Chapter 3 The Bookbinder's Warning

POV: Imogen

Otto's bindery hadn't changed in ten years, which was exactly why I loved it.

Same crooked sign hanging over the door, the paint gone soft and gray with age. Same bell that jangled too loud when you pushed inside, like it was announcing you to the whole street whether you wanted it to or not. Same smell ,leather and old glue and the particular dust that only comes from paper that's sat quiet on a shelf for a very long time.

Otto looked up from his workbench when the bell rang, and for half a second his face did the thing it always did when he saw me ,softened, just slightly, like a man setting down something heavy he'd been carrying a while.

Then he saw my face properly, and the softness disappeared.

"You look like you ran here," he said.

"I took a cab."

"Same thing, with you." He set down the brush he'd been using to spread paste along a spine and wiped his hands on his apron, slow, giving himself time to look at me the way he always did ,top to bottom, like he was checking for damage. "Sit down before you fall down."

I sat. The stool wobbled the same way it always had.

"I took the Fenwick job," I said, because there was no version of this conversation where I got to ease into it.

Otto went very still.

"You're joking."

"I'm not."

"Tell me you're joking, Imogen."

"I don't joke about two and a half million dollars." I said it lighter than I felt, which was a mistake, because Otto's face didn't loosen at all. If anything, it got harder.

"Two and a half —" He set both hands flat on the workbench like he needed something solid to hold onto. "Do you know what that company does? Fenwick Dynamics isn't some jeweler with more money than sense, girl. They build the systems that hunt people like us. That's their whole business. That's what made them rich."

"I know what they do."

"Then you know what it means that someone's paying that much to go inside their walls." He shook his head, gray hair catching the lamplight. "Nobody offers that kind of money for an easy job. That's not payment. That's an apology in advance."

"I need this one, Otto." I hadn't meant to say it that plainly, but it came out anyway, raw around the edges. "This is the last one. I mean it this time."

"You've meant it three times before."

"I know."

"And here you are anyway."

"I know." My voice cracked, just slightly, on the second one, and Otto's face changed again ,not softer, exactly, but something adjacent to it. Worry wearing anger's coat.

He came around the workbench and sat on the stool across from me, close enough that our knees almost touched, the way he used to sit when I was younger and something had gone wrong on a job and I hadn't known yet how to hold my face still while I talked about it.

"Tell me the rest," he said. "Because there's a rest. I can see it on you."

So I told him.

I told him about the message on the train, the coded shipping confirmation, the six lines that added up to more money than I'd ever seen attached to a single job. I told him about the headline ,my name, my real name, tied to a robbery I hadn't committed, in a city I hadn't visited in years. I told him about the second headline, two hundred miles away, same week, same impossible name.

By the time I got to the man on the platform ,the mask, the shoulder bump that wasn't an accident, the two words he'd murmured before disappearing into the crowd ,Otto had gone pale in a way I'd never seen on him before. Not the pale of a man startled. The pale of a man who'd been waiting, dreading, for exactly this conversation to happen.

"Otto." I reached out and touched his sleeve. "What is it?"

He didn't answer right away. He got up instead, crossed to the front window, and turned the sign hanging in it from OPEN to CLOSED, even though it was barely past four in the afternoon.

"Otto."

"I've been hearing things," he said finally, still facing the window, his back to me. "For over a month now.". People in the Old Quarter ,the kind of people who trade in names for a living, same as we do ,they've been asking questions."

"What kind of questions?"

"About you." He turned around, and his face had settled into something grim and careful, a man choosing his words like they might explode if he got them wrong. "Not Sabine. Not Celeste. Not any of the names you've worn. They've been asking about the real one. Imogen Vance. Whether she's still alive. Whether anyone's seen her recently. Whether anyone knows where she went after —"

He stopped.

"After what?" I said.

"After the job that killed her old life," Otto said quietly. "The one you never talk about. The one that made you come to me in the first place, ten years ago, half-starved and scared out of your mind, asking me to help you disappear."

My chest went tight, an old, familiar ache waking up somewhere behind my ribs. I hadn't thought about that job in years ,hadn't let myself, not really, not past the edges of it. Julian's face flickered at the corner of my mind and I pushed it away before it could take shape.

"Who's asking?" I said. "Give me a name, Otto."

"I don't have one. That's the trouble. Whoever it is, they're careful. They ask through three people before the question ever reaches someone who might know an answer, and by the time it does, nobody can trace it back further than a stranger in a bar who bought a round of drinks and mentioned your old name like he was just making conversation."

"That's not nothing, Otto. That's a pattern."

"I know what it is." His voice sharpened, an edge of fear pushing through the calm he usually kept so carefully. "That's why I'm telling you to walk away from this job. Tonight. Before Veil Week even starts. Take whatever they've paid you up front and disappear somewhere they'll never think to look."

"I can't just —"

"You can." He crossed back to me, gripped both my hands in his, his skin dry and warm and shaking, just slightly, in a way that frightened me more than anything he'd said so far. "Imogen. Listen to me. Someone else asked these same questions six months ago. Same city, same whispers, same careful trail that led nowhere."

"What happened to them?"

Otto's grip tightened.

"They turned up in the river three weeks later," he said. "Nobody ever found out who they'd been asking on behalf of. Nobody ever found out why."

The bindery went very quiet, the kind of quiet that has weight to it, that presses against your ears until you can hear your own heartbeat too clearly.

"You're telling me," I said slowly, "that whoever's using my name ,whoever's hunting the real one ,has already killed once to keep the trail clean."

Otto didn't answer.

He didn't have to.