Page 1 of Ignition Rites

Chapter one

Stop Me

Lorelei

Loss. The common theme of tonight.

The first thing I lose is my phone battery. The second thing I lose is my sanity. The third thing I lose is the illusion that I know how to take care of myself.

So much for an unforgettable night.

I’m sitting on the curb outside a house party three streets over from where I told my mother I’d be, mascara doing something I don’t want to look at through my front camera even if I had the battery to check, and my last text to my ride read 5 min about forty minutes ago.

Somebody inside is playing music loud enough that I can feel the bassline in the concrete under me. I don’t go back in. Whatever’s happening in there stopped being fun around the time a girl I don’t know started crying in the bathroom line and nobody but me seemed to notice.

I borrow a phone from a stranger — a guy with kind eyes and a fraternity-letter tattoo, which should tell you everything about my judgment tonight — and call the one number I still have memorized.

“Mom?”

“Mija?” Carmen’s voice comes through bright, distracted, threaded with the kind of laughter that means she’s somewhere with too many people and not enough air. “Whose phone is this?”

“Long story. Can somebody come get me?”

A pause. I can hear her calculating — not whether to help me, never that, but how, filtered through a version of herself that’s been learning for two years now to ask permission for things that used to just be hers to decide.

“I’m at the benefit with Alistair. I can’t leave, but — “ Another pause, muffled, like she’s turned to ask someone something with her hand half over the receiver. “Ash is working late at the shop. But Cassian’s close. I’ll send Cassian.”

My stomach does something complicated at that name — not fear, exactly, but something with poorer manners, something that sits up when it’s called.

I’ve met Cassian enough times over the last two years to know what he looks like across a Thanksgiving table or standing beside Alistair at some family thing I wanted no part of. We’ve just never had much reason to speak. He keeps his distance, and I’ve been perfectly happy to let him.

Apparently tonight we’re breaking tradition.

“Fine,” I say. “Tell him to hurry.”

“Mija.”

“What?”

“Stay where you are.”

I roll my eyes even though she can’t see me. “Ma, I’m sitting on a curb.”

“That has never stopped you from finding trouble.”

Fair.

She does that thing she’s started doing lately, the too-warm sign-off, like she’s performing comfort for someone standing just out of frame. “You’re safe now, mija. Cassian will take care of you.”

The word now sits wrong in my ear the whole time I wait.

I don’t wait long because he doesn’t pull up so much as arrive — headlights cutting the dark half a block early, engine so quiet at low speed it barely registers as sound, more like a held breath rolling toward me. Matte black, low, the kind of car built by people who think driving fast should look effortless, which is its own kind of arrogance.

I’m on my feet before he’s fully stopped.

He doesn’t get out right away. Just sits there a second, engine ticking, looking at me through the windshield like he’s confirming something he already suspected. Then the door opens, unhurried, and he unfolds out of the car in a way that makes the whole street feel smaller.

Black on black. Sleeves shoved up like he came straight from somewhere that required his hands. A ring on his right hand catching the streetlight — silver, plain, the kind of plain that costs more than ornate ever could.