Page 45 of Thief of Night (The Charlatan Duology #2)

“I told her that you’d discovered our plan and that the Cabal was coming. That I’d come to warn her. I told her to run.”

“Clever,” Charlie said with a snort. “But you really didn’t see the gloamist?”

“The next thing I saw was you.”

“You’re lucky you did.” Charlie met his burning eyes.

“I was wrong about you. I should have seen you more clearly, but I see you now. I have a lot to apologize for.” He took a deep breath, even though she wasn’t sure he needed one. “I don’t always think like a person.”

Red thought like a person who had grown up around a wealthy sociopath who’d had and done everything he desired, but she wasn’t about to make excuses for him.

He caught her gaze. “I am deeply sorry. I will not keep things from you again. I will not make choices for you. I won’t take anything from you, even if the thing I am taking is danger.”

Charlie’s cheeks felt warm. No one talked like that and she didn’t want him to see how much it got to her. “That’s a very pretty apology,” she said, attempting to seem unaffected. “I’ll think about accepting it.”

He closed his eyes. “That’s more generous than I deserve.”

Well, she had something to tell him while he was feeling repentant. “So, I, um, planned something stupid and may have used Remy Carver’s name to do it. I’m going to Solaluna and I plan to steal shadows back from Mr. Punch before he can sell them to a bunch of rich fuckers.”

He glanced up, raising his brows. “So you needed another rich fucker to get through the door?”

She shrugged, since she was still angry with him and unwilling to admit that she had done anything wrong. “If you don’t want to help, I’ll figure out another way.”

“And miss seeing you in action?” he asked, a light in his eyes like maybe he didn’t mind so much that she was a charlatan. Like maybe he liked it.

“Mr. Punch promised you your freedom,” Charlie said. “If we pull this off and he finds out, he won’t support you with the Cabals.”

“They’d never let me go,” Red said. “Even if Mr. Punch really spoke up for me, which I doubt he would.”

Charlie believed there might be a way to hold him to his word. “Still.”

“You want to save shadows?” he asked gently, but with great seriousness. “I am going to help.”

Charlie grinned. “That’s good, since the room is booked in your name. But don’t worry, I used Topher’s credit card to pay for it.”

He laughed out loud. “How old were you when you started scamming people?” There was no judgment in his voice.

“Thirteen,” she said. “Maybe fourteen. Rand needed a kid, I guess.”

“I was about that when we came to live with Salt.”

Her voice dropped to a whisper as though if asked quietly, the question wouldn’t be so bad. “And became his personal assassin?”

He made a motion with his broad shoulders that was half shrug and half acknowledgment. “Salt told Remy that his mother needed help. He offered to put her in the best rehab on the East Coast, so long as Remy would help him with a few small problems.”

“That’s fucked up,” Charlie told him. “Remy was his grandson. She was his daughter.”

Red looked as though he was trying to guess what she thought of him. “It was little things at first. Spying. Stealing.”

“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.

He saw her, 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 she think Rand 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 older man 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.

“He wanted you to have birthday cake,” Charlie said. “And when he was dying, he gave you everything that was left of him. He knew you couldn’t save him, but you could save yourself.”