Page 134 of Thief of Night
Charlie’s poisonous smile was still in place. “Your cousin? Around somewhere. I told her I’d bring you the drink since we need to talk.”
“Do we?”
“Let’s take a turn around the party,” Charlie said.
“If you like,” Adeline replied, her smile faltering. “But I think you ought to have a conversation with Red first. There are some things he needs to tell you.”
“Nah,” Charlie told her, with a flash of a smile in his direction. “Let’s put business before pleasure.”
“Well, then,” said Adeline, taking a sip of her champagne. They walked into the hall, toward one of the parlors where there was less of a crush. As they passed a crystal bowl filled with tinsel hats and curled-up party horns, Charlie took one, turning it in her fingers.
Adeline paused beside a black-and-white photograph of her younger self, hair in pigtails as she sat in a garden full of flowers.
“All new art,” Charlie observed.
“We dragged it out of storage,” she said. “I am bringing some with me to New York.”
“Great,” Charlie said. “But you’re not bringing Red.”
Adeline’s eyebrows rose and her mouth curved in a smile, as though she was looking forward to a particular treat. “And why do you say that?”
“You think you have something over him because you could, what? Tell everyone what he is? Maybe make it seem like he did something bad? And of course, you have that paperwork he must have signed.”
Adeline gave a half shrug at that. She didn’t want herself portrayed as manipulative and probably thought the specifics weren’t important.
Charlie opened her clutch and put the party whistle inside. Then she took out her phone. Pulling up the record app, she pressed play.
“I watched. I watched plenty of people die so shadows could eat. Maybe I even cut a few throats myself.”
“It’s not legal to record someone without their permission,” Adeline said. “That’s a felony.”
Charlie smiled. “Well, I am a criminal.”
The smugness returned to Adeline’s expression. She folded her arms over her chest. “You can’t use it.”
“Of course I can,” Charlie said. “I can put it online, hosted in places that will ignore your takedown notices. I could get arrested, I guess, but one thing you ought to know about me—I have a terrible sense of self-preservation.”
“So what do you want?” Adeline smiled. “Not money, I imagine. Or perhaps not a small amount of money.”
“Leave him alone,” said Charlie. “Red isn’t going anywhere he doesn’t want to go and he’s not doing anything he doesn’t want to do. You’re going to let him walk away as Remy Vincent Carver without you telling him who that is.”
“What could you possibly get out of that?” Adeline asked, acid in her voice. “You think that he will love you when he doesn’t need you anymore? Or do you think he’ll love you for this, for saving him fromme,of all people?”
“He doesn’t need to know about our conversation,” Charlie said. “He just needs to know he’s free. Pretend you’re a good person, if you want.”
Adeline’s lips pulled back in a snarl that was almost a smile.
“I don’t care about you,” Charlie said, stepping closer to her. “But I care about him. He’s not your toy. And before you say something disgusting about me and him, he’s not a toy at all. For a while I thought you didn’t think he was a person and that’s why you treated him the way you did, but I realized that wasn’t it at all. There’s a house full of staff here you’d treat the same way. You don’t think of people as people, do you? We’re all toys to you.”
Adeline shook her head. “You’re wrong. You don’t understand anything about my relationship to Remy, or to Red. For a long time, all we had was one another. We looked out for one another. Cared for one another.”
“If you really believe that,” Charlie said, “there’s only one way to know if he feels the same. Let him decide for himself.”
“He will never be yours,” Adeline told her.
“Oh, I know,” Charlie said. He’d gotten her out of prison. He’d brought a shadow army to save her from Mark. She’d been a lot of trouble.
“This has been an interesting chat,” Adeline told her. “Now I believe I have other guests to be extorted by.”
