Louisa watched them leave, still clutching her neck, looking distraught. I tapped my finger on the payment, thought about those photos of Bernard and Henry at various awards ceremonies. “Didn’t Bernard have a foundation here? A scholarship program, for new librarians?”
“He did,” she said. “I’m not sure what we’ll do with it now.”
I tapped my check again. “If I gave half of this to the foundation, would you let me give it a new name?”
50
Abe
It had been almost one year—exactly—since I’d found Henry standing at the back of this library, staring out at the beautiful gardens of Oxford University.
He’d had his entire world turned upside down just forty-eight hours earlier. And I’d gone ahead and trusted my gut instinct that, deep down, he’d make one hell of a private detective. And he had.
I slipped my hands into my pockets, surveyed the students strolling across the green. “How do you feel now?” I asked.
“Relieved,” he said, an echo of our former conversation. “I’m not lying this time. I am relieved. I know why you were obsessed with finding him for so long. Bernard represents the worst attributes of humanity. The longer he stayed hidden, the more he would have stolen from the world. All of us finding him, together, is exactly what needed to happen.”
“I agree,” I said, letting out a long sigh. “I’m anxious to know more. Anxious to know how he stayed hidden this past year. But that restlessness is gone. I feel much more settled.”
“Does Sloane have something to do with that?”
I hid a smile. “Yes, she does.”
“Good,” he said. “I speak for all of Codex when I say thank god.”
“Thank god, what?”
Sloane walked up, smile on her face. She was so much more open around people now. Her sultry edges were still there yet softened for those she trusted. And she was trusting a lot more.
“Thank god we met,” I explained, looping an arm around her shoulders.
“Ah,” she said. “Makes sense. I am truly magnificent.”
I kissed the top of her head.
She turned toward Henry and touched his elbow. “I gave half of my payment to Louisa to re-fund the scholarship program Bernard used to run. With a new name, of course.” She handed him a slip of paper. “It’s now called the Dr. Henry Finch Fellowship.”
Henry took it, read it. Looked back at her like he couldn’t quite believe it. “Sloane, you… you absolutely did not have to do this.”
“I wanted to. I was more than happy to.” She shifted on her feet. “Henry, until I was seventeen years old, I was raised by two parents who were con artists. They forced me to do it too.” She didn’t look to me for courage—she didn’t need to. “My parents earned their living by taking advantage of people. Corrupting their trust, manipulating them. The reason why people like my parents, people like Bernard, are so successful at it is because humans want to trust. To connect. To love.” She touched his arm. “I wanted you to know that none of this was your fault. And I’m so happy to see that your ability to love and trust and connect wasn’t stolen from you by Bernard. That gives me hope.”
Henry hugged her. I could see her face, and the look she was giving me was pure excitement.
“Thank you,” he said. “And I hope you come work for Codex. Actually, one year ago Abe approached me here, gave me his business card. Told me I’d make one hell of a private detective.”
“Is that so?” she said.
“It is,” he said. “He changed my life forever. But you already know that about Abe.” Henry nodded behind him. “I’m going to take one more walk around. Meet you at the front?”
The minute Henry left us, I knew what I needed to do. “You are magnificent, truly.”
Sloane was giving me that captivating smile while her hair blew softly in the breeze. I felt in my jacket pocket for a business card, the memories of doing this for Henry were so strong and emotional. I hadn’t anticipated how much one man could change in twelve months.
Her smile turned sly. She held a business card that said Codex between two fingers. “Do you think I’d make one hell of a private detective or what?”
I kissed her—hot, hungry, urgent. “If Henry and Delilah work together, and Sam and Freya work together, there’s not one fucking reason why I can’t work with my gorgeous, charming, sticky-fingered girlfriend.”
She tapped the card against her chin. “So, to be clear, you’re offering me a job?” She examined it closely, then studied me. “And I’m your… girlfriend?”
“Yes, god, yes, I’m offering you a job,” I said. “And also please be my girlfriend.”
“This morning, what we talked about, being with each other after all of this,” she said. “You meant it.”
It wasn’t a question. It never had been.
“I meant it,” I said. “I will break the speed limit driving to see you in New York. Do not doubt it. We can split the time between each city. I will figure out how to make it work if you don’t want to move to Philadelphia. Or even if you do want to move but don’t want to work with me and my taco-obsessed team of detectives. Anything for you. I will do anything—”
This time it was Sloane who kissed me, a kiss full of possibility, of fate. A kiss full of our future.
