by Krista Walsh
Vera stared into his sunglasses, wishing he could be less wonderful than he was. But as much as she wanted to cut ties with him as smoothly and quickly as possible, she accepted that what he said made sense. She would feel safer knowing there was someone watching who would have her back if everything went to hell.
Reluctantly, she nodded.
“Good,” Ara said, releasing a breath. Vera hadn’t noticed how worried her friend had been that she would turn him down. “So where do you want to hide these books?
Her throat still too tight for words, Vera held out a hand. Gabe set the replica into her palm. The silent request-response had come so naturally to her that she didn’t appreciate its significance until she caught Ara’s arch stare. Heat filled her cheeks and she looked away, refusing to consider the possibility that she would never again meet anyone as suited to her as Gabe was.
For what seemed like the millionth time, her brain scrambled to find some way that she could balance their relationship against all the duties hanging over her, but once again, any possible solutions crumbled under her certainty that the responsibility of keeping him safe would be one too many for her to handle. She could never live with herself if something happened to him, or if, in saving him, she lost the book.
She wished she could overlook the truth of their lives and take a leap of faith. Gabe was strong and resourceful, and a second pair of eyes would be an advantage in her flight. But even if he did keep watch with her, it would be harder to hide two people than one. And with his ability, he would always stand out.
Maybe when this was all over, there would still be a chance to reconsider. For now, it couldn’t happen.
She moved into the staff room behind the counter and pulled back the painting of the shop to reveal the safe. With the quickness of a five-year habit, she worked the two seven-digit combination locks on the door and heaved it open. With the replica wrapped in its oilcloth, she rested it under the cash from yesterday’s sales, then covered it with another layer of velvet and placed three of her less valuable first editions on top. By the time she was finished, it wasn’t obvious that a fourth book lay hidden beneath them.
All she had to do was hope Rega and Humphrey bought the display. Such a small thing to ask in the scheme of her life, and yet the odds teetered on a knife edge. There were too many factors out of her control, which scared her, and the stakes increased the gamble almost to the point of making it not worth the bet. Part of her was tempted to forget her plan, go upstairs, pack a bag, and disappear without giving the thieves a chance to act. Take Gabe and Ara with her, grab Vidar and Baxter from the farmhouse — her poor furbabies; she hoped they were okay on their own — and run. But the chase would be so much tighter, with too high a possibility of being caught.
She had to push forward with the path she’d laid out for herself.
And when they discover the truth? Where will they look first?
Vera squeezed her eyes shut and imagined Ara at their mercy. Of course they would return to the shop. They could grab Ara on her way home one night and demand to know where Vera had gone. Ara would tell them the truth, that she didn’t know, but they likely wouldn’t believe her. How hard would they push her to prove she’d given them all the information she possessed? The back of Vera’s throat burned with acid, and shards of broken wood pierced her palm where she had cracked the edge of the frame around the painting.
She would just have to find a way to leave a message for Rega so he followed her trail. A friendly challenge of ‘Catch me if you can.’
“Vera?” Ara’s voice drifted through her turmoil, and Vera sucked in a breath.
She could no longer keep the rest of her plan a secret from the others. As tempting as it was to slip out tonight without them knowing, her sudden absence would leave them in too much danger. She had to give them time to prepare their own defenses. To come up with plans of their own.
Wiping her expression of anything other than confidence in her decision, she turned toward them and smiled. The effort made her feel as though her face were made of stone.
“I’ll keep the other book upstairs with me,” she said. “I’ll have to stay in the shop until Rega comes to get the replica, and after that it will be time to leave. I —” She cast her gaze to the corner of the room to give herself a moment to find her composure, and then she raised her chin to hide her grief. “I think it would be best if you two didn’t know where I was going.”
“What?” Gabe asked, his voice no more than a whisper against Ara’s startled cry.
“Vera, no,” she said. Her face was horrified. Her green eyes darted toward Gabe and back to Vera, clearly thinking about what Vera had said about him earlier. “You don’t need to leave to make this work. We can come up with a solution here. We have time.”
“We don’t,” Vera said, shutting down her emotions and concentrating only on the necessity of her mission. “That’s the point. If the thieves fall for the fake, I give them a day, maybe two, to discover it isn’t real. That’s a narrow window for me to disappear. I’m going to guide them away from you, but you need to be ready in case they don’t trust the trail.”
“What about Vidar and Baxter?” Ara asked.
The thought of her dogs made Vera quake, but she bit down on the inside of her lip hard enough to taste blood. “If you’ll watch over them for me, I’ll know I’m leaving them in good hands. Hopefully it won’t be for very long. I have contacts I can seek out who might know more than what Percy can find online. Once I know what we’re up against, I can come back and face them.” With effort, she looked to Gabe, whose expression could have been carved from marble. “You pointed out yourself that right now it’s not possible to take these bastards down. There are too many of them with too many unknown variables.”
The small room seemed to shrink around Vera, the air growing too thin to breathe. She edged into the shop, skirting around Ara to go up to her apartment. The other two followed.
