Page 4 of Redline Communion

I used to remember it catching the streetlight the night he picked me up, how carefully he opened the car door, how he said my name like it belonged to him more than it belonged to me.

Now I’ve seen its twin flash on Alistair’s hand beneath the floodlights.

The memory doesn’t stay warm anymore. It turns into a question about who put that ring on Cassian’s hand, how long he has worn it, and what it means when both father and son carry the same piece of silver into rooms where everybody else is expected to obey.

Then I remember the private box.

Cassian’s mouth at my throat. His hand around my neck. The way neither of us said what we already knew.

That memory doesn’t disappear because the ring means something uglier now.

Apparently my brain is committed to making this difficult.

He’s close enough that I could count the individual threads catching the light on his sleeve if I were the kind of unhinged person who counted threads, which — apparently, this morning — I am.

Then it hits me, with real horror, that I’ve spent more of the last few minutes on the topography of his forearm than I have on Marcus, Helena’s folder, or the ten thousand more urgent things a person is supposed to be thinking about the morning after watching a boy disappear in the dark.

I’m with Rafe.

Whatever with means in this house, it’s real enough that I went to sleep wanting him beside me and he wasn’t there because he went through a door I chose to stay outside of.

I still don’t know what he saw.

And here I am cataloguing another man’s hands around a mug like it’s a personality trait I’ve been assigned to memorize for a test nobody warned me about.

I hate myself a little.

Not enough to look away.

Before I can decide whether that says something terrible about me, a shadow falls across the doorway.

Ash stops when he sees us.

His hair looks like he’s run both hands through it too many times, and there’s dark stubble along his jaw. He’s wearing yesterday’s shirt, or one close enough that I can’t tell the difference.

His gaze goes to my hands first, then the coffee, then Cassian.

He doesn’t come in. He leans against the frame instead, looking like sleep has been avoiding him the same way it’s been avoiding me.

“Lo.”

“Ash.”

Yesterday, four days of avoiding each other finally ended in a service corridor while somebody’s mother begged behind a door. I told him he didn’t get to decide what I was allowed to see.

He let go.

Then he asked me not to go in.

I stayed.

Now all of that sits between the two syllables we give each other across the kitchen.

“Can we talk?” he asks.

Quietly.

Almost, infuriatingly, like he’s asking permission instead of demanding it.