Page 42 of Ignition Rites

“Do you?”

I could make a joke.

For once, I don’t.

“Yeah.”

Ash studies me another second, then turns and walks back toward the crowd.

Chapter twelve

Pretty Things That Starve

Lorelei

Nobody tells me Ash has a girlfriend now. I find out the way I find out everything in this house, by walking into a room already in progress and doing the math myself.

Dinner’s in the formal room tonight, the one with the too-long table and the chandelier that makes everyone look slightly more expensive than they actually are. I’m the last one in, which means I get the full tableau at once: Alistair at the head, my mother beside him with her company smile already on, Cassian across from an empty chair, Rafe two seats down looking like he’d rather be literally anywhere else, and Ash sitting next to a girl I’ve never seen before, his hand resting near hers on the table, near and not touching, practiced in a way I recognize immediately.

I know exactly what practiced looks like now. I’ve been doing it myself for two years.

“Lorelei,” Alistair says, like he’s been waiting for this moment. “This is Talia. Ash’s girlfriend.”

The word lands strange, and not because I care. I tell myself I don’t care, and mostly believe it. It’s Ash’s face that throws me: something tightens behind his eyes when Alistair says girlfriend, a reaction too fast to belong to a man hearing the correct name for something.

Talia turns toward me with a smile that seems genuinely warm. She’s dark-skinned, her coils swept up in a way that looks effortless until I notice the gold threaded through them, and everything about her outfit says she understood exactly what kind of dinner this was and refused to let the room dress her instead.

“Hi,” she says. “Sorry. Walking into a full family dinner is a lot, and apparently meeting the family while everyone’s holding cutlery makes it worse.”

“You get used to it,” I say, sliding into the empty chair. “Or you don’t, and you just get better at hiding that you haven’t.”

Talia laughs. “I like her.”

“Everybody likes Lo,” Rafe says. “It’s becoming a serious problem.”

He doesn’t quite look at me when he says it, and Ash notices anyway, and so do I. For half a second Rafe’s attention drops to Ash’s hand beside Talia’s, something passing over his face before he reaches for his water and makes it disappear.

Nobody explains that. Nobody explains anything at this table without being cornered into it first.

Dinner starts the way it always does — Helena’s staff moving in rehearsed silence, my mother filling gaps in conversation with the skill of a woman who’s had years of practice keeping rooms from going quiet.

Alistair asks Talia polite, pointed questions about her family, her studies, where she sees herself after graduation. Normal questions if you ignore how efficiently he turns every answer into a measure of usefulness.

Talia handles him beautifully, answering without overexplaining and smiling without looking eager, and somehow telling him enough without handing over anything that feels important. Ash watches her through one answer about her family’s business, his fork stalled halfway to his plate, and I notice. Of course I notice.

“So how’d you two meet?” I ask, mostly to see what happens.

“Through a mutual friend,” Talia says easily. “Small world, this circle.”

“Smaller than you’d think,” Ash says, and there’s an edge under it.

Talia hears it. I know she does because she turns her wineglass once between her fingers and smiles at him like she’s decided not to acknowledge the warning.

Across the table, Cassian hasn’t said much, and I’ve been trying not to look at him, which gets harder when he reaches for his glass and silver flashes on his right hand. For one ugly second the dining room disappears: gold light, a mask abandoned on a workbench, that same ring against my skin, his face when I finally knew exactly who had been behind it. My body remembers before I can tell it not to. Heat climbs the back of my neck, and when I look up, Cassian is already watching me.

The car was weeks ago. The box was not. That’s the problem.

“You’re quiet tonight,” my mother says under the general table noise.