“So you’re just going to leave us behind and not let us know where you are or if you’re safe?” Ara asked. “What if something happens to you? How would we ever know?”
Vera didn’t acknowledge the argument. She opened the door and froze when she stepped inside. Without her or the dogs to stop them, Rega and his crew had trashed her apartment in search of the book. The couch cushions had been torn apart, the stuffing strewn across the rug. Books had been pulled off the shelves, her kitchen cupboards emptied, food from the fridge and freezer left to thaw on the counters and floor. Her throat closed, but her eyes remained dry, too heavy with exhaustion to summon the effort to cry. She wished Baxter and Vidar were here, their tails wagging, begging attention. As it was, the apartment felt empty. As though her life had already changed and she’d already lost what mattered most to her.
“I’ve gone through all the options,” she said in reply, “and none of them gives us a better chance than my disappearing. I have enough money and the right contacts to change my identity when I need to. I can go anywhere in the world, and if I catch a whiff of Rega, I can keep moving. Maybe the Collegiate will step in and deal with him for me, but I can’t rely on that. It’ll be easier to travel quickly on my own.” Vera caught Ara’s gaze, and her heart clenched at the tears swimming amid the mossy stare. “I have faith that you can handle things here, and I promise I’ll be in touch with you as often as I safely can. But we have too much to lose for me not to do whatever it takes, no matter how much I don’t want to go.”
The two stared at each other for a full minute before Ara dropped her gaze and nodded. Her shoulders slumped, and when she spoke again, it was with the voice of someone who’d had her joy stripped away. She brushed back her hair with shaking hands, and in a wobbly voice said, “I need to get some sleep. I know you believe this is for the best, but think it over again tonight, all right? There has to be another way.”
She threw her arms around Vera’s neck. “Please rethink this,” she whispered, softly enough that only Vera could hear. �
�At least don’t go alone. Don’t take the risk of losing what could be the best thing to ever happen to you, just for the sake of a bunch of uncertainties. It’s not worth it.” She pressed a kiss against Vera cheek, her tears staining her chin, then she turned her back and hurried downstairs without looking at her again.
The silence in the apartment grew heavier, and Vera’s heart struggled to keep its rhythm under Gabe’s steady stare. He closed the door behind Ara, then leaned against it, crossing his arms.
He’d said nothing after his initial protest, and by the way the muscles in his jaw bulged, Vera suspected he was going to wait until she spoke first.
His anger had ebbed and flowed throughout everything that had happened, but so far he’d managed to keep it restrained. Now Vera guessed that she was about to face the brunt of it. That part didn’t scare her. Furious or not, he wouldn’t hurt her. But she would be hurting him. Nothing he might say would sway her decision, so unless he acknowledged her logic and allowed her to end things amicably, there was no way he was walking out of here unscathed.
Knowing her reasons didn’t make this situation any less painful. She was grateful to him for showing her a glimpse of a future she could have had. A temporary step into the life her parents would have wanted for her. It had been perfect, and she would hold the memory with her when she was far from home, without friends or family to support her. But her feelings for him would be a weakness — a threat to both of them — if she held on to them. He had to see that.
Resolved to get this moment over with, she said, “I’m sorry.”
With stiff movements, Gabe removed his sunglasses and hooked them into the front of his shirt. He met her gaze, the sparking heat of his anger swimming in the snake-like depths. He was already in pain, and she was about to drive the knife deeper into his heart.
Clearing her throat, she folded her hands in front of her.
“You never intended to come back to the farmhouse with me, did you?” he asked. “From the beginning, your plan was to leave me behind and run on your own.”
“Yes,” Vera lied. What would be the point of telling him that she’d tried to think of a way to stay with him? It would only give him hope, and she didn’t have enough for herself to offer any falseness to him.
“Why?”
“I already told you, it’s safer for me to be where no one can find me. That way these men have no reason to go after you or Ara. Everyone I care about will be left alone.”
“You’ll be left without any kind of support,” he said, his voice harsh. “It makes no sense to go out on your own. Why wouldn’t you want me to come with you? With my connections, we could go so far underground, they’d never be able to find us.”
“You would leave your business to fade away? You’d leave Percy?”
Gabe clenched his fist and brought it back hard enough against the door that it trembled on its hinges.
“To hell with my stupid business, Vera. I started it to help people. To bring some goddamned purpose to my life, but none of it means as much to me as you do. Do you not understand what you are to me? I’m not giving you up just because some demons are threatening to hunt me down. The Fates brought you into my life, and I’m not going to turn my back on that.” He clenched his jaw and his nostrils flared as he exhaled. “If you’d given me a reason to think I stood no chance, I wouldn’t be here fighting for you. But you can’t lie to me and say that the last two days meant nothing.”
Vera’s throat closed. She hated that he was making her fight. She wanted to regress into silence and keep her feelings to herself, but his stubbornness would never let him leave without hearing the words that would hurt him most.
