Page 8 of Ignition Rites

I cross the kitchen, nudge him half a step to the side without asking permission, and press the one button he apparently hasn’t tried, the large obvious one labeled BREW in letters he could’ve read from across the room.

The machine hisses to life.

Cassian stares at it like it’s personally betrayed him.

“That was the button,” he says, flat.

“That was the button.”

“I pressed several buttons.”

“You pressed the wrong several buttons.”

He looks from the machine to me, and for once there’s none of the controlled, impossible-to-read thing he usually does. He just looks like a man realizing he’s been mildly and harmlessly outsmarted by a coffee maker and a woman who hasn’t had enough caffeine to be gracious about it.

“This is humiliating,” he says.

I laugh before I can stop myself, real and surprised out of me. “A little.”

“I coordinate people who are significantly more difficult than this machine.”

“Apparently people come with better instructions.”

The corner of his mouth moves. It isn’t the restrained almost-smile I’m used to seeing from him, but something looser, closer to an actual laugh he hasn’t decided whether to allow.

“Thank you,” he says, and it sounds strange in his mouth, like a phrase he doesn’t get much practice with.

“Don’t mention it. Literally. I don’t think anyone would believe me if I told them Cassian Vale got beaten by a coffee maker.”

“I would deny it under oath.”

“I figured.”

He pours his coffee, and for a moment, standing in a kitchen that smells like burnt grounds and early morning, he doesn’t look like the Cassian who picked me up last night or the man everybody seems to lower their voice around.

He looks tired, a little embarrassed, and entirely, unglamorously human.

Then Helena’s footsteps sound in the hall. Alistair’s house manager has a talent for appearing exactly when something needs doing, correcting, or quietly reporting, and I watch Cassian straighten before she even reaches the doorway.

By the time she appears, whatever I caught him without has disappeared.

But I saw it.

And I don’t think he minds, exactly, that I did.

Chapter five

Saving Her Soul

Rafe

Dominic’s office smells like cedar and old paper, with the faint bite of whiskey underneath both. I’ve been standing outside the door for two full minutes before I knock, which is two minutes longer than I usually give myself for anything, long enough that I’ve counted the grain lines in the wood three separate times.

“Come in,” he says before I’ve even touched it. He always does that. Some fathers know their kids’ footsteps, but mine knows the exact pause before a hand becomes a fist against a door.

He’s behind his desk, sleeves rolled to the forearm, papers stacked in a way that isn’t neat so much as defended, nothing overlapping, like disorder is a language he’s decided not to speak anymore. He spent twenty years as Alistair’s right hand, which is why his office is in this house and why I grew up underfoot in it.

A glass of whiskey sits at his elbow, untouched long enough that the ice has gone flat and clear. He doesn’t look up right away, and when he finally does, he sets his pen down and studies me the way he studies everything, like he’s already three moves ahead of whatever I’m about to say.