Page 32 of Redline Communion

She hands it over without ceremony, the way she hands over everything: competent, unbothered, entirely uninterested in what any particular document might cost the person receiving it.

I take it into the empty dining room.

The folder is thinner than I expected. A single sheet of lineage documentation cross-referenced against branch records going back further than I have context for. A physical assessment written in language clinical enough to turn Lorelei into measurements. The final page contains the claimant list.

I read the active names.

Beneath them is another, struck through in red ink so fresh it is barely dry.

Vale, Asher.

I stare at it longer than necessary.

Before I reached the garage, someone had already updated the page to reflect a fact Ash did not yet know.

That is the part I cannot stop looking at.

He was still standing beside a workbench believing the Offering was something he might choose to participate in while, somewhere else in the house, a pen had already settled the matter for him.

Lorelei’s name remains at the top of the page, her lineage beneath it, her body reduced to measurements and observations. Ash has become one red line below hers.

A few hours ago he told me paperwork has never meant anything real to the people actually living inside it.

I wanted to disagree.

Sitting here, I’m less certain why.

I close the folder and leave both hands resting on top of it.

The house does not need anyone’s understanding to keep moving.

I have always known that.

Today is the first time I can remember resenting it.

Chapter nine

French Exit

Lorelei

Somewhere in the weeks since Marcus disappeared, the Offering stopped being a threat nobody would explain and became a date everyone assumes I know.

Helena has written it on three calendars. On one of them, a second date sits circled in red farther out, with no label at all. Odette has scheduled another fitting. Carmen keeps finding reasons to be elsewhere whenever anybody mentions it.

I’m looking for Rafe because he promised to drive me back to campus and is now twelve minutes late, which is just long enough to be irritating without being long enough to justify the speech I’m preparing.

I find a stranger instead.

He’s in the east sitting room, the one nobody uses because the light is wrong for reading and the fireplace has never once been lit in the entire time I’ve lived here. He stands at the window with his back to the door, hands in his pockets, looking out at the garden like he’s deciding whether it was worth crossing an ocean to see.

“You’re not Rafe.”

Possibly the least intelligent thing I could have opened with.

He turns, and he has Rafe’s eyes, which is what does it. The rest of him takes another second to arrive: older than I expected, broader through the shoulders than the photograph I half remember, dressed like somebody collected him directly from an airport lounge and forgot to let him change. French sits neatly around his vowels when he speaks, careful enough that I wonder whether it always sounds that way or only when he wants it to.

“No,” he says. “Though we do share a father. Apparently not a sense of punctuality.”