Chapter Two
CHAPTER
Two
CASSANDRA RUNS UNTIL her lungs burn. Until she has to stop and retch in an alleyway, even though nothing comes up. Just a faint aftertaste of ink and blood, hard proof that Roth had tried to compel her.
He’s dead.
When Roth doesn’t come barrelling after her, a fraction of relief seeps through her.
But she feels watched, nevertheless, so she takes the long route home, slipping through winding streets and tucked-away alleys until the press of Roth’s fingers no longer haunts her skin.
Halfway there, she shivers; although the days are still warm, London’s nights are beginning to feel the bite of autumn.
Too late, she realises that her coat with her wallet and keys is still in Roth’s flat, but she can hardly go back for them now.
So—no keys, no wallet, and not one penny of her fee.
Then again, he was never going to pay her. If she’s honest, it’s lucky that’s all he wanted to do: extract information and cast her aside. In his shoes, she wouldn’t have let herself leave. Not without guaranteeing absolute silence.
It doesn’t take more than a well-placed shove to bust open the door to her flat, with its flimsy lock and varnished plywood.
The bang echoes in the corridor, but no one comes to investigate.
No one would. It’s been a long time since anyone put together the identities of Cass Holt, book thief and ink magic reader, with Cassandra Fairfax, Chiron’s oh-so promising, oh-so disgraced ex-protégé, banished from his doors forever.
But Roth had done it, weeks ago. He’d made it sound like it wasn’t a big deal, like it was just another quirky fact to add to her reputation. And she’d let herself believe him, even though there were reasons why she’d never connected the two.
Cassandra Fairfax. It’s been a long time since she’s heard her real name out loud.
She wonders how many people know the truth now. The booksellers and collectors, with their starving eye to acquire. What they would give. What they would take, for what they wanted.
The light flickers in her flat a few times before it sticks, giving Cassandra just enough to see by.
She was hungry before she left for Roth’s, but now she has no appetite—only an aching exhaustion.
But she forces herself to drag a bookshelf across her door, pinning it shut.
It’s not enough to stop someone, but it might give her a little warning.
Shivering, she clambers onto her couch, pulling her duvet around her shoulders.
Roth’s love for showmanship saved her, really. That, and the haphazard instincts she’s tried to hone over the past years. After all, he’s not the only person who’s tried to fuck her over—just the latest. And now that he knows who she is—was—she has no doubt he won’t be the last.
She puts her head in her hands and breathes deeply.
He’s dead.
It might be true. So what if it is? The Chiron she knew—the one who had been her mentor—died, as far as she’s concerned, the day she’d left his bookshop for good.
If he still slinks into her thoughts occasionally, it’s only ever as a ghost, rummaging through worn memories to portend a future that’s already happened.
And sure, maybe in her weaker moments, she lets herself remember all the things that have slipped away and all the things she no longer knows, so that her poltergeist more and more resembles a blurry, thumb-printed photograph with each passing year.
Roth had wanted to shock her with the news, and if it had been six months ago, the joke would be on him, as usual. Six months ago, it wouldn’t have made any difference to her—or at least, it wouldn’t have changed anything.
Except six months ago, you made the second-biggest fuck-up of your life, and too many of the wrong people paid attention.
Through her parted fingers, she glances at the letter on her kitchen table, where she’s let it sit for the last two days. Unable to open it, and unable to throw it away. The address is written in a hand that she knows like her own heartbeat: Chiron’s.
It’s been years; people forget all sorts of things in that span of time.
She might very well not remember where the bookshop is.
But she couldn’t convince Roth of that, never mind all the collectors who’ll be lining up behind him—every power-hungry or even power-curious acquirer, ready to see the inside of Chiron’s bookshop.
All desperate to get their hands on the book that could change their life.
Take my money. Take my firstborn. I’d kill a man.
Anyway, Chiron might not be dead. If she, say, walked past the bookshop tomorrow, and came face to face with him, that would arguably be a lot worse.
His disgraced protégé returned, only to admit that she’s fucked up again, and maybe in worse ways than he’s even conceived of.
She hates that she’s only proved him right; she hates that she cares what he’d think at all.
Cassandra eyes the letter again, in his handwriting. Addressed to her: Cassandra Fairfax.
Then she feels the ache in her limbs, the adrenaline rush of terror sinking into an exhausted, leaden-weight throb of fear.
She’s slept badly the last few nights. The last six months, if she’d let herself admit it.
For now, Roth doesn’t know where she lives—what a joke he’d make of her shitty studio apartment—and neither does anyone else, as far as she’s aware.
It’s about the only thing she’s managed to get right.
She’s probably safe for a little longer. Long enough to put off reading that letter for one more day.
Cassandra wakes at four in the morning with the taste of ink in her mouth.
You don’t have to go to the bookshop, she tells herself, as she stretches, and makes herself a cup of coffee in the microwave because the kettle is broken.
Haloed by the cool glow of her ancient laptop, she climbs back onto the couch and writes students’ papers.
It’s a fall-back that’s often more hassle than it’s worth, but there is a fine line between what she earns from her other jobs and her rent.
And within that fine line is a gulf of a sum.
