Chapter Fifteen #2
Lowell Sharpe would know how to do this, she thinks with a vicious stab at herself. But she’s the owner, so they’re her responsibility.
Despite the relative stuffiness of the shop, Cassandra hasn’t figured out how to open the windows—if they can, in fact, be opened—so she pushes the door open. Cool air rushes past her, a welcome relief from the warmth.
But every muscle in her body tenses. Because standing on the doorstep is Roth.
“Cassandra, Cassie, Cass,” he says, smiling as rakishly as he can with the bruise on his face. “Couldn’t even send me a text?”
For a second, icy fear slicks her insides. In the haze of looking after the bookshop, she hadn’t quite forgotten about Roth. But he had settled into the back of her mind, a problem to be dealt with later.
Later looks an awful lot like now.
“You shouldn’t be able to find the bookshop,” Cassandra says.
Roth smirks at her, and she catches the glimpse of black handwriting below his cuffs, mingled with a splash of red that can only be blood. Another reading, more forceful than the last. “No one’s untouchable, Cass.”
He still seems a little worse for wear after their encounter, she notes with vicious satisfaction, though she can’t take credit for all of it.
Apart from the faded bruise across his face, there are a few new scrapes, with at least one scab that will turn into a dashing scar later on.
A little less chalet boy. It suits him, she thinks, to have some of that artificial charm stripped away.
“I looked all over for you,” he says. “I even checked in with your bar buddies, who don’t really give a shit, by the way, that you’ve disappeared on them, so hey, might not want to keep working there, just giving you the heads-up—”
Cassandra lets him monologue for a little longer, buying her time to take stock of her circumstances.
Roth is furious—probably angry enough to give her a bruise to match his, if he can get close enough.
Byron is in the back cataloguing for the next few hours, and therefore miles away as far as shouting for help’s concerned.
That’s if Cassandra wants anyone to witness this, which she doesn’t.
Roth’s presence will only bring up questions, which will lead to Cass Holt. And from there, it’s not too hard to connect Cass Holt to that night six months ago. Layers of deception unravelling in an instant.
No, she’ll handle this alone.
“I even went to your flat—bit of a shithole, gotta say, Cass; didn’t think you were the type to live like that.”
At this, Cassandra laughs. Just once, but Roth’s eyes darken. She tightens her grip on the doorway just a little.
“Yeah, I thought you’d be pretty fucking amused,” he says, no longer sounding pleasant or even conversational.
She shrugs. “It’s just funny that you thought you knew me at all.”
“I knew you’d be here, didn’t I?” He touches his arm, slick with ink. “Just took some… persuasion to find the right reader.”
To this, she has no recourse. It’s not worth explaining to him that it didn’t happen the way he probably thinks it did—that she’s here because Chiron, it seems, had no choice, not because she’s his protégé reborn—but she can’t deny that it’s immensely satisfying to let Roth believe that this is the truth.
That she’d had something to offer him, but had chosen to withhold it.
“What do you want?” she asks.
He attempts a laugh. “What are you playing at, Cass? Sitting at that fancy desk, like that’s all it takes to be an owner?”
This would be a little more damning if Lowell Sharpe hadn’t already said the same thing to her only a few hours ago. Roth and Lowell could probably get together and start their own Cassandra Fairfax hate club.
“What do you want, Roth?” she asks again, a touch impatient.
Roth seems slightly taken aback at her nonchalance. His eyes acquire a calculating, greedy gleam.
“Fine, you have your shop. I can’t blame you. But I want what’s in that basement. Vault. Whatever he called it.”
The other bookshop. Cassandra hasn’t been down there since the night she signed the contract and became an owner. She has no idea how he knows about it, never mind what’s inside.
“We go way back, you and I,” Roth says, as though they’re old school friends, like their relationship is social.
“We might have had our disagreements lately. Who doesn’t fight?
But you know if you were ever in a spot of trouble, if there was ever something I could do for you…
I would do it. You know I would do anything for you, Cass. ”
This is such a fantastic lie that Cassandra is actually speechless for a moment. Roth must realise this, too, because he takes her silence as a need for him to further convince her.
“You want money?” He pulls out his wallet, runs a finger through the bills. “Upgrade your wardrobe, or give your flat a paint—though I guess you don’t really need that anymore.”
Briefly, Cassandra entertains the thought of taking Roth’s money for whatever he so badly wants.
She could probably squeeze him for all he’s worth, given that he was already desperate enough to track her down.
It would be enough for her to set up a new life—no booksellers, no threats, no ink magic.
She wouldn’t buy one of those ornate, tacky flats, or a grand countryside mansion.
No, it would be a boat: perfect, billowy sails in clean white, the hull striped with some fanciful woman’s name.
Just enough room for her, and as many books as she can carry.
Nothing but the sharp line of the horizon to guide her.
Then she imagines Roth in the bookshop, stuffing fistfuls of books into a satchel like a cartoon villain. Roth climbing up the stairs, past the reading room with its hearth and gentle clutter, to the very top of Chiron’s tower. Plucking a single white flower to take with him.
Something slams shut in her mind.
“No,” she says.
She waits a second longer, letting the silence speak for itself. Roth’s mouth twists, giving his face a rare varnish of ugliness.
“No?” he repeats.
Now she smiles widely, as though she’s just revealed the punchline of her favourite joke. “No.”
There’s so much else she wants to say—to dangle the fullness of his failures in front of him gleefully—but she bites the rest of it back. She’s supposed to be an owner; there are lines. Chiron would have already closed the door on Roth, but she settles for watching Roth’s face turn a furious puce.
He starts climbing the stairs to the bookshop. “If it’s about the money—”
“It’s not about the money. I just don’t want to give it to you.”
The ugly expression deepens. “I suppose I’ll have to take it, then.”
He tries to barrel past her—Cassandra scrambles backwards, nearly trips over her own feet—and abruptly stops. The iron railings outside have curved inwards like a protective claw, barring entry into the bookshop. Every spiked finial points towards Roth, the nearest only inches from his throat.
“What the hell is this?” he snarls, all vestiges of charm gone. “If this is your ink magic crap—”
Cassandra shrugs, even though her heart is racing. “I didn’t do anything. The bookshop chooses who to let in. If they’re deemed worthy.”
Which Roth obviously isn’t.
He stares at the sharpened finials, then at Cassandra.
“You don’t even know what you’ve got down there,” he says.
“Too bad for me,” she agrees.
“Fuck you, Cass.” A nerve jumps in his jaw. “This isn’t over.”
Cassandra gives him a little wave as he storms back down the steps, away from the bookshop and out of sight.
It’s almost certainly not the last she’ll see of him—if he’s persistent enough to find her here, then he’ll try again, in some other nefarious way.
She wonders idly if the bookshop would recognise him in a trench coat and fedora.
But there’s a warmth loosening the weight in her chest. The bookshop protects its own—and tonight, it protected her. The river might make an owner of her, after all.
Byron comes out of the back, humming a folk song with rude lyrics. She pauses when she sees Cassandra.
“What happened?” she asks.
Despite the events of tonight, Cassandra smiles. “Nothing.”
It might even be true, she tells herself.