Chapter Sixteen
CHAPTER
Sixteen
ROTH STORMS UP and down the street opposite Chiron’s bookshop, then in a disgusted huff turns back down the alley from which he’d come.
This is the fourth time he’s tried to stake out the bookshop, but it’s proving just as fruitless as the others.
Shadows move behind the curtains, but it’s impossible to discern which one of them belongs to Cassandra.
It’s because of Cassandra that he’s skulking in this alleyway, freezing and furious. It’s because of her that he’s about to lose everything.
“Hello, James.”
He turns around, and his expression undergoes a complicated transformation from annoyed to cloyingly charming—a charm that for some reason is no longer working as well as it’s done in the past—to panic when he thinks that it might be one of the debt collectors, then relief when he realises it’s no one he knows.
His face finally settles on a veneer of arrogance to compensate for the panic.
It’s just an old woman. A very nicely dressed old woman, a small part of him registers. But he’s wound too tight for any attempt at superficial politeness.
“Who the hell are you?” he demands.
“James, we told you to stop,” she says.
“How the fuck do you know my name?”
But the first waves of unease are washing over him.
At this point in his life, he should be on some Mediterranean beach, drinking cocktails with names like Sultry Storm or Hot Summer Nights, while a beautiful woman—or perhaps several—rubs scented oils across his shoulders.
That’s what his father did, and he’d had a perfectly fantastic time of it before the whopping heart attack that had felled him in his late sixties.
Spend it and enjoy it, his father had said the week before the heart attack, in what would turn out to be a surprisingly prescient phone call.
It’s not going to jump in the grave with you, son.
But Roth fucked up.
He already had the city flat, the countryside getaway, the summer villa abroad.
And there are only so many holidays where beautiful women can rub lotion across his body.
The beaches blended into one, the beautiful women no longer quite so uniquely beautiful, the patrons a rotating crowd of retired politicians and criminals and oligarchs.
Then he’d been at the bar one night—he forgets exactly which hotel on which small island, just that he’d thrown up in the infinity pool the night before—when he’d heard someone mention magic.
Maybe it was the hangover pulsing in his temple, or perhaps the cocktail he was somehow already at the end of, but he’d indulged in eavesdropping on the group.
Two hours in, he’d shaken off enough of his hangover to put on his most dazzling smile and introduce himself.
Several shots later, he had a name: Cass Holt.
By the time he finally tracked her down, he was in a fair amount of debt.
It turned out an old man’s fortune didn’t stretch quite as far as it once had, and the sleuthing had taken considerably more money than the tropical holidays.
But what was a little debt when he could promise his creditors magic?
A book that could give its reader anything: longevity, unfailing persuasion, fame, a beautiful face without the plasticity that would give away a surgeon’s hand in the matter.
So to promise the world, and then not be able to give it—well, Roth’s taken to keeping one eye out for his creditors, and two eyes when he can spare them. They usually don’t come in the guise of someone’s grandmother, though.
“How do I know your name?” the woman says. “You’ve made yourself somewhat of a nuisance, I’m afraid. Asking a lot of questions. Too many.”
“Listen, you old—”
Two heavily muscled men emerge on either side of the woman, dressed in unseasonably light clothing. Just vests and ratty joggers, like they’ve come from the gym. But black lettering swirls along their arms, climbs up their throats, visible on their torsos through their vests.
Roth swallows. He’d run into a retired hitman early on into his extended holidays, well before the magic, but not before he was bored enough to do extremely stupid things under the guise of novelty.
Already drunk, he’d asked what the most difficult thing about being a hitman was.
Was it hard, for example, to kill someone?
The hitman had sighed and picked at the straw in his drink before saying, it’s the movies. They never get our outfits right.
Because it’s much harder to get blood out of a suit than a vest.
“I considered intervening myself,” the woman says, as though Roth hadn’t interrupted her. “But you’ve already made quite the mess. Promising so much to these people who really don’t have a right to know our secrets.”
“I don’t know who you are, or what the fuck you want. I don’t owe you anything.”
Roth takes a step backwards, then another one. When he gets his hands on Cassandra Fairfax, he’s going to make her give him the bookshop. And then he’s going to call that retired hitman.
“No, but you do owe quite a lot of people something. Something that doesn’t belong to you.”
The men move. They don’t walk, or run, or even lunge.
There is simply a point in time where they were behind the woman, and now they’re on either side of Roth.
It happens so quickly that it takes him longer than it should to register their hands pressed tightly over his shoulders.
He cries out and tries to shake them off.
He’s maintained his rigorous fitness from his university rowing days—there’s no point in lying on a beach, after all, without the accompanying physique to be admired.
But the strength between these men is more than a couple of hours every day at the gym. Ink magic.
Out of the corner of his eye, he catches the words rippling over one of the men’s knuckles. Something in Latin. Fuck, he wishes he’d studied Latin.
“Such theatrics.” The woman smiles thinly. “You’ve meddled in our affairs for long enough, James. But I have just the plan to repay your debts.”
The men drag him bodily down the alleyway, towards an expensive-looking car. Roth struggles against their combined heft, but it’s no use. The woman sighs a little impatiently, and crooks a finger towards the men: come along.
He doesn’t ask where he’s being taken. He doesn’t want to know.
The last thing Roth sees before they press him into the car is the dim glow of the bookshop, and the shadow behind the curtain.