Chapter Thirty-Eight
CHAPTER
Thirty-Eight
CASSANDRA MAKES THE walk to Sharpe’s, deliberately avoiding a replay of the conversation with Edmund by focusing on everything she’s gleaned about the river.
She’d meant to discuss this with Lowell when he’d visited, before she’d been…
distracted. But truthfully, she’s put this off as long as she can. Their date will have to wait.
The river is dying, taking the bookshops with it—and maybe more, if she’s read between Edmund’s lines well enough.
The choices from the paradox books will snap, like wires stretched too taut, the consequences spooling back through time, until the world is once again unshaped by the tributary owners’ haphazard decisions. Unshaped… and unrecognisable.
The society know. The owners know. Roth—well, that she’s still deliberating. But it’s clear that they want access to the bookshop below. Perhaps to pull a paradox book and attempt to save the river, though it seems improbable now; perhaps to try something else entirely.
The only puzzle piece that doesn’t fit is Chiron. Except that the vial of ink she’d found in Roth’s flat had felt an awful lot like the ink she’d used for that disastrous reading. And Chiron’s quest for books on ink surely can’t be coincidental.
She can almost grasp how they fit together. Almost. And with Lowell’s deep knowledge of the bookshops, she can practically see the end of this mystery, once and for all. What they’ll do once they have the answer is another question entirely.
She desperately hopes it’ll be more than watch the world unravel and the river die.
When she opens the door to Sharpe’s, she spies Lowell, attending to the bookshelves as always, and something in her heart softens.
But the atmosphere has a peculiar charge to it, and she pauses, unnerved.
A second later, she notices Byron in the corner, head bowed as though she doesn’t want to be seen.
Then Edmund appears. The pale grey of his eyes is creased in a smug satisfaction that leaves her cold.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Edmund says, with a killing smile. “What did you say, scum floats to the top? And how far you’ve risen, Cass.”
Something in her stomach drops. Edmund, calling her bluff.
“Byron?” Cassandra tries to conjure the self with authority, the owner she has been playing for the last months. “Don’t listen to him. If you knew what he’s done, what he’s witnessed—”
Edmund holds up one careful finger. “Let me tell you a story, Cassandra. For years now, we’ve known about a talented thief.
I say ‘talented,’ but it seems somewhat crass to call a thief anything but lucky.
We knew she was a woman, and that she’d had some experience in a tributary bookshop because of the way the books would disappear.
Like magic, no matter how hard we tried, or how many precautions we took. ”
Cassandra’s chest constricts. She can’t breathe.
“Cass Holt cost people money that they needed. Jobs that they’d held with pride. Imagine my surprise when I learnt who it was, some weeks back.”
“It was you?” Byron says, and there’s no mistaking the heartbreak of betrayal.
Cassandra risks a look at Lowell, but his gaze is firmly on his brother.
She should lie. She can still get out of this; she just needs to regain control of the situation.
“Edmund has done—all sorts of things,” she says, but even this sounds hollow. “He’s threatened other owners, he’s—”
“Is it true?” Byron demands, and Cassandra knows she’s not talking about Edmund’s sordid reputation.
Because of course, Byron would already know about Edmund Sharpe, to a degree.
Byron, who talks to everyone, and in doing so, would have heard the gossip, the rumours of shady dealings and soured relationships.
It’s Cassandra who has crafted a blank and inscrutable past. Who has left herself open, after all.
Lie, Cassandra. But the excuses keep sliding away from her. And there’s Byron’s reproachful expression, beyond pain.
“I can explain—” she begins.
“A book thief, owning a bookshop.” Edmund lets out a sharp laugh. “The irony. Well, not just a book thief.”
Cassandra can feel it coming. The night of the fuck-up: the reading. The young man who had died in her arms. The blame so firmly upon her because there could be no other reason.
“Don’t,” she says, and she hates that it sounds like a plea.
But Edmund continues, relentless. “They should know what you did. What was his name?”
She doesn’t say anything. She could walk out this door and keep going. Keep running. Cassandra, who breaks everything she touches.
“You killed a man, and you don’t even know his name. But I do. Arthur Sharpe.”
“No,” she says hoarsely.
But Edmund’s entire face tightens, and it’s not false pain. This is real.
