Chapter Thirty-Two
CHAPTER
Thirty-Two
BYRON PICKS HER up in a car with rust creeping over the bright blue paint.
She looks Cassandra over, and Cassandra knows she must be seeing exactly what Cassandra feels: the reddening across her jaw, which will be a bruise by tomorrow; her jacket ripped to shreds; the spatter of ink across her face.
Cass Holt, unmasked—or Cass Holt, the armour that Cassandra puts on to go to places like this.
She’d always assumed it was the former, but now…
she’s not so sure. Cass of a year ago, six months ago, maybe even up until that night in Roth’s flat, would have threatened hard and fast. Or at least bluffed her way further than she managed.
Not good enough to be an owner. Not good enough to be a thief. What a useless place to be in.
“Are you getting in?” Byron asks tersely.
Cassandra touches her temple, where a headache is already settling in. “Sorry, I just…”
She thinks of a way to account for her state that would make sense. But there’s no way she can explain this to Byron. Nothing that Byron would buy, anyway.
She climbs into the passenger seat, gently dislodging two bags of second-hand books.
Nothing magical, for once—just extra reading material.
Next to her, Byron restarts the engine, with enough difficulty that she swears once or twice, and thumps the wheel for good measure before it catches.
She’s not in her pyjamas, which would make Cassandra feel unbearably guilty—pulling Byron out of bed at this truly ungodly hour—but she is in a sequinned jumpsuit that looks like it could be for a date.
Or at least something more fun than whatever this is.
For a while they drive, the streetlights rolling over the car in flashes of yellow.
Twice, sirens streak past: first a fire engine, then two police cars, hot on the heels of an ambulance.
And what would they find? Ink and glass and shredded books everywhere?
An empty bar? No one in their right mind would stick around to explain to the police, if they could even explain it in the first place.
Sometimes she wonders if the owners really know how thin the line is between their world and mundanity, how grey and blurred its edges are.
How many people exist entirely within it.
“Byron—” she begins.
“I told myself I wasn’t going to ask, but fuck it, I’m going to ask,” Byron says, her hands tight on the wheel. “What the hell did I just pull you out of?”
“Nothing you want to know about.”
“Like I said, I’m asking.”
Cassandra doesn’t reply. There’s no answer she can conceive of that doesn’t involve her spilling all her secrets. Those hard, unpleasant truths. Cass Holt, who wrecked Byron’s life and never even knew about it.
Byron slams on the brakes. Cassandra’s seatbelt digs into her chest as the car jolts to a halt along a grassy verge. For a single, absurd second, Cassandra contemplates scrambling out of the car and running. As far and hard as she can go—anywhere from here.
“Septimus warned me about this job before I took it,” Byron says. “He said that Chiron was the least dodgy of all the owners, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still dodgy as fuck.”
Oh, and doesn’t Cassandra know that now.
“I’ve dealt with a lot of inexplicable shit lately,” Byron continues, staring at the empty road ahead. “Those guys at Sharpe’s. And I’ve been followed home a couple of times.”
Cassandra jolts upright. “What? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Byron gives her a look that suggests she’s being an idiot. “You were keeping secrets, hard. Figured you might not want anything to get in the way of that.”
It takes Cassandra a second to realise the implications of Byron’s words, and the dull weight of shame hits her. Byron thought that Cassandra was dangerous. That she might do harm, the way that Roth—
“But you called me here,” she continues. “At three in the morning, to a bar that was on fire. I’m owed an explanation.”
The silence in the car swells. Cassandra rests her head on the window, unable to look at Byron.
“Septimus could tell you everything you need to know,” she says eventually.
Septimus had made it clear what he thought of her from the beginning. A liability. A danger. He wouldn’t need to tell Byron the whole truth; just enough to poison her. And isn’t that what the truth is anyway, an entire bottle of poison?
“I want to hear it from you.”
As though Cassandra could make it palatable.
She thinks about all the lies she could tell, all the half-truths and almosts, all the versions of herself that had made the smarter decision to forge ahead or turn away—or do anything else than what Cassandra has done.
