Chapter Eighteen
CHAPTER
Eighteen
THE CROWD OF booksellers, collectors and craftspeople is thinning when Cassandra finally relocates Byron. She’s at the bar, her sequinned suit jacket slung over one shoulder, revealing a sleeveless silk shirt in midnight black. The effect is devastatingly cool.
As a result, Cassandra has to sift through a group of admirers, all of whom are doing their best to buy Byron another drink. Then her eyes light on Cassandra and she grins.
“Hey! You made it out of the auction.” She pulls out of the crowd effortlessly, and slings an arm around Cassandra. “We’re the rejects.”
Cassandra smiles wryly, thinking of the real rejects—the people who might have tried to bribe an invitation from a pliable bookseller, or even slip in amongst the waitstaff, if they thought it would buy them an opportunity.
Then commiserating in some dingy bar afterwards, when attempts to bribe and sneak and threaten failed.
She’d never tried—too much risk of bumping into Chiron, and she’d told herself that it wouldn’t be worth it, anyway—though she’d heard the stories, same as anyone.
But sometimes, on the long walk home from the bar, she’d let herself imagine what it might have been like to attend an event like this.
Not through subterfuge, but with an invitation pressed in her hand.
To be the bookseller standing next to Chiron.
Cass Holt would never be able to even touch this.
Cassandra listens for a while to the booksellers’ chatter, an odd sort of contentment washing over her. She should probably go to the owners’ lounge, or seek out the dealers, but it can all wait. Just enough for her to relish this feeling for a little while longer.
“I take it you’ve been busy?” she says, noting the assortment of drinks on the bar.
“Some of us more than others.” Byron nods teasingly at Aloysius, who is doing his best to not look drunk and cheerfully failing.
“I am fine, I’ll have you know,” he says, though he keeps one hand tight on the back of a stool. “Did Lowell get his book?”
“He did,” Cassandra says.
“And pissed off everyone in the vicinity, I’ve no doubt,” he says. “I told him to leave it, as a gesture of goodwill. Let some other bookseller have a chance. But would he listen to me? Noooooooooo.”
The idea of Lowell Sharpe listening to anyone strikes her as amusing in its unlikeliness. Byron snorts into her drink.
“But that’s Lowell for you.” Aloysius’ phone, abandoned on the table, lights up; he glances at it. “Speak of the devil. Your company, ladies, was delightful, but my carriage awaits.”
He offers them a sloppy bow and turns, somewhat uncertainly, towards the exit. Cassandra tries to imagine what Lowell will say at the sight of his assistant, too obviously having enjoyed himself. But her thoughts keep wandering back to him on the stairs, unflinching in his apology.
Byron sighs happily, interrupting the recurring mental image. “I’ve always wanted to come here.” Then her smile slips. “I was supposed to, before…”
“Before the thief,” Cassandra finishes.
“Yup.” Byron plucks the olive garnish from her drink and stares at it. “Before thief, after thief. That’s my life, I guess.”
Oh, you have no idea, Cassandra thinks. She’s tortured herself before, trying to imagine what life might have been like had she stayed at Chiron’s.
Whether she would be like Lowell: hammered into the shape of an owner, her imperfections sanded down and beaten flat.
Whether Roth and his threats would be not even a distant dream because to dream is to know it exists, and Roth only ever played at the very fringes of the edge.
Whether she would feel more like a person and less like an imposter, stealing everything she could because so little has ever truly belonged to her.
Whether Chiron would have finally looked at her and been satisfied.
“Might have made a difference if I’d put it on my CV,” Byron says, cutting across her thoughts. “One bookselling job: stolen by Cass Holt.”
Cassandra flinches. “Your thief was—”
Cass Holt. Cassandra, taking what she shouldn’t.
“I’m not just any bookseller,” Byron says, a little too sharply. “And it wouldn’t have just been any thief.”
No, Cassandra knows Byron well enough now. It wouldn’t have been just any thief.
She tightens her grip on her drink to stop her hands from shaking.
She doesn’t know why the thought unsettles her; more than one bookseller has lost a book or more to Cass Holt.