She feels herself go very still, as if her mind is watching from afar. Her mind, screaming, I killed Arthur Sharpe. Something cold and distant takes over.
“Lowell,” she says.
Lowell looks at her, then. Cassandra wishes he hadn’t. His eyes, usually unfathomable, are black with anger.
She could say something more. She could tell him that Arthur was a terrible accident.
Everyone’s fault, a collective manslaughter.
It was Arthur’s choice, just as it was hers, to read from a book still dripping with the waters of the river.
That the pages were already soaked through with his blood, and only later would they realise it.
She could tell Lowell that she still dreams of his eldest brother’s face, his eyes wide with horror.
The way his hands kept slipping in hers, bloody and slick and trembling.
That she still knows the shape of his lips as he’d mouthed a last, indecipherable word.
A word that haunts her because he’d wanted to say something, and she’d been too useless for such a simple thing.
That she couldn’t even grant a dead man his last wish of being heard and understood, and what a profound thing they have lost instead.
She could tell Lowell that there are some things too monstrous for forgiveness, and so she won’t ask for it, and insult him on top of everything else. She’ll never forgive herself, anyway.
She could tell Lowell these things, but she doesn’t.
Instead, she turns to Edmund. “We had a deal.”
“I made no such thing with you,” he says, with a tone that would imply self-righteousness if she didn’t know he was lying.
And the worst part is that she can’t prove it. Who would trust her now? They would have believed Cassandra Fairfax, owner. But Cass Holt is just some nobody thief. A liar, who killed a man because she was too arrogant, too convinced of her invulnerability.
You break everything you touch.
“Edmund, you—” She breaks off; Lowell is turning away, leaving. “Lowell, please.”
“I’ve heard—” he closes his eyes “—enough.”
Cassandra’s gaze turns to Byron. She wants Byron to scream at her. To get angry, or to cry. Anything would be better than this terrible stillness.
“Did you find it funny?” Byron says, and it’s her quiet calm that scares Cassandra more than anything. “Did you enjoy that power play?”
“I didn’t know—” Cassandra begins, the lie already wedged between her teeth.
Byron cuts her off. “You knew because you asked me. All those small, clever questions, like I couldn’t tell you were hiding something.” She pauses. “I’ve put up with a lot from you because that’s what a bookseller does. But this? It’s not worth it.”
Byron follows Lowell, and Cassandra starts towards them. She has to make this right somehow. But Edmund grabs her roughly.
“I told you to leave my brother alone.”
“Fuck you,” she spits.
But it’s an empty anger, and they both know it.
“You already killed Arthur,” he says, and her heart stutters. “Haven’t you done enough to my family?”
The fight goes out of her instantly. Yes, she thinks. She’s done more than enough damage. Her heart seizes.
“Then get out of my bookshop, and don’t come back,” Edmund hisses.
She flees.
The long walk home isn’t long enough. But too long to spend by herself, to work through every single decision she’s made that’s led up to this moment. She so badly wants to hate Edmund for this, but the truth is that there’s no one left to hate but herself.
She could have told Byron at the bar. Or at the fair. At the auction.
She could have told Lowell who she was when she’d stolen the book from him, when he’d asked her what she was really doing the night she’d come to Sharpe’s after Roth’s flat.
When he’d come into the bookshop and seen her for exactly what she was: unsuitable, inadequate, less than nothing because at least nothing doesn’t take. And how Cassandra has taken.
Or she could have told them how badly she wishes she could turn back the clock, so she would have never done any of this in the first place.
A Cassandra who doesn’t know what death looks like because she hasn’t already held it in her hands.
A Cassandra who is never tempted to take books because their song mirrors the one in her heart.
Cassandra, who is Chiron’s protégé as he’d envisioned, and a bookseller Septimus might respect, and who might have had everything she wanted and more had she not thrown it all away.
My God, how she regrets.
She fumbles with her key twice as she tries to open the door to the bookshop.
Her hands don’t seem to be working as well as they usually do.
So what if they know? So what if Lowell knows?
Now they have the truth of her: thief, liar, con artist. And it’s not as if she went to great lengths to hide herself.
Lowell had known the second he’d walked into the bookshop, and Byron… well, she isn’t stupid, either.
It is what it is. It’s all there is.