Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
“I’m happy to wait,” she says, even though truthfully she’d love nothing more than to run from here and keep running. Away from the trap she’s sprung on herself.
As soon as Lowell retreats to the office, Aloysius following, Edmund rounds on her.
Now that she’s placed him, it would be impossible to mistake him for a complete stranger.
He’d been half a head taller than everyone else that night, a mountain of brooding, sullen man in the corner.
His eyes, a cold, unrelenting grey, bore into hers.
He grabs her arm, fingers squeezing painfully. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Get your hand off me,” she says.
“I don’t know how you dug your claws into my brother, or what bullshit name you’re working under, but if you think that Cass fucking Holt—”
In one quick motion, Cassandra grasps one of his fingers and bends it backwards, the joint popping. He hisses and lets go, flexing his hand.
“I told you to get off me,” she says calmly. “You want to talk? Fine, let’s talk.”
Lowell and Aloysius are in the office; the bookshop is otherwise empty. She doesn’t need to raise her voice to make it clear just how high the stakes are for both of them.
“Let’s talk about how interesting it would be if Lowell found out about your illegal readings.
” She ticks down her fingers. “Or the books you stole. Or the promises you made—and then broke. Or, fuck it,” she adds, false lightness in her tone.
“Let’s just tell him about that night, hm? No secrets between brothers, right?”
She levels her gaze at him, knowing that he’s recalling the same evening, and its awful end. At the same time, she tries to place it at the back of her mind, where it can’t touch her. Remember Cass Holt, criminal. Remember Cass Holt, untouchable, enigmatic. Remember what it is to be dangerous.
Edmund is the first to turn away, his gaze shifting to the closed office door.
A vein jumps in his jaw, and his hands flex at his sides.
Cassandra lets the moment spin out a little longer.
He has to believe they’re equals. He has to believe she can crack his armour.
Even if Edmund is smarter than Roth and better connected than the boy she’d met at the auction.
“Stay away from this bookshop,” he growls. “And Lowell.”
Edmund looks like he wants to say more, but Lowell returns. His face tightens as he notes the tension between them. Cassandra makes an effort to appear breezy, like they’ve been having nothing but a conversation about the weather.
“Everything okay?” he asks, his gaze on Cassandra.
Cassandra glances at Edmund.
“Fine,” Edmund says tightly. “Or at least they will be once I’ve checked the records. Excuse me.”
Edmund storms off. A second later, the office door slams shut.
“I must apologise for Edmund’s behaviour,” Lowell says. “He’s not always such an asshole.” Then he pauses, considering. “Well, he is, but usually not to strangers.”
The back of Cassandra’s neck prickles; Lowell, ever perceptive.
She feigns a dismissive shrug. “I have that effect on people.” She tacks on a smile. “Maybe it’s just Sharpes.”
Lowell’s eyes crinkle, like he’s trying and failing to hide a smile.
“He heard about the break-in. From Aloysius, I presume,” he adds, with a scowl in the direction of the office.
“You could have let them have the bookshop,” Cassandra says, teasing, just to see what his response would be.
After all, it’s what he’s spent all this time telling her. Just give me your bookshop, and I’ll be on my way. Cassandra has already formed a smart-ass response in her head, and she’s ready to unleash it on whatever Lowell—
“It’s not mine to give,” he says.
Cassandra stops. “What?”
“The bookshop belongs to Edmund.” Lowell touches the wainscoting. “I’m just keeping it tidy.”
“But—but—”
For once, Cassandra’s at a loss for words.
How can the bookshop belong to someone else?
She knew this was Lowell’s the second she passed it on the street, the moment she walked through the door.
Every element, every choice, is his—from the gunmetal grey to the rich panelling.
The practical yet warm lighting. The elegant, looping sign above the door.
“It’s a long story,” he says.
“It has your name on the front,” she says.
“It says Sharpe’s,” he says softly.
Cassandra thinks of the way the other booksellers had spoken of him, hatred masking pride and envy.
She thinks of how Lowell had come into Chiron’s bookshop, knowing exactly how to fix the deluge of water.
How he walks around Sharpe’s with a confident ease that she can never hope to replicate.
How desperate he’d been to claim Chiron’s bookshop.
“But you love this bookshop,” she says helplessly. “How can that be fair?”
He shrugs. “It’s a certain definition of fair.”
He says it like it’s a matter of fact, like he’s spent his entire life considering this question, and this is the only logical conclusion he can come to. It’s the kind of fair that Cassandra is well acquainted with. Which is to say, a fairness that seems to favour owners, no matter how it’s framed.
“No, I’m sorry, that’s bullshit,” she says. “You can’t tell me any one deserves this more than you.”