A sum that Roth should have paid, and then some, if he hadn’t tried to use her own skills against her.
There was a time, not that long ago, when the idea of legal employment had been both unthinkable and unnecessary.
When Cass Holt had been a name that rattled every bookseller and collector in the country—anyone who’d dipped a toe into the murky waters of magic, and decided they wanted more.
She might not have lived in a penthouse like Roth’s, but she’d had her luxuries, the command of a well-furnished flat, her own little acquisitions in the brief interlude when she’d fancied herself a collector.
Being a thief, especially one as talented as herself, had paid well.
How far and fast she’s fallen, even when she’d thought there was nowhere further to fall than thief.
She spends the morning chasing students for their inevitably late payments, then departs to her second job at a local bar.
And all the while she feels the press of the letter—literally, swiped from the countertop and shoved into the deepest corner of her jacket pocket.
If Roth hasn’t found her by now, then he’s surely looking, with every resource at his disposal.
She’s been careful, but Roth’s connections run deep, his pockets deeper.
At two in the morning, she finishes up at the bar and slips out of the back, away from her co-workers wearily stumbling out the front.
Her head is weightless with exhaustion, and her body aches with the fingerprint-shaped bruises from where Roth grabbed her.
She twiddles with the spare set of keys to her flat for a second, before remembering that the lock is broken and it’s fair game for anyone.
She really doesn’t want to face whatever’s waiting for her there.
Instead, she finds herself meandering past the road to her flat, down quiet, ink-dark residential streets, everyone else asleep; underneath the long shadow of St. Paul’s all the way to the snarled alleys of Covent Garden.
Even at this unsociable hour, there are still tourists and late-night revellers rambling through central London, but they pay her little heed.
She shivers, wishing for her coat again.
Just before Leicester Square, where the crowd surges and flows towards the bright lights of Piccadilly, she turns down a series of alleyways, slipping beneath dark windows and across empty roads like a wraith amongst the living.
Then, at last, she stops in front of the entrance to a narrow street: Cecil Court.
Here, time seems to stumble, with delicate gates pulled over doorways and Victorian gas lamps throwing dim yellow light over painted signs.
Old-fashioned window displays exhibit antique prints and lithographs, neatly trimmed from their literary counterparts; historic marble figurines and aged war mementos; enormous tea-coloured maps encased safely behind glass frames.
But mostly, it’s books. For the last century, bookshops have gravitated to this particular street, as though drawn by a singular pull, though both owners and patrons would struggle to pinpoint the reason.
A black hole, luring the literary-inclined.
Cassandra stands at the entrance of the street for so long her hands go numb inside her pockets.
It might not be here, she thinks. She could still turn around.
Go back to her flat, the glow of her laptop.
The student papers, the bar. Brokering deals for stolen books because that’s all her skills are worth now.
If she hasn’t already wrecked that part of her life alongside all the others.
Is this all there is?
She closes her eyes, recalls her dream underpinned by memory, and opens them again.
And there it is, as though it had always been there to begin with. Chiron’s bookshop.
The door is closed, of course, and the light is off, the shutters pinned back indifferently from the windows.
The air behind the displays is still. But even in daylight it would be impossible to see the rest of the shop from the gloom that so pervades those scant few front inches.
A wrought-iron lantern hangs above the sheltered nook of its doorway.
It’s had a dozen names in Cassandra’s lifetime, never mind before, but the current sign batting back and forth in the wind reads: The Bookshop.
As though no other signifier needs to precede it.
How many times has she dreamed of the lantern, the doorway, the paved stairs with a smooth dip in the centre, worn away by centuries of footsteps?
But they’re not really here, in the same way that the bookshop isn’t really here to anyone passing by.
No one simply comes across Chiron’s bookshop.
Maps forget its name; entire streets fail to acknowledge its existence; passers-by stumble over a crack in the pavement and catch—well, maybe a shimmer of glass, or the scent of ink, or the leafy rustle of pages.
But no more than that. And by the time they right themselves, it’s vanished once again, just the ghost of a half-remembered thing.
The bookshop chooses its customers very carefully. But Cassandra’s not a customer. Not one of its booksellers, nor Chiron’s protégé. By all rights, she shouldn’t be here at all.
She climbs the stairs slowly, waiting for some well-deserved punishment to strike her. But she reaches the door unharmed. More worrying is the absence of angry footfall, of Chiron throwing open the door, furious at her audacity for returning.
She places her palm against the door, and a heavy clank echoes somewhere in the bookshop, deeper than one would expect. As though the building is mustering its strongest defences against her, every bolt sliding shut, arrows cocked from the narrow windows above.
But the handle yields to her careful touch, and the door eases open with a tired groan.
She’s never needed a key to enter before, and the bookshop, at least, has held to this.
A breath of air whispers past her into the cool night, and she inhales.
Cedar, dust, the soft-sweet smell of old books—and underneath, the sharp tang of ink.
She touches the letter in her pocket and pictures Lady Fate with her cleaving smile, the skein of thread running through her hands in a spider’s web of past and future. A tight, unpickable knot, pinning Cassandra to the centre.
Fine, she concedes. You win.
Slowly, she steps inside.