Page 43 of Ignition Rites

“Just tired.”

Her eyes stay on me a little longer than the answer deserves, then drop to my plate, where I’ve barely touched anything.

“Come un poco, mija.”

The words are soft enough that they belong only to us, but Alistair still hears them.

“English, Carmen.” He doesn’t raise his voice, and he doesn’t have to.

My mother’s hand pauses beside her glass, and for one second I think she might say something. Instead she looks back at me.

“Eat something, sweetheart.”

English this time. Alistair returns to Talia like nothing happened, and something sour settles under my tongue, and I pick up my fork even though I’m not hungry.

Ash barely eats either, cutting his food into smaller and smaller pieces and rearranging them like eventually geometry might make them edible, while Talia finishes nearly everything on her plate and talks easily to my mother about a designer I’ve never heard of. My own appetite isn’t doing much better, and I’ve started noticing too much about him lately: where his hands are, when his jaw tightens, how quickly he looks away from me. Tonight his gaze finds me, catches, and disappears, over and over.

Apparently word travels exactly as fast as Rafe promised it would.

“So,” Talia says during a lull, looking between Rafe and me, “I heard there was some excitement at Saturday’s race.”

Ash’s fork stops. “Talia.”

“What?” She looks genuinely innocent. “I’m new. I’m making conversation.”

“That’s not conversation.”

“It became conversation the second half the circuit started talking about it.”

Rafe leans back in his chair. “You’ve been here twenty minutes and already chose violence.”

“I was told dinner needed help.”

“Whoever told you that was trying to get us all killed.”

Talia smiles into her glass. “Maybe I like a challenge.”

There’s something under the exchange that I can’t quite place, not malice, more like she’s pressing lightly at the edge of something to see who reacts. Ash does, and Rafe does too, though differently, his eyes moving from Talia to Ash and then to the space between their hands on the table. I don’t know what that means yet. I’m beginning to suspect everybody else does.

“I heard it was quite public,” Talia adds.

“Extremely,” Rafe says.

“Subtlety isn’t really his thing,” I say.

“That hurts.”

“You kissed me in front of half the circuit.”

“I said it hurts. I didn’t say you were wrong.”

Talia laughs, and Ash does not. I catch his eye across the table, and this time he holds it, and my stomach knots.

Alistair is watching all of us with the quiet satisfaction of a man collecting confirmation.

“Family dinners,” my mother says too brightly, reaching for her wine. “Never a dull moment.”

“That’s one way to put it.”