For a wild second, she imagines telling all of it, instead.
Spilling everything out on the table in all its bloody, shameful glory. But that, too, is just as impossible.
She can’t tell Byron about Cass Holt, or the things that she’s done under the guise of a thief. But Byron deserves better than nothing.
That really only leaves one truth left, even though it’s been so long since she’s said it out loud that it still feels like a lie.
“I was Chiron’s protégé,” she says quietly. “And then… I wasn’t.”
She explains as best as she can. There’s a lot she leaves out—and she can tell that Byron doesn’t buy the haphazard jumps over swathes of time—but she tries to be honest with what’s left.
When she gets to Chiron’s letter, she has to pause and remember what it was like to receive it.
To know that the worst had happened, even though she’d tried so hard to believe otherwise.
It feels like lifetimes ago, like another Cassandra experienced it.
“And that’s it?” Byron says sceptically.
“You have to understand,” Cassandra says, and hates the slight tremor in her voice. “I wasn’t—I didn’t always make the right decisions. And some of those decisions… followed me.”
The man at the reading, his blood ribboning through Cassandra’s fingers. She swallows, nauseous.
“But Chiron gave you the bookshop.”
“If I could tell you why, I would.” She squeezes her eyes shut, takes a deep breath. “You have no idea how impossible he was to satisfy. Whatever I did, I could have done better. Whatever I didn’t do, I should have known. I could make no mistakes, and still be a failure.”
She had realised, somewhere along the way, that there was no point in trying to please Chiron.
It didn’t matter that she’d racked her brains for the cause of his perpetual disappointment in her because it had been staring at her the entire time, obvious as daylight.
She was the cause, in self when not in deed—and there’s no changing that.
More than once, she’s wondered if Lady Fate had whispered in his ear and told him what she would become, and therefore who she really was.
The snake in their garden, venomous and deadly.
But if Lady Fate had intervened then, she must have intervened again.
How else would Cassandra be here, bookshop and bookseller in hand, like she was always destined to have them?
Byron looks at her, oddly unreadable. “So here we are.”
Here they are.
Cassandra lets the silence sit for as long as she can bear it. She can’t imagine what Byron must think of her now. To know that she’d held the river—the world—in her hands, at one point, and that she’d thrown it away—or been discarded by it, depending on who she’d ask.
“Were you out?” Cassandra asks eventually.
Byron closes her eyes; even her eyeshadow is a smear of azure glitter. “Yeah, I was. But I still came for you. That’s what a bookseller is supposed to do. A good one, anyway.”
A good bookseller. Like Lowell. Like Chiron, too, or so she’d thought.
“I’d do it again,” Byron adds.
Cassandra exhales, feeling something perilously close to hope flutter against her ribs. “So you’re not quitting just yet?”
Byron cracks one eye open. “And take my chances at somewhere like Sharpe’s, or worse? Hell no. No offence to Lowell.”
Something burns at the back of Cassandra’s throat. Smoke, probably. Definitely not emotion swelling through her chest.
“I won’t mention this to him,” she adds. “In case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t,” Cassandra says, a little too late to be believable.
Byron rolls her eyes and finally smiles, good-natured. Real. “This is where you go thank you, Byron, in case you weren’t wondering about that, too.” She yawns. “Christ, I’m tired. Let’s go home.”
She turns the key in the ignition and eases the car off the grassy kerb, back onto the road.
The adrenaline from the night’s events is starting to wear off, leaving Cassandra with a leaden exhaustion that reminds her of working double shifts at the bar.
Or, more recently, getting almost beaten to a pulp at Lowell’s bookshop.
What she wouldn’t give for someone to lay out all the cards in front of her and tell her exactly what Chiron was up to before someone decided he was in the way.
Really, what she wouldn’t give for this to be someone else’s problem.
The street lamps stripe the road a hypnotic gold and black. Cassandra leans back in her seat and sighs.
“Thank you, Byron.”