At one point, it had been a mark of pride to be targeted by the ghost thief; if you’d been a victim, well, at least you had taste enough to be worth stealing from.
It shouldn’t surprise her that she would come across someone she’d taken more than a book from. It’s just that… it’s Byron.
“Still, it was worth the wait to get in,” Byron continues. “Did you meet the other owners?” She waggles her fingers. “Did they induct you into their secret society?”
Cassandra tries to collect herself. “Secret society?”
“Septimus says it’s nonsense, but every now and then the rumour will crop up. So I reckon it must be at least a little bit true.”
Despite herself, Cassandra smiles. The icy owners she’d seen at the auction didn’t look like they were capable of conversation with each other, much less convening in secret.
There weren’t many of them, she noted. But perhaps the theatrical lure of an even greater pretence to authority is too attractive to resist.
“No induction for me just yet,” she says, and Byron huffs in defeat.
Cassandra finishes her drink, then orders another. By the time she’s onto her third drink, her thoughts are pleasantly swathed in an alcohol haze. Not enough to be drunk—she’s not that stupid—but enough to put the spectre of her thief away.
As she tries to get the bartender’s attention, a young man grabs her arm. “Hey—fancy seeing you—”
It’s been a long evening, so she turns, expecting to see someone from her conversation earlier. But it’s a complete stranger. She gives him a puzzled look, and his grip on her slackens immediately.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought…” Then he pauses. “No, I do know you. Cass, right?”
No one calls her Cass. No one but Roth, and all the other collectors she’d read for.
Her heart stops. The invitation. The threat.
“I know you,” the man insists.
“No, you don’t,” she says slowly.
But she does.
In the half-light of the bar, she hadn’t recognised him, but close up, he’s instantly familiar. Red hair, masked as auburn in the poor lighting, freckles across his wide-eyed expression. The kind of face that will look young even when he’s fifty.
He’d been one of the attendees at a reading, where she’d imbued a man with the ability to paint like Monet for an evening.
Illustration transfusion is enormously tricky, but she can do it, and she’d watched the coloured green and blue inks dapple like bruises over the man’s skin, as he sweated and painted feverishly in front of an audience.
She’d read speed over him, too, and focus, and a handful of other traits designed to get him to churn out as many paintings as possible in the time frame.
It had been a potent cocktail of magic, and if she was a little wiser or a little less behind on the rent, she might have refused.
She remembers that night so clearly because of the way the man started to shiver as the reading wore off, the paintings turning to sloppy, unreadable things.
His face streaked with black tears, his teeth slick with blood.
The patron had eventually offered him a couple of pink pills, too, and he’d spent the rest of the evening in the corner, pupils blown wide, fingers grasping at nothing.
Ink poisoning, she suspected. And she’d felt not an iota of guilt—they paid for it, after all, and just as likely as not, their forger would have paid to be part of the experience.
They’d known what they were getting into.
Later, she would dream of the blood, the ink, the forger’s stained fingers.
She pushes past the man, upsetting his drink. Byron, still enmeshed in conversation elsewhere, gives her a curious glance.
“Forgot something in my coat,” she tells her.
She has to get out of here. Calmly. Quietly. Before anyone else notices Cass Holt, thief and nothing else, lurking in this crowd of beautiful, polished owners and their booksellers.
“Wait—” the man says.
Cassandra walks towards the exit, her footsteps quickening.
The man pursues her. “Chiron—I heard—”
She grabs his wrist and drags him into a corner. “What do you know about Chiron?”
A faint blush spreads over his face as he stares at her hand on him, admiration flitting across his expression. Cassandra snaps her fingers to regain his attention.
“Tell me about Chiron.”
“He… he died, didn’t he?” the man says. “I’m Kevin, by the way.”
“Well, yes. Do you know anything about what he was like before that? Kevin?” she adds, trying to sound gracious.
“Kept himself to himself, didn’t he? Apart from those visits to whatshername. And, okay, there was that one time he got into that fistfight.”
“Fistfight?” That doesn’t sound like Chiron at all. “With who?”
