Page 19 of Ignition Rites

For half a second, every warning I’ve ever been given flashes through my head. I should stop him. I know I should.

I tighten my legs around his waist instead.

He grunts and comes inside me.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Dirty little girl. That’s right, take my cum.”

The words hit almost as hard as the pulse of him inside me, and I let myself have the moment before consequences start asking for their turn.

His thrusts slow until he finally stills and releases my throat.

The thought of the mark his hand might leave there sends one last shiver through me, and I clench around him again.

We catch our breaths for a moment, his hands gliding up and down my body like he’s trying to memorize me.

I fix my bra and push myself upright on the workbench. He reaches for a clean work rag, and a car roaring in the distance pulls my attention toward the wall while he cleans between my thighs. The first touch makes me twitch, oversensitive enough that he slows without being asked.

When he tosses the rag aside, I pull my crop top back on and tug my skirt into place, moving too quickly. My mask slips loose and drops beside the workbench.

I don’t pick it up.

When I look up, Cassian hooks a finger beneath the edge of his own mask and pulls it away, setting it on the workbench beside mine, with no ceremony and no pretending it slipped. Just a choice.

The low gold light catches the face I confirmed the second his ring touched my jaw.

Cassian.

I don’t say his name.

He doesn’t say mine.

Outside, the crowd roars again — someone’s won, someone’s lost, the night rolling forward without either of us in it — and I think I should feel shame.

I don’t. I feel found, and that terrifies me more than anything else that happened in this room tonight.

Chapter eight

Of Pulpits, Penance, and Punishments

Cassian

The chapel is the one room in this house Alistair has never once set foot in, and I’ve never asked why, because I don’t want to know if the answer is reverence or contempt. Some questions are safer left as architecture.

I come here still dressed from the circuit, mask gone, jacket open, her scent still on my hands like something I haven’t earned the right to wash off yet.

The altar isn’t consecrated by anyone but me. No priest blessed this room. No congregation has ever knelt here but the one that matters — which is to say, no one but me, on nights exactly like this one, when the distance between what I believe and what I want collapses down to something I can’t hold apart anymore.

I kneel anyway. Old habit. Older than doctrine, if I’m honest, which I try to be here if nowhere else.

Lorelei.

I press my palm flat against the stone of the altar, cold under my hand, and I try to pray the way I was taught. Forgive the want. Sanctify the want. Make the want into something with a purpose larger than itself.

It doesn’t work tonight. It hasn’t worked for longer than I want to admit.

Memory comes back without order: black lace dragged beneath my hands, my teeth against her neck, the shiver that moved through her when I touched her, the sounds she made when she stopped trying to contain them.

I reach into my back pocket and close my hand around her panties.