He startles, and very briefly, his expression clears of frown lines. A mask, lifting, just for a second, to reveal a softer, gentler face—and in that second, Cassandra’s heart thumps complicatedly in her chest. No, she thinks, a little desperately.
Lowell clears his throat. “Anyway, you asked for that ink sample. I… haven’t seen anything like it before.”
Somewhere in the recesses of her memory, bolstered by Edmund’s appearance, an alarm goes off. There had been an unusual ink, too, on that bloody night. Surely it has to be coincidence.
She hopes to every god and devil she knows that it’s just a coincidence.
“I’d like to hold on to the sample for a little longer,” Lowell says. “If that’s okay.”
A sudden outpouring of cursing from the office startles them both.
Cassandra tries to shrug off her foreboding.
If anyone can coax answers out of a bottle of ink, it’s probably Lowell.
And she’d rather not be here when Edmund re-emerges, a tempting reason to change his mind and divulge the truth between them.
“I’ll leave you to it,” she says.
Later, Cassandra sits at Chiron’s desk, turning it over in her mind, while Byron pulls on her coat, the day long spent. Ink. The river. Roth, bolstered by this mysterious society.
And that night, forever churning at the back of her thoughts.
“What do you know about Edmund Sharpe?” Cassandra asks.
Byron looks up, surprised. “Not much. What do you want with him?”
“Nothing,” she says.
That evening, another book arrives on her desk, heralded by a plaintive meow.
She picks it up, a hefty paperback with a broken spine and a tacky circle on the front cover with half a sticker scrubbed away.
The cover artwork is vintage, abstract; Cassandra guesses seventies, and she’s a little smug when she checks the copyright page.
It’s an obscure title that she doesn’t recognise.
But there is a handsome scrawl in the corner that identifies the book as belonging to one Lowell J. F. Sharpe.
Inside is a small note, written in tidy handwriting. I thought you might like this.
She sets it back on her desk and conspicuously ignores it for several hours. But at the end of the evening, she closes the curtain, turns off the lights, and heads upstairs, Lowell’s book tucked underneath her arm.
In Chiron’s comfortable armchair by the fire, she cradles a mug of tea in both hands, the book eased open on her lap. Outside, a soft patter of rain starts up.
The hours come and go.
Towards the end of the book, she turns a page and something falls out. A pressed daisy, the petals delicate as lace.
A series of notes exchanged by Cassandra Fairfax and Lowell Sharpe, carried by Errata
Inside The Bartender Only Serves Once by Fred R.
Abel—the seventies paperback is obviously well read, but in pristine condition.
On the cover, a scantily clad woman clings to a man who wears nothing but leather trousers and a holster, his gun pointed menacingly at the reader.
A third, slightly more clothed man, broods in the distance.
Absolutely not.
This is classic literature.
Ah, yes, nothing says classic like a book with that on the front.
Don’t judge, etc. etc. Besides, the description of the shoot-out against the backdrop of a secondary shoot-out is legendary in certain social circles.
A social circle that consists of you and Aloysius is not, in fact, a social circle.
Inside Beyond Midnight by Josephine Bayer—while the shabby paperback is nothing to look at, someone has added cheerful doodles of a castle, vampire and bats around the title page. A speech bubble attributed to the vampire reads fangs for reading!
Is this a joke?
A book about a reclusive man who shuts himself up in his castle to menace bookshop owners—oh, I’m sorry, peasants—and be otherwise vaguely disagreeable? Wherever would you get that idea.
Absolute drivel. It should have, quite frankly, died with the Count.
Rude. The romance between Edward de Lacey and Lady Isabella is fantastic. Besides, think of all the excellent vampire novels we would have missed out on.
Think of all the terrible ones.
Inside Travels of an Adventuress: Volume 3 by Hyacinth Watson—nineteenth century, clothbound. Obviously well loved.
I defy you to hate this one.
You win. Reluctantly. Her illustrations are really something.
Do you know that she disappeared somewhere in the Alps in 1897?
I did, in fact, know that. It’s detailed quite specifically in the afterword of The Last Diaries of Hyacinth Watson 1893–1897, revised edition.
Do you know that she allegedly took her final manuscript, Doorways to Elsewhere & Other Unnatural Phenomena, with her?
And that she burnt all of her notes before she set off? Almost as if she knew she would vanish?
A fanboy!
Oh God. Please, any other name.
A fanboy by any other name is still a fanboy. (That means no.)
You can’t see me, but I’m banging my head on my desk. Repeatedly.
Listen, Hyacinth deserves her fandom. Even if it’s just the two of us.