Page 59 of Redline Communion

I look down at my fingers. They’re clean, obviously — three days have passed. I flex them anyway. The pressure disappears.

“What the fuck?”

Nobody answers.

I sit on the edge of my bed. There’s a whole stretch of the Offering I can’t account for. I know that now — not because I suddenly remember what belongs there, but because I can finally see the edges.

I remember Rafe. I remember Cassian. I remember sex, and the flower making the room soft while the coke kept every voice sharp. I remember wanting things I’d spent weeks refusing to name. I remember pleasure.

Then pieces are simply gone.

Afterward, I remember Helena’s folder. I think. Maybe. Cream stock under candlelight, Cassian signing something — or maybe I’m borrowing that from every other folder this family has shoved into my life. I press my palms against my eyes. Nothing useful comes.

The worst part is that I know my brain can remember. It just keeps choosing the wrong things — Rafe saying Little Birdy, Cassian looking at my mouth, his hand at my waist, Rafe steadying me, my own body responding while half the room watched. All of it passed whatever fucked-up quality-control system runs my memory. Whatever happened between those things didn’t.

I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling.

Marcus is dead. That fact is real now. I don’t have to guess anymore. Whatever happened after the Reaping ended with his family grieving, him offering himself for them, and the house taking the bargain without keeping its side.

I still don’t know how. Nobody said.

That should be enough to make me furious. Instead, my brain keeps drifting back to the Offering — Cassian’s mouth, Rafe’s hands, the way the room moved around us.

I roll onto my side hard enough to make the mattress complain.

“Stop.”

Nothing stops.

The memory of being wanted is easier to access than the memory of whatever else happened to me that night. I hate that most.

I consider asking someone. Carmen first — she’ll tell me she doesn’t have an answer that won’t terrify me. Cassian will tell me it isn’t the time, or that the details wouldn’t change the outcome, or some other sentence polished enough to survive being engraved on a mausoleum. Rafe might answer, and that possibility is somehow worse — because if I ask him what I forgot and his face changes before he speaks, I’ll know there’s something to remember. Alistair isn’t an option at all; he’d explain the gaps as mercy and then make me feel ungrateful for having them.

So I don’t ask.

Maybe that’s cowardice. Maybe I’m finally learning from everyone else in this house and deciding ignorance counts as protection when I’m the one choosing it.

I stay in my room until evening. The memories keep coming. None of them are Marcus.

That should make me feel better. It doesn’t. If anything, it makes the empty parts louder.

What happened in those minutes? Why can I remember Cassian’s mouth but not how I got from one side of the room to the other? Why do I remember Rafe holding me up? Was I that high? Did I pass out? Did I say something humiliating? Did they?

There are entire sections of my own night being kept from me by my own head.

Apparently the family has competition.

By eleven, I’m tired of sitting inside it. I find Talia a little after midnight. She opens her door, takes one look at my face, and steps aside.

“Bad day?”

“Bad everything.”

She locks the door behind me. I sit on the edge of her bed while she opens the top drawer of her dresser — the small mirror beneath a stack of shirts, the baggie tucked inside a jewelry box with a broken hinge. Her hands move quickly. She cuts two lines. One is longer.

“Do you want to talk first?”

“No.”