“Oh, just some customer, or maybe a bookseller,” Kevin says. “I don’t know. Someone who was harassing him.”
A fistfight doesn’t sound like Chiron, but an angry customer? That has Chiron written all over it.
Kevin lowers his voice. “So you’re really the owner now? Even though…”
Even though she’s been a thief and a liar and all the things an owner should despise. Chiron would have despised her, by the end, if he’d known even half of what she’d done.
“Even though what?” she asks, her voice dangerous and silky.
The tips of Kevin’s ears turn pink. Deliberately, she lets the veneer of Cassandra Fairfax slide off her, exposing just enough of the woman who’d read entire paintings onto a man’s skin. It feels like taking the first sip of air after being starved of oxygen.
“How lovely it is, to find us both here,” she says softly, tapping her hands on the edge of his forearm. “Maybe the owners are slacking. One of their own, attending a reading like that.”
Underneath her hand, Kevin’s muscles have gone rigid. She pauses, letting the implication sink in. Let this man forget about Cassandra’s own precarious position—let him worry about his own. If he wants to take her down, she won’t be the only one falling.
“I guess I should say one of our own now,” she adds, with a breezy laugh. “Right?”
She releases his arm, and lets the mask of Cassandra Fairfax, respectable owner, slide back on. Kevin rubs his arm, slightly dazed; his eyes lift to meet hers, but at the last minute, he looks away, busying himself with the cuffs of his shirt.
“Oh, no, I would never—I mean—” He coughs.
Cassandra lets him trail off awkwardly, just long enough for the silence to be uncomfortable. “Well, I’d better let you get back to the party. Don’t want to miss out on that champagne.”
Kevin nods, dazed. “I—sure.” Then his expression clears a little.
“Chiron was kind of a pain in the ass, you know. Complaining about this, stirring up that. Wouldn’t name an heir even though he was held practically at knifepoint—” He clears his throat.
“Anyway. He was a lot of trouble, that’s all I’m saying.
Might go easier for you if you’re more amenable. Or something.”
Cassandra watches Kevin flee into the owners’ lounge, but she doesn’t feel any better for his absence. This party has been illuminating, but it’s time to get out of here. One brush with her past is more than enough.
She pushes her way back through Byron’s admirers to say goodbye. She’s rummaging for her coat in a side room when a voice comes out of the darkness and she jumps.
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
It’s dark, but she can just make out a woman’s face, framed by wild brown curls and half-hidden behind a coat rack. Cassandra gives herself a second to let her heart return to its normal rhythm.
“I’m sorry?” she says.
“I told you—I warned you—”
Cassandra understands, in a sudden rush of clarity. “You sent me the invitation,” she says.
“—but you’re here anyway, so I suppose now is as good a time as any—”
Cassandra cuts her off. “Who are you?”
She should feel more afraid, she thinks, but it’s hard to be frightened of someone hiding in a coat cupboard.
“Maud,” the woman says distractedly. “I would have come to see you before now, but it’s been—well, challenging.” She shakes her head, talking to herself. “Chiron told me you might be difficult, but I thought if I sent you the message, then you would wait—”
Cassandra’s breath catches on the mention of Chiron’s name. Twice in one night.
“—I thought we had longer—we both did—but he knew he was being watched. He knew they were coming for him. He knew what would be next.”
He knew they were coming for him. The message on the invitation had been a warning, not a threat. Horror overtakes her as the implications set in.
Her stomach drops. “You think he was murdered?”
“I think he made more than a few enemies. And I think his death was pretty damn convenient for them.”
Chiron, not dying peacefully in his old age. Not leaving her a letter filled with his last regrets. Cassandra, not a mistake to be corrected… but a contingency plan.
“Did you sign the contract?” Maud asks, gripping Cassandra’s hands with a painful urgency. “Has the bookshop taken you as its own?”
“Yes. But—”
“Good.” Without warning, Maud lets go of her hands. “Then Chiron was right. We have to move now, before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what? What did Chiron say? What did he—”
Maud presses a scrap of paper onto her. An address.
“Not here. But later. Come find me, and we’ll talk.”