Chapter 906: Missing Book
Chapter 906: Missing Book
The penthouse had settled into a maddening silence by the time Phei made it back — just him and the light.
Day had gone soft and golden at its edges and was sliding, unhurried, into afternoon, and it poured through what was very possibly the most ruinously expensive expanse of glass on the planet, gilding everything it touched.
The vaulted ceiling drank the glow and gave it back gentler:
For one suspended moment the place stopped resembling real estate and started resembling what it had always quietly aspired to be: a resting place for some divine thing pausing between miracles, catching its breath before the next inconvenient act of creation.
’Well. Not entirely far-fetched, is it?’
He smiled at the arrogance of the thought — at how thoroughly he’d earned the arrogance, and how little comfort the earning had turned out to be —
Phei crossed to the wardrobe to change into something the day’s nonsense would deign to call formal.
He didn’t bother reaching for his Sense to find his women.
He knew they were already down below, gilding themselves further, because today was the day he’d decided that they would spend the whole of it together.
All of them; the entire glorious, lethal, squabbling family they’d become would be as one unlike yesterday, which he was still quietly tithing penance for in the only currency that mattered: imagined silver tears at a window he hadn’t been standing at.
Today was the last day he intended to surrender to anything that wasn’t simply living, and he refused, point blank, to spend it alone.
So they were coming to the shoot; Landon and Brian will also be in that gilded little circus, and then straight into the interview, slotted in the moment the Ashford Madam’s advertisement wrapped — the television crew already informed him they’d be right there after.
’Two hours? Perhaps three?’ And then the entire glossy, grasping apparatus could be quietly smothered in its sleep, and he could get on with the actual project of his one wildly improbable life.
First item on that agenda, naturally, was the long-deferred and frankly sacramental rite of going car shopping.
He adored the fleet his grandmother lavished on him beneath the threadbare fiction of hotel cars, the women’s cars, a euphemism that had never once fooled a single living soul, least of all him — but Phei wanted machines that were his.
But not a single car either car; as many cars as his appetite could be coaxed into feeding, which was, historically, a number that did not enjoy ceilings.
’How many?’ He hadn’t the faintest.
The figure would announce itself the way appetites always did, loudly and after the fact. And the women would be drowning in new keys too, obviously — when had Maddie ever wearied of a shining new thing, when had Sierra or Delilah ever once drawn breath to say no, truly, I have enough?
Valentina especially. Quiet, devoted, ruinously patient Valentina, who would never ask for so much as a hairpin and would, for precisely that reason, be buried in chrome and leather until she surrendered.
’Ah~ What a day it is shaping into.’
There was also the other matter — that other matter — which he had to attend to today or tomorrow, depending on how badly today’s festivities ran over their banks.
Only Melissa knew about that one. He let himself sit in it just long enough to append, with something poised between hope and flat certainty, that she’d have found someone genuinely exquisite at the work.
Of course she had. Melissa was anything if not a menace at certain things; Melissa was the breed of woman who measured a blade twice before she ever permitted it to leave her hand. She’d be perfect, because she was always perfect, and that flawlessness had cost her something he was only now, far too late, beginning to grasp the true price of.
"Let’s get dressed, then."
A white shirt, the long sleeves folded back to the forearm — the cotton straining faintly over muscle that had no business existing on a body his alleged age, the tendons shifting beneath sun-warmed skin every time his hands moved.
A few of the topmost buttons were left undone, the parted collar offering a sliver of divine-like chest and the plain silver chain that lay against his throat like a vein of something colder than blood and then black trousers.
Phei tucked the shirt just enough to read as deliberate rather than fussed-over.
He’d carry the jacket draped over one forearm rather than wear it, phone pocketed, white sneakers laced — the velvet horrors had, mercifully, stayed home — and the cumulative verdict, which he rendered with the cool detachment of a man appraising a weapon in a glass case, was that the effect would be flatly insufferable.
He looked, he conceded without modesty or pleasure, like something women would write very poor decisions about.
Good. Let them suffer. Misery, properly distributed, was practically a public service.
He then moved out through the long high hallways toward the living room — toward the bookshelf reaching out blindly like a steadying hand in the dark —
It wasn’t there.
Phei stopped and tilted his head a degree.
There were, in fact, fewer books than the last time he’d taken inventory of this modest little library that wasn’t part of the main library, there were gaps standing in the ranks like missing teeth in an otherwise immaculate smile.
His eyebrow rose before a smile arrived to meet it.
So his women had collectively resolved, today of all days, to perform literacy — to drift about the premises advertising hidden depths and curated interiors.
’Adorable.’
And yet, among the entire luminous family and his women, he’d have staked a continent that exactly one of them would so much as crack the spine of what Rhythms of the Longing Distant Hearts meant, and that was Patricia.
Patricia Bloom, whose whole frequency seemed pitched to some private wavelength he could neither name nor stop hearing, and who — he suspected, without the faintest notion of why — would not emerge from the far side of that book the same woman who had entered it.
Something in her would shift on its hinges. Something would settle into place, or wake, and he wasn’t at all certain which prospect unsettled him more.
’Ah. What am I even circling, here.’
He shook his head at himself, retrieved the watch he’d carried from the wardrobe, and fastened it as he walked, the band cinching cold against his pulse, before he made for the private elevator.
There was no denying it, though; Patricia had something.
He could not get a hand all the way around it; it was familiar and impossibly far away in the same indrawn breath, like a melody hummed in an adjoining room by a voice he was nearly, dangerously sure he already knew.
He’d circle it until it surrendered. He circled everything eventually; it was the leaving-alone he had never once in his short and overcrowded existence managed to learn.
He exhaled, leaned back against the cool panelling of the elevator, and let his eyes fall shut — thinking, with great deliberation, of nothing whatsoever, a luxury he rationed himself perhaps four times a year — until the soft ding reached in and hauled him back out by the collar.
He smiled, and stepped into another long hallway.
The same floor the Ashford Madam was staying in.
And there it went; the composure of an ancient, void-blooded thing dissolving, just at the edges, into something boyish and faintly absurd, a grin he had not strictly authorised tugging insistent at the corner of his mouth as he walked.
The corridor was crowded, and it noticed him the way a still pond notices a dropped stone.
He drew eyes by the fistful — a passing staff whose breath caught audibly behind her trolley; two women in tailored grey who abruptly discovered the wall sconces fascinating and rearranged their spines to track him in the reflections; a young girl near the service door who went pink to the collarbone and pressed her clipboard to her chest as though it might shield her from the simple crime of his existing in good lighting.
The whole hall seemed to lean a half-degree toward him, the air thickening with that warm, helpless attention he’d long since stopped finding flattering and started finding faintly comic.
He let them look.
It cost him precisely nothing, and besides — he was thinking about someone else entirely.
Beaming, frankly while walking the length of that admiring gauntlet like a boy on his way to knock his knuckles against the door of a crush he had absolutely no business harbouring and every intention of keeping forever.
He reached the door and knocked.
When it opened, Phei — who had stared down a Vampire Progenitors without blinking, who had promised a trembling Maxton he would unmake her across the full length of her every future life should she ever once make Melissa weep, who carried a barbed remark loaded and chambered for very nearly every door in the waking world —
— stood there, for one full and graceless breath, with absolutely nothing to say.
Then he stepped inside.
’Heavens forgive me, but I can’t resist her.’