Page 68 of Redline Communion

Lo: also your sweater is mine now, legally, I checked

I laugh out loud in an empty garage.

Me: what happened to the sweater rule

Her answer comes back immediately.

Lo: there is no sweater rule. there was never a rule. this is a lawless household

I sit there grinning at my phone longer than the joke deserves. The tightness that has been sitting in my chest since the villa loosens enough for me to breathe around it.

This part of her doesn’t fit anywhere on Dominic’s forms. Burned dinner, stolen clothes, bad jokes about imaginary property law. He can turn cocaine into leverage and grief into a question about compliance, but there isn’t much he can do with a ruined pan and a sweater she has decided belongs to her.

Whatever else they get to watch, they don’t get this.

I open the laptop again. The report is exactly where I left it, waiting for me to decide whether the lie counts if it never leaves the screen.

I submit it.

My phone buzzes less than a minute later.

Dominic: Received.

Two words. No questions about the gap between the gathering and her safe return, no request for the names of the people present or the reason Kiwi called me after midnight. Whatever system takes the report next has accepted the version I gave it.

I look back at Lorelei’s messages. I can tell myself the missing lines protect her, and they do. They also keep me from writing that I knew she was high and went down that hallway with her anyway.

Both are true.

I only like one of them.

Lorelei never asked me to redact her life. She doesn’t even know there is a report, much less that I’ve appointed myself the person who decides which parts of her belong to Dominic and which ones she gets to keep.

I put the phone away and go back to the bike. The rear chain was aligned before Dominic walked in, but I loosen it and start over.

Twenty minutes later, I’m still adjusting something that was right the first time.

Chapter sixteen

Too Many Hands

Lorelei

I’ve been trying to take my makeup off for twenty minutes.

The makeup isn’t the problem. Every time I lift the cotton pad toward my face, I catch sight of my phone on the bed, put the pad down, and read the same four threads without answering any of them.

Rafe: you good? you went quiet

Ash: drove past your building. didn’t stop. just wanted you to know I thought about it

Cassian hasn’t sent anything. He never texts first. The last message in our thread is mine from three days ago, and I haven’t reopened it because I don’t remember exactly what I said and would prefer to continue living that way.

Nico: I meant what I said about the questions. Ask me one sometime. I’ll answer honestly, which is rarer than you’d think.

I set the phone facedown on my comforter and pick up the cotton pad again. One eye is still fully done, and the other has a gray smear beneath it. I look like a before-and-after picture where neither side recommends the product.

I’m sober tonight, and that matters more than it should. There’s no flower fog to blame and no coke making every thought move too fast to catch, just me, my own pulse, and a feeling that has been building for days without giving me a chemical excuse to hand it off to.