Chapter Twenty-Four
CHAPTER
Twenty-Four
IT’S LATE, AND Cassandra should be heading for home.
Even though she didn’t touch much in Roth’s flat, and certainly none of the bodily fluids gracing his storage facility, she feels dirty.
As though she can’t erase the remnants of his terrible experiment.
She wants a shower, clean clothes, and most of all, a soft bed in which to drown herself in sleep, and forget about all of this for a blissful eight hours.
Instead, she finds herself making the long walk back to Sharpe’s.
Someone is interfering in river business.
And Roth’s not clever enough to figure it out on his own.
Someone told him about the tributary bookshops.
Someone told him about the readers. Lowell might not know who that someone is, but he might be able to tell her something about that ink vial, at least. Or why someone would be so desperate to recreate what already exists in its infinity.
The question is what to trust him with.
Not Roth, she thinks. Certainly not Cass Holt. And not the Keeper’s revelation about Chiron’s murderer, either.
Though she’d never intended to, one by one, her secrets have somehow slipped into her pockets like stones.
And not for the first time, she feels that relentless urge to cast them aside and shuck her skin entirely.
The boat, the horizon, with clean, sweet air inhaled by someone who is neither Cass Holt nor Cassandra Fairfax, but another person made anew.
Tense, coiled energy fizzes through her.
She could do it. She could run.
Then the vial of ink jolts in her pocket, sending sickening waves across her body. No, she can’t run—not just yet. Not while Chiron’s murderer walks free. Not with Roth’s unnerving, tangled presence in the river.
Cassandra gives herself a quick brush down before she tentatively pushes on the door to Sharpe’s.
Even though it’s well past sociable hours, it’s still open.
Lowell is at the front of the shop, checking a pile of books against his ledger.
He doesn’t notice her enter, so she allows herself the indulgence of watching him work in profile: the very image of what a proper owner should be.
He cradles the book with one hand, the ledger in the other, pencil tucked behind his ear.
His forehead still bears that habitual pinch of concentration, oddly endearing, just underneath his glasses.
Setting the book back on the shelf, he pushes his glasses up his nose and pulls the pencil from behind his ear.
He touches his forefinger to his lip before turning the page, near a small freckle that she’s never noticed until now.
She feels a little like she’s caught him undressing. She clears her throat.
“Lowell,” she says, “I have—”
He looks up, and the pile of books spills onto the floor. He doesn’t pick them up. His gaze sweeps over her, and now it’s her turn to feel as though she’s been caught in some act of intimacy.
“Cassandra,” he says, strangled. “You—”
Lowell quickly recovers, but she notes the way his eyes now seem to be anywhere but her. Instead, he bends down to pick up the books he dropped. She kneels to help him, but he waves her away. For some reason, he keeps his head tilted at an angle from her.
“Lowell, really, I don’t mind helping—”
“It’s fine, I’ve got it—”
Ignoring him, she scrounges for the remaining fallen books and hands him a stack. Bloody stubborn Lowell Sharpe.
At the same time, her gaze finally rests on his face in full, and she realises why he’s been so keen to avoid her. “What the hell is that?”
Lowell shrugs, a little uncomfortably. “You’ve seen a black eye before, I’m sure.”
Lowell has no right to be sporting a black eye. And he has no right to look so good doing so, even with his collar buttoned up tight and the serious tilt of his mouth. There’s something thrilling about the idea of a Lowell roguish enough to get into a fight.
She takes a step closer. “How did you get it?”
He doesn’t even look at her. “Research.”
“Lowell, you did not—”
Aloysius walks in and stops. “That is a bomb-ass outfit, Fairfax.”
Something in Lowell’s demeanour shifts and he cuffs Aloysius over the head. Aloysius groans and glares at Lowell, who glares back, unrepentant. Cassandra glances down at herself. Oh, right.
“I had a date,” she lies. “But I wanted to drop something off on my way home.”
Aloysius looks at her, puzzled. “You already gave us back the umbrella.”
She gives Lowell a pleading glance.
“Aloysius, did you finish cataloguing the titles from the Whittingly-Barnes purchase?” he asks.
“No, but—”
Lowell raises a commanding eyebrow. “I want it done before we close up. And it’s already late.”
Aloysius glances between Lowell and Cassandra, who shrugs. Reluctantly, Aloysius gives them a half-hearted wave and retreats into the back of the shop. Cassandra waits until she hears the office door click shut.
“You said your bookshop’s speciality was book binding?” she says.
“The history of the book as an object, physical and otherwise,” Lowell corrects. “And I didn’t, but go on.”
“Do you think you could find anything out about this?”
Carefully, Cassandra pulls the vial of ink from her pocket, shuddering as her fingers hit the glass. Theoretically, it can’t hurt her from within the vial, but the feeling is enough to make her recoil.
Lowell takes it, and unlike her, he doesn’t shudder at its wrongness. But he must notice the difference because he holds it up to the light, peering at it. To her, it just looks like ink, but his eyes widen fractionally.
