Page 6 of Redline Communion

I can’t tell whether he’s seen the folder. I can’t tell whether he put it there. I can’t tell whether the whole conversation we just had was meant to keep me occupied until I noticed it for myself.

I set the mug down carefully.

“Cassian.”

“Yes?”

I keep my eyes on the folder.

“What happens when I’ve learned enough?”

Cassian doesn’t look at me. If he has clocked that I noticed it, he has decided I don’t get to ask him about that either.

The silence between us stretches before he finally says, “You’ll find out.”

Not a warning.

Not an answer either.

I rinse the mug and set it down. I don’t look at the folder again, though I feel it the whole time the way you feel someone hiding in a room they don’t want you to know they’re in.

Whatever’s coming isn’t going to knock first.

It’s already in the house, waiting for me to notice.

Chapter two

Dead Weight

Ash

Three days since the kitchen, and I still haven’t figured out how to stand in a doorway like a normal person.

I wasn’t looking for them. I want that on record somewhere, even if it’s only for myself. I came out to the garage because I couldn’t sit in my own room another hour, and then I was standing here, and now I can’t make myself leave, which is its own kind of admission I don’t have the stomach to examine yet.

Rafe’s got some stripped-down bike up on the lift, half a frame, no tank, the kind of build he does when his hands need something to do more than his brain needs a plan. He hasn’t said one word about whatever was behind that service-corridor door, and the bike is the closest thing to an answer I’m going to get.

Lorelei’s on the workbench beside him in a shirt that’s obviously his — too big, collar gone soft — legs swinging, the crescents her nails left in her palms still pink where she’s braced them against the edge. She says something. He laughs, reaches over without looking, and tugs the hem down over her thigh where it’s ridden up, easy and unthinking, already done before either of them could’ve called it a decision.

I tell myself it’s not about the shirt. Repeating it doesn’t make it any truer.

She hasn’t said six words to me since the kitchen. I know because I counted, actual fingers, actual tally, like a man keeping stats on his own humiliation. I hate that I know it, and I hate more that some sick part of me needed to know the exact shape of how little room I take up right now.

Rafe clocks me before she does. Doesn’t stop what he’s doing.

“Vale. You gonna stand there or hand me a nine-sixteenths?”

She doesn’t look over. Keeps her eyes on the frame, on his hands, on anything that isn’t me.

The dismissal lands slow and ugly.

“I’m good.”

It comes out wrong, flat in a way that isn’t casual, and I watch Rafe hear the difference even if she doesn’t.

“Suit yourself.”

I should go find something to hit that isn’t a person and be the better version of myself for once. Instead I stay and watch his hand settle at the small of her back when he shifts her out of the way of a dropped tool. She leans into it before she’s even decided to, and the two of them take up the same six feet of space like it never had to be earned.