. Neither calls after me.

By the time I reach the stairs, my chest feels too tight. Not grief exactly — not only grief.

Offered himself. The phrase keeps catching against the Offering even though there’s no reason it should. Everything in this family is offering, claiming, giving, receiving; they’ve never met a terrible thing they couldn’t improve with ceremonial vocabulary. Halfway up the stairs, Alistair’s voice flickers through my head with the beginning of a sentence — What is offered— but the rest refuses to come. I grip the banister and remind myself that he spoke for most of the night. Any one of those sentences could have contained the word. I could be manufacturing the connection because Helena just used the same language. It is a perfectly reasonable explanation, which would be more useful if repeating it made me feel any better.

By the time I reach my room, another flash has already taken over — Rafe beneath my hands, my mouth against Cassian’s, someone’s fingers gripping mine tightly enough to hurt.

I stop. That one is different. I wait for the rest.

Nothing comes. Just pressure. My hand enclosed in somebody else’s. Then Cassian kissing me.