Page 2 of Ignition Rites

“You look like you’ve had a night,” he says. No greeting. Very Cassian. His voice sits low in his chest, unbothered, like he’s reading a fact off a page rather than making conversation.

“You look like you got dressed for a funeral no one invited you to.”

The corner of his mouth doesn’t quite move, but something behind his eyes does. “Get in.”

I go to step past him into the car, and there’s a half-second where the space between us collapses smaller than it should, his shoulder inches from mine, his cologne — cedar, something darker underneath it, something that smells more like a garage than a bottle — close enough that I breathe it in before I can stop myself.

Heat climbs my neck, immediate and unwelcome, entirely uninvited by any part of me that gets a vote.

It’s the cold, I tell myself, folding into the passenger seat. It’s the fact that I’ve been sitting on concrete for forty minutes.

It is neither of those things, and the small, traitor part of my brain that’s already cataloguing the shape of his hands on the wheel knows it.

He doesn’t say anything else for a long stretch. Doesn’t put on music. Doesn’t ask what happened, why I’m out here alone at this hour, whether I’m okay — none of the questions a normal person who picks up a stranded girl asks. He just drives, one hand loose on the wheel, the other resting near the gearshift like it’s an extension of the car itself.

“You’re not going to interrogate me?” I ask, because the silence is getting unbearable.

“Should I?”

“Most people would.”

“I’m not most people.” He says it the way other people say I take my coffee black — flat fact, no performance in it at all, which somehow makes it land harder than if he’d tried to sound dangerous on purpose.

I study his profile in the passing streetlight. There’s a stillness to him that doesn’t read as calm so much as held — like something under pressure, contained — and I get the distinct, uncomfortable sense that its eventual release wouldn’t be gentle.

“You didn’t even ask where I live.”

“I know where you live.”

“That is not as reassuring as you seem to think it is.”

For the first time, something close to amusement moves across his face. “Noted.”

We take a turn I don’t recognize, away from the direction of home, and my pulse ticks up before my brain catches up to why.

“This isn’t the way to my apartment.”

“I know.”

Then — light, gold, spilling up over a rise in the road before I can ask again — a whole strip of asphalt lit like daylight, fencing strung with floodlights, the low collective growl of engines idling in formation like something breathing in its sleep. A crowd loose along the rail, restless, waiting. Somewhere past the noise, a banner snaps in the wind that I can’t feel from inside the car — a crest I don’t recognize, a shape I can’t quite parse in the half-second we’re in view of it.

“What is that?”

“Family business.” He doesn’t slow down. “You’ll understand more of it than you’d like to, eventually.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you get tonight.”

We leave it behind, and I catch myself turning to watch it shrink in the side mirror longer than I mean to.

He doesn’t speak again until we’re parked outside my building, engine off, silence pressing in around us thick enough to touch.

“Lorelei.”

Most people who know me well enough to shorten it call me Lo. My mother only pulls out all three syllables when I’m in trouble, but Cassian has never once used the nickname.

He has always called me Lorelei — two years of scattered family dinners, holidays, passing each other in hallways, and never once Lo.