Chapter Nineteen #2
“You haven’t gone down to the river yet?” Lowell stares at her, disbelief etched on his face. “Do you actually want Chiron’s bookshop? Would you even miss it?”
Something seizes in Cassandra’s throat. Of course she missed it. She missed it the way someone would miss their heart, ripped from underneath their ribcage, to display in humiliating glory. This is what I’ve taken from you. Everything.
“Christ, Lowell!” she snaps. “Do you try to piss off everyone you meet, or are you just saving it for me—”
Then she hears it. They both do. The sound of shattering glass—and loud, heavy footsteps. Voices, plural.
Cassandra and Lowell look at each other for one brief moment. Then, by silent mutual agreement, they climb into the wardrobe and yank the door shut.
Almost immediately, she wishes they’d chosen a different hiding place.
There’s just enough room for her to stand, but Lowell has to scrunch his entire body to fit around the curve of the wardrobe.
His breath huffs against her forehead, so close she can feel the warmth radiating from his skin.
One hand brushes the back of her head, bracing his body.
A thin strip of light illuminates the side of his face, but otherwise, the wardrobe is dark and warm.
Cassandra looks up at him, at exactly the same time he looks down at her. Up close, it’s hard to forget how handsome Lowell actually is, even when he’s scowling at her. She tries harder.
Outside of the wardrobe, the voices gain coherence as they get closer.
“Mad Maud here?”
“Doesn’t look like it. Someone must have tipped her off.”
“Damn it. Out of a reader again, I guess.”
Footsteps echo in the hallway. Something clatters; someone swears. Through the slit in the wardrobe, Cassandra glimpses two men, broad-shouldered and terrifyingly huge. She thinks of diminutive Maud hiding in the coat cupboard at the auction.
“Well, surely that means this place is up for grabs. For you, I mean.”
Cassandra feels as though she’s been sucker-punched. She knows that voice.
Roth.
“No point. River’s gone, or is going. Anyway, that’s not what we’re here for.”
There’s the sound of rummaging, much closer this time. Cassandra tries to guess from the noise how many people there are. Including Roth and the men she glimpsed, she guesses three, maybe four people. Two to investigate, and at least one to watch the door, if they’re smart.
“No, but—what do you mean the river’s gone?” Roth says, using a tone he probably saves for waitresses he doesn’t like. “Where the fuck would it go?”
“Do I look like a genie to you? No? Well, there you are. All I know is that it’s gone.” A pause; more rummaging. “Oh, for God’s— leave it. We’ll come back for the books later.”
“The door was open, Blake.” And Cassandra hears that persistent peevishness in Roth’s voice.
For all his faults, there’s that attention to detail that so many collectors possess. And Roth has already proved how good he is at tracking minutiae; he found the bookshop, after all. Next to her, Lowell goes very still.
“No one else is here. We’re fucking miles away from civilisation. Come on, I’m freezing.”
The door slams shut. Lowell starts to move, but Cassandra shakes her head fractionally.
Wait, she mouths. It would be exactly like Roth for him to pretend to slam the door and then wait for the other intruders to appear.
It’s what she would do, in his position.
And he might have seen Cassandra’s bicycle, or Lowell’s car, wherever he parked it.
If he noticed the door ajar, he might have also noticed the muddy footprints.
He might just even sense that elusive not-quite-right feeling, that gut instinct left over from a more primordial existence.
The seconds move past, achingly slow. Without the sound of Roth and the other intruders to distract her, Cassandra is suddenly extremely aware of Lowell’s every move.
One hand shifts, and his arm brushes against the top of her shoulder.
His knee touches the top of her thigh. She can’t look at him directly—like looking at sunlight—so her gaze lands on the arch of his neck, stubble dusting his jawline.
“I think they’re gone,” she says softly.
He swallows, and every line moves. “Are you sure?”
Another five long seconds tick by. It’s just five seconds, but it feels like an eternity.
“I’m sure,” she whispers.
They tumble out, the wardrobe door banging open. Cassandra nearly falls straight into the opposite wall, but Lowell catches her. The noise would be more than enough to lure Roth from hiding, but it seems as though they’re truly alone for now.
They look at each other renewed in the light, breaths held. Then, the silence bursts.
“What did they mean, Maud is gone?” Cassandra says, at the same time that Lowell says, indignant, “They can’t just take books from an owner! That’s… that’s robbery! Literally daylight robbery!”
“I think we’ve got bigger problems to worry about,” she says grimly.
Her mind replays Roth’s words, as though trying to convince her both that it couldn’t possibly have been Roth, and that it was so undeniably Roth that it couldn’t be anyone else.
Reluctantly, she has to concur the latter.
But what the hell is he doing here, of all places, breaking in with thieves?
She’d pinned him as an obsessive collector, but a dabbler in their secretive world of magic.
This looks like a hell of a lot more than dabbling.
Lowell seems to recover some of himself. “We need to leave. Before they come back.”
Slowly, Cassandra takes stock of the office again, this time with an eye for intrusion. The men outside hadn’t been interested in anything here; or at least they hadn’t felt the urge to check. So, not book thieves, she amends. They’d only been interested in another reader—in Maud.
Maud, who had warned her that someone else had been after Chiron. Who had been afraid.
“We should go,” Lowell says, more urgently.
But Cassandra’s not done. “Wait.”
She rifles through Maud’s desk, pulling out every piece of paper she can get her hands on, every note that Maud might have written, even if it was just a grocery list. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches Lowell’s expression, utterly scandalised. But he doesn’t try to stop her.
It takes her a little while to find what she’s looking for. She finally pulls the cushion off a faded ottoman and rummages until a false bottom shifts. There, amidst letters and detritus, is Maud’s ledger. She shoves every paper she can find into it.
Maud had clearly known someone was coming for her. Maybe she left a note for Cassandra, in the absence of their meeting. It’s all she can hope for now.
“If you take that, they’ll know someone was here,” Lowell says.
“Let them,” she says, tucking it under her arm. “They won’t know it was us.”
But she thinks of Roth’s fury, standing outside of Chiron’s bookshop. She’d known, then, that he would do whatever it took to get inside. Even if it means stealing Chiron’s bookshop from underneath her.
Lowell narrows his eyes. “Do you know what they’re looking for?”
“No,” she says. “But I’m going to find out.”