“Where did—”
“Don’t ask me where it came from,” she says quickly. “I just need to know if there’s anything… unusual about it.”
It’s a risk, but the expertise is beyond her. She waits for him to demand answers, regardless of how she feels about them, or perhaps to thrust it back at her. But he only pockets it quietly.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he says.
They lapse into silence. Somewhere in the back of the shop, there’s the soft thump of books falling, and swearing.
It could be the river at work, but there’s something about Sharpe’s that feels slightly less formidable, compared to the first time she’d walked in.
The lighting is warm instead of clinical, and the books rustle happily.
This is what Chiron’s might have looked like by now, instead of the chaos she’s constantly wrestling, if Lowell had beaten her to it.
“You must really love this place,” she says, half to herself.
Lowell’s mouth tilts upwards. “I grew up here,” he says, echoing their conversation in the tea shop. “There were a few of us protégés.”
“Prices?” she asks.
He nods. “You?”
“Yeah. Probably,” she adds, the word slipping out.
“Probably?”
She shrugs. “Chiron wasn’t very forthcoming. But you know how it is.”
Cassandra’s met a few of them in her time: the priceless firstborns, who, it turns out, can be priced after all.
She doesn’t remember her origins—it’s possible she was just a baby when she was exchanged—but others, she knows, remember theirs.
Parents and siblings, friends and homes that had been theirs until they weren’t.
There aren’t any good answers to the questions she might ask, so she doesn’t ask them.
Lowell exhales. “I know how it is. But in exchange, we get… this.”
The bookshops, he means; Cassandra can tell from the way his gaze turns tender and reverent.
And not just the physical buildings, suffused with centuries of workmanship and care by the hands that came before them.
Not just the magic and the heady power that comes with it, or the comfort of old books, their language one of well-worn friends.
Not simply the challenges and joys and satisfaction that come from handing the right book to the right customer, and tipping Fate’s scale ever so slightly in their favour.
But to wake up every day to the whisper of the river. To feel, even if only in its immersion, the bone-deep connection between past and future, owner and protégé, fairy tale and fact—and belong to it in its entirety, without reservation.
To dip your hands into its water, and have the world trickle between your fingertips.
Cassandra swallows back the echo of yearning inside her.
“Anyway, I fear I’ve interrupted something.” Lowell raises one eyebrow at her. “You mentioned a date?”
“Is that so hard to believe?” She offers him a wry smile. “Can’t a nice girl like me go out on a date occasionally?”
She expects Lowell to blush, perhaps mutter something about nice girls and Cassandra being an oxymoron. But instead, he steps closer, searching her face as though she has something to give away. Then his hand slips across her bare shoulder, just shy of the strap of her dress. Her breath catches.
“Do nice girls go on dates to read ink?”
She flushes. It’s barely visible, but there, so small it could almost be a freckle, is a dot of ink, resting next to Lowell’s thumb.
“What were you doing, really?” he asks.
She looks at him, and allows herself the smallest satisfaction when he glances away first. His hand falls from her shoulder, as if he’s only just realised he’s touching her.
“Research,” she says.
He rolls his eyes, and just like that, the tension dissipates. There, again, is the Lowell Sharpe she knows. But the echo of his thumb burns like she’s been scalded.
“Goodnight, Cassandra,” he says.
She’s still smiling when she closes the door behind her. As she leaves, her traitorous thoughts repeat the long, tantalising seconds of Lowell’s fingers across her shoulder. And then the moment after, when the spell had broken. How strange, she muses, that there was a spell to break at all.
Cassandra so nearly makes it home.
She’s only a few streets away when she decides to cave and take off her heels. As she straightens up, a car slows next to her. Black and sleek, expensive. A tinted window rolls down.
“Cassandra Fairfax.”
An elderly woman is just visible through the window, on the far side of the car. Cassandra immediately recognises her from the first day in Chiron’s bookshop. The way she had eyed everything in it with that devouring hunger.
“Get in.” The woman crooks a finger. “I think it’s time you and I had a talk.”
Cassandra backs away. “I don’t think it is, actually.”
If she runs now, she might make it to the bookshop. Byron might have left the door open, and if her luck holds, there’ll be three locks between her and this woman.
She’s not sure Lady Fate deals in that much luck.
She keeps walking, and the car maintains its pace beside her.
They move like this all the way to the bookshop, like an especially slow police escort despite the blare of furious car horns behind them.
Cassandra braces herself to sprint, but the car never attempts to veer into her, and no one bursts out of it, either.
Then finally, the bookshop. She reaches for her key and drops it, her hands stiff from the cold night air.
The woman watches her, amused. “An owner, now? My, Chiron’s bookshop has cleaned up nicely.”
Cassandra grits her teeth. “That’s right.”
“So you’ve already dealt with all those requests for impossible books, then? The books that shouldn’t exist?”
Cassandra places her hand on the door handle, but doesn’t turn it. No one else knows about the requests for the impossible books.
She eyes the woman again. “Who are you?”
The car door swings open.
“Like I said, we need to talk.”