Page 66 of Redline Communion

I’m still catching my breath, staring at the pool nobody used all night. Cups and abandoned shoes surround it instead, and one of the underwater lights has burned out, leaving half the water blue and the other half black.

“Lark,” she says, trying the name more softly this time.

I look at her.

“That really stuck, you know. Everybody’s calling you that already.”

“Good.”

“You okay?”

“I’m Lark. Lark’s always okay.”

She studies me long enough to make the lie uncomfortable, then drops into the chair beside me.

“Somebody threw up in the downstairs fountain.”

“Classy.”

“They’re blaming the statue.”

“What did the statue do?”

“Looked judgmental.”

She laughs and keeps talking, and I let her. The sky above the pool turns gray-blue while the coke thins out enough for the edges of the night to start returning.

I can feel Marcus waiting underneath it, along with the annex, the cream folder, and Rafe’s pause before he followed me into that room.

None of it is gone.

It just can’t catch me while I’m moving this fast.

Chapter fifteen

Gaps in the Record

Rafe

The cursor blinks in the empty field for longer than it should.

I have the villa laid out in my head as clean as a timeline. The paddock, the service road, the back rooms of the house, Kiwi’s name lighting up my phone at 12:14 a.m. I could account for every hour if I wanted to. Months of Dominic’s training have made sure of that.

His system wants all of it.

I write the first true line.

Subject attended private circuit gathering with university associates.

True. Clean. The kind of sentence that survives an audit without telling anyone what the night actually looked like.

I try another.

Subject appeared emotionally distressed.

I stare at it. It’s accurate, but Dominic and Alistair don’t care that she’s hurting. They care whether the hurt makes her easier to manage, harder to predict, or useful to somebody who reaches her before they do. I delete it and type the opposite.

No notable change in routine.