Page 91 of Thief of Night
“Yeah, it starts with the little things,” Charlie agreed with a sigh. “They’re the reason you have to do the bigger things. By the time you realize it, you’re in so deep that you’re drowning.”
“Rand?” he asked.
Charlie looked away. “It’s not like he was a bad guy.”
“What’d he have over you?”
She opened her mouth—not sure if she was about to lie or not—when her throat closed up around the words. It would be easier, she thought, to tell him, if she didn’t like him so much. The shame of what she’d done—deceiving her mother in such a childish, fumbling way and succeeding—was fresh in her mind.
Still, of all people, he might not judge her.
She took a deep breath and looked at the floor, deliberately not meeting his eyes as she told him the story of Travis moving in with them. Of him hitting Posey and their mother not believing it. And then Charlie, always with a scheme, pretending to be a medium. Of channeling Alonso Nieto, warlock. Of drawing her mother into believing. Of becoming more interesting and beloved as Alonso than she’d ever been to her mother as herself.
And then Rand discovering her secret.
“He was going to tell Mom and then she would have hated me,” Charlie said. “She would have blamed me for the end of her marriage with Travis.”
“And now she knows,” he said.
Charlie looked at the floor. “Maybe she won’t be so mad. I think she’s happy with Bob—”
“The Magic card guy?” Red asked.
It always threw Charlie that Vince had paid attention to the little things. The throwaway comments she made about people or her past. The gossip that flowed around Rapture. She’d never had a boyfriend do that before and it was alarming and gratifying in equal measure. Hesawher, but sometimes she felt safer not being seen. Red did it too and it unnerved her all over again. “Yeah, the Magic card guy—who’s going to want you to come to Christmas dinner, by the way—but even if Mom isn’t mad about Travis, she’ll still be furious I made a fool of her. And I took something away from her. She really believed she spoke to a spirit who chose her because of her spiritual importance.”
He considered that for a long moment. “What did shethinkRand was doing with you?”
It wasn’t just the attention Red paid to what she said that was disturbing either. He was unnervingly good at spotting the part of a story that didn’t quite add up, the dissonant note. It had never been easy to con him. “He was part of her spiritual group, so she thought he was mentoring me in my abilities—you know, as a medium.”
Red gave her an incredulous look.
Charlie shrugged. That was just one part of the raft of unsaid things between her and her mother—things that had been better off that way, but would always bother her. Even back then it hadn’t seemed right to let Rand spend so much time with Charlie. She’d been a young girl, alone with a much older guy, and even though he’d been instructing her on the finer points of swindling, pickpocketing, and scams, her mother hadn’t known that. As not-great as he’d been, he could have been something much worse. She had no illusions that her mother wanted to see nothing evil in an olderman who kept one of her daughters busy and sent her home with money or gifts. Since Charlie didn’t want to say any of that, she changed the subject. “Why did you help me back then?”
“I—” He hesitated.
She thought of him again, as the boy he would have appeared to be, crouched over Rand’s body, blood on his mouth. “Remy never knew, did he?”
Red shook his head.
“Was it hard to keep things from him?” Charlie asked, wrapping her arms around her knees.
“No,” Red said. “He wanted me to keep things from him. That’s what I was for. Like a vault full of everything you don’t want to see.”
She didn’t like the way he talked about himself. “So, why did you smuggle me out of the mansion that night?”
“Because I thought you had a chance,” he said. “And I liked you—the beet juice was funny and clever. It might have worked, before Salt discovered shadow magic. I didn’t want you to wind up like the others.”
Charlie thought of how many people he might have seen die, murdered by Salt and his friends. Thought about what Adeline had said about her own participation, about what Red had been forced to do.
“Did Remy ever hurt—” Charlie began.
He looked away. “Remy never did anything by his own hand.”
Red might be good at seeing the dissonant notes in other people’s stories, but that didn’t mean he saw them in his own. She believed that he missed Remy. She believed that he loved Remy and would have done anything to have him back. But underneath all that was fury at bearing the brunt of their pain for so long. Rage at being loved, but not well enough to keep the person who loved him from using him cruelly. And guilt over Remy’s death that kept him from examining any of those emotions, leaving them festering inside of him.
Charlie recognized the feeling. “He would want you to be happy.”
“You don’t know that.” Red didn’t snap at her, but she could hear the tension in his voice.
