“Not as much as you need concealer, Pru.” Ceridwen glared daggers at Rhiannon.
This is fun.
“I admit, I got a touch overzealous.”
“Rhiannon!” Prudence’s low growl did nothing to settle Rhiannon down or douse her joy.
The door jingled again, and preceding Lachlan, Victoria swanned in, took one look around, and tsked. “A turtleneck and some air freshener should fix most of your current problems, Prudence Ophelia.”
Somewhere nearby something heavy fell, and a voice that could only be Christian’s screamed as if shot.
Rhiannon, heart in her throat, was the first one out the door of the Book Nest and up the stairs of the Atelier, the sounds of the three other women running following her close behind.
It was a dead bird. A dead, hanged bird, swinging off the chandelier that Christian and Lachlan had assisted the electrician in installing just that morning.
Christian himself was standing right underneath it, eyes wide and full of tears, hands clutching what looked like a take-out bag. A few mail packages were strewn over the floor. He must’ve been carrying them in from outside.
He dropped the food too when Rhiannon flung the front door open and blocked her from coming closer. She had seen enough as it were.
It was Victoria who surprisingly beat everyone else to the chandelier, with Pru, Lachlan, and Ceridwen spilling through the door in behind her.
A strange, stifling silence, one that felt greasy on Rhiannon’s skin, stilled around her. She took a few steps into what had begun to feel like her space. A space she was slowly filling with her own touches, her own presence. The place she once hated with all her heart and was only recently beginning to see as hers.
Goddess knew she didn’t want it. Not then and not even now. She had despised it years ago when her mother had almost begged Jerome to take her, to teach her, to show her the magic of book restoration. And the wretched old demon had so much of it. It poured out of his arthritic hands and Rhiannon absorbed it like a sponge. To his credit, he wasn’t stingy with it. With his gift.He had left his mark on the books he gave second, third, fourth lives to. That skill in turn left a mark on Rhiannon. She had been grateful for it, initially.
And then she hated his very existence once she met his much younger than him and lonely wife, misunderstood and forgotten by her husband and by the whole world. Once a talented sculptor with a bright future and now a housewife locked in a loveless marriage.
Of course, it had to be loveless! She was beautiful and gorgeous and he was old and awful. Was it a wonder Rhiannon fell head over heels for the wounded, vulnerable, defenseless Margaux? Was it a wonder Rhiannon, young, impressionable, gullible, and hotheaded Rhiannon battled the entire town to save Margaux? To free her? He was cruel and abrasive, he was thirty years older than her, he didn’t deserve Margaux. Rhiannon did!
And so, Rhiannon fought her mother and her aunt and her sister and Crow’s Nest. The world itself. And then she won. Triumphant, she claimed her prize—Margaux—and a few months later left behind this place, old Jerome, and the judgmental Crowharts.
Rhiannon’s memory unhelpfully supplied her mother’s face, looking at her with so much pity and disappointment, right before she?—
She shook her head and focused on the oaken panels and stained glass. She would rake her own conscience over the coals later. Now was not the time.
Rhiannon couldn’t say that she had ever given the Atelier a second thought, especially after they had moved to LA and opened their auction house. She had seen pictures of it once, about five years into her own marriage. A copy of Crow’s Caw making its way into her hands somehow. The Market Square reconstruction was featured heavily, with the article mentioningthat the Atelier was a sore on the face of the Square, empty and rotting, a gaping wound. Rhiannon remembered the wording making her roll her eyes. Flair for drama that yellow rag always had. And it gave her a secret thrill that the place where Margaux had suffered was decaying.
Now? Two decades later, an older, wiser, burnt, and cut-to-the-quick Rhiannon knew better, and seeing the rotten boards and the gutted walls did not bring her any pleasure. She still detested it, but her reasons were very different this time around.
She half expected, half dreamed that the town would fight her for it. After all, the physical possession over it had been lost for two decades. Surely the mayor would have established some sort of eminent domain over it.
But Jedidiah Fowler simply glanced at her, giving Margaux’s will a cursory read before welcoming Rhiannon back to Crow’s Nest, if she could but sign here and there for the building’s deed. Then he stepped aside the moment the ink dried on the paperwork.
In the month that followed Rhiannon hated every stone, every layer of wallpaper the workers stripped off the wretched walls. She hated it even more when the oaken floors were revealed under the grime and filth of old carpet. When the panels were removed to show masterful brickwork.
She was there for every reveal, every setback, every gem uncovered. And somewhere between the old fireplace puffing smoke once again and the redwood counter being resurfaced and restrained, Rhiannon could not reach the hate anymore. Neither for herself, nor for the Old Atelier. The building had seen her make a mockery of her own life, of the life of other people, yet it had no fault. Rhiannon had done it all herself and she had paid. She would pay more, time and again.
She surely would pay for Margaux. The last five years of their relationship had been hell, and Rhiannon’s heart was still just acollection of chambers and pulsing veins and arteries where her dead wife was concerned. So she sidestepped that acid burn and Christian’s reaching arms and looked death in the empty eyes once again. This time the blank, glassy orbs of a bird. Exactly like Margaux’s had been in that bathtub.
Next to her, Ceridwen’s face was tearstained. Rhiannon wanted to take her shaking hand, yet the thought of touching anyone, anything, was akin to snapping her own bones, small, tiny breaks she couldn’t endure.
It was Prudence who reached for her and their connection, that silver thread, that warmth for once did not scald her skin. It silenced the voices in her head, and in that silence the grief bloomed, blood-red petals on black feathers.
Rhiannon swallowed, and the thorns of unspoken words cut her throat to shreds. Did she whimper? Did Ceridwen? One of them sure did.
And then like a bullet to her chest, Rhiannon’s reality slammed into focus in her eyes.
“Boleyn! Goddess, Boleyn!”