She wished she could tell him that as long as she lived, there would be a part of her that regretted walking away. That even in the few days they’d spent together, she’d had visions of a possible future, of happiness and support, faith and loyalty. But admitting all of that would only make it so much harder to convince him to leave. If she gave him hope, he wouldn’t stop pushing until she agreed to stay or let him come with her, and the chances of failure were too high to allow that. Duty had to come first.
She squared her shoulders. “That time with you meant everything to me, Gabe,” she said. “But it was a vision of paradise that could never withstand the trials of our real lives. You know as well as I do that changing old habits is next to impossible, and changing them for someone else is even more so. We’d be happy for a couple of months, but I know myself too well to believe I could keep you front and center of my attention for longer than that. You deserve someone who would. I have too much to look after. Too much responsibility to carry.”
“Goddamn right you do,” he said, and the shake of his words revealed his slipping hold on his otherworldly rage. “You have so many responsibilities that you hold them in front of you like a shield. None of them matter as much as you claim they do, but that doesn’t stop you from toting them around like a martyr, does it?”
Vera’s mind numbed, and any response escaped her.
“You talk about keeping balance in your life, but all you’ve done is pile your responsibilities around you like an impenetrable wall. You’ve built yourself the same kind of prison that keeps Percy in his warehouse. That’s not bravery. That’s not responsibility. It’s cowardice.”
He’s lashing out because he’s hurt. That’s all this is, she told herself. She couldn’t let him see how much his words stung her. She kept her expression neutral, even as her stomach cramped.
“You’re afraid to change,” he went on. “You’re afraid of re-evaluating everything in your life, because you’re too safe in your comfort zone to risk something good happening for you. Something that gives you the same sense of freedom you experienced at the farmhouse. You’d rather walk around with your nose buried in your planner, incapable of laughing, incapable of seeing what life is trying to offer you. I can see myself falling in love with you, but you’d rather lie to yourself and believe that sacrificing your feelings for me will save the world.”
He fell silent and stared at her, seemingly begging her to contradict him, but she couldn’t. Even if she’d wanted to — and oh, how she wanted to — she couldn’t. Her heart had climbed so far into her throat that her lungs burned at the lack of oxygen in her empty chest. Tears threatened, but she wouldn’t let them fall.
She wished she could argue with him and call him an asshole for saying the things he had, but he was right. She was all of those things. And it was better he saw it now and walked away than discovered it later. He had to leave so she could lose herself to grief and fear. He had to leave so she could save him.
After a while, he shook his head and reached for his sunglasses. “I hope you never have reason to look back on this decision and realize you made the wrong choice.” He slid his glasses on and created an immediate curtain over his emotions, cutting Vera off from him. As if the man she’d developed feelings for had already walked out, taking a part of her with him, and only this angry, hurt version of him remained. He turned to open the door and, without looking back, said, “Take care of yourself. I hope you don’t wind up dead.” He slammed the door behind him and stormed down the stairs.
Vera remained frozen as she listened to his footsteps pass through the shop. Her muscles screamed at her to move, but they were too heavy. His last stare at her through those dark lenses may as well have been the look that finally broke through her immunity and turned her to stone.
The spell broke when the front door slammed shut. As though she were drowning, Vera gasped for breath, her lungs squeezing out air even as she tried to suck more in. She collapsed into her rocking chair, her legs no longer strong enough to hold her up. The fire in the grate was out, her dogs weren’t home, she’d broken her best friend’s heart, and she’d pushed away the only man who filled the emptiness that had lived inside her for as long as she could remember.
She was on her own, just as she’d planned, and she’d never felt lonelier.
15
Vera cried until her head ached and she had no more tears left to shed. By then, the gray day had passed into evening, and she wondered where the hours had gone.
So much had happened in the last couple of days that she’d lost any sense of time, and all she wanted was a hot cup of tea so she could begin to sort everything out. She felt a moment’s panic when she discovered her planner wasn’t on the table beside her chair, and then she remembered it was still at the farmhouse, sitting on top of her suitcase.
Turning on the table lamp, she staggered into the kitchen. At least Rega and his goons had been kind enough to leave her kettle and tea selection untouched. While the water boiled, she washed her face in the sink, clearing the tear streaks from her cheeks. Then she sorted through the kitchen mess and grabbed the box of chocolate-covered biscuits. If ever there was a time for chocolate, it was while you were nursing a broken heart, working through the revelation that your whole family history was a lie, and waiting for a homicidal demon to rob you.
The kettle clicked, and Vera went through the motions of preparing her tea. The moves were automatic, so ingrained in her muscle memory that she only became aware she was making them when she tripped over the edge of the mat in front of the sink on her way to the compost.
Drips of tea dribbled over her thumb, but she didn’t feel the heat. She was too numb. Too tired.
Tea and biscuits in hand, she returned to the living room, set the dishes on the end table, and bent over the grate to start a fire. Fatigue had worn down her resilience to the October chill, and she craved the comforting crackle and pop of the flames.