“I meant what I said too,” she whispered. “My house isn’t a home. You would make my life feel like home. We’ve only known each other a week, I know this is chaos, but I refuse to sidestep my feelings for you, Abe. I like you. More than I’ve ever liked anyone.” Her hand found a spot directly over my heart, palm pressed down. “Trust is hard for me. I promise not to give up. I’m still here.”
I interlaced our fingers over my heart. “And I’m not going anywhere.”
Her teasing smile reappeared. “And we’re two workaholics who have promised each other to have more spontaneous fun. We can’t do that if I’m living two hours away from you, now can we?”
“How many cooking classes do you want to take? I’ll sign up for every damn one on the flight home.”
Her laughter was unfiltered joy. “Not cooking. I’d like to see you on a dance floor, Abraham. Tango lessons.”
“I’m a man of many secret talents, as you know,” I said, kissing right below her ear.
Sloane held up the business card again. “My business is important to me, Abe. I built it on my own but I… I liked working with a team.”
“Perhaps you could consider a merger?” I asked.
She hummed beneath her breath. “Less my boss, more my business partner.”
“Equal footing,” I said. “I like that even better.”
Her eyes searched mine. “So do I, actually. My only suggestion being Freya told me you had a strict PDA policy for the office. And I’ve never known you to keep your hands to yourself, Mr. Royal.”
I didn’t even try and hide my happiness. “I’ll begin revising our personnel policies immediately.”
51
Sloane
Three months later
Philadelphia, PA
I was wearing a pink crown and a sash that said Birthday Girl—although it wasn’t even close to my birthday. But, according to Freya, we needed a formal coronation—her words—celebrating my official start as a private detective working at Codex.
All six of us were sitting around in Abe’s office. I was perched on the end of his desk; he was giving me too lascivious of a look for the workplace, even if he’d just revised his personnel policies.
Freya, Sam, Delilah, and Henry were all clapping for me.
“Thank you, thank you,” I said, standing and taking a bow. It had been three months since we’d all left London, and while I was still in the process of moving my life from Brooklyn to Philadelphia, Abe had already invited me to live with him in his fancy condo near City Hall.
I’d said yes, of course, both of us dedicated to making our house a real home.
Working with Louisa had been my last official case as Arge
nto Enterprises. I was now merging my old cases and former clients with Codex’s and settling into a new routine as the sixth member and Abe’s business partner. Equal footing, as promised. Those five years working on my own had been vital to my own self-discovery, but it was time now to be part of a team.
In the intervening moments, I spent every second I could with Abe or with Codex. They were friends—we were friends. Delilah and Freya had permanently adopted me into their girl gang, and I’d never, ever, ever, been happier. Our taco Tuesdays had become legendary, and most Friday nights Delilah and Freya dragged me to their favorite bars and restaurants in the city—for drinking or dancing or talking the night away.
“Although I’d like to point out that Henry and I didn’t receive a sash or a crown or any kind of formal welcome,” Sam said, bemused.
“Sloane’s a girl,” Freya said. “So it’s more exciting all around. And she’s Abe’s girlfriend, and her existence means Abe will be a lot nicer to us.”
“No guarantees will be made,” Abe said, eying us with affection.
To me, he said, “I can’t imagine Codex without you. You were the final missing piece, Sloane.”
I reached forward, squeezed his fingers. “And you were mine.”
After the nonstop adrenaline of that week in London, Abe and I were simply together. The adjustment for two (former) lone wolves was not without its challenges, but our trust, our intimacy, and our growth deepened every single day.
We were also having the most frivolous, silly fun of our lives. Dance classes, cooking lessons, picnics on our living room floor, weekend road trips, and lazy brunches in bed. After my first video chat with Abe’s moms, they’d told him, definitely, that I was the one.
After we’d hung up, I crawled into his lap and kissed his cheek. “The one, huh?”
He’d scooped the hair off my shoulder before kissing me back. “If I’d called them the night we met, I could have told them the same thing.”
We didn’t get out of bed that night or the next day.
Our nights together couldn’t accurately be put into words, except that I woke each morning with wild sex hair, bite marks on my throat, and a smile of smug satisfaction. We had also broken our fair share of tables in Abe’s home.
There was another reason why today was so exciting. Sam’s father had sent us all the information he had on Bernard and the criminal organization that Codex had helped bring tumbling down. Abe, sensing my shift in thoughts, rapped his knuckles once on the desk.
“Now that Codex is officially a team of six,” he said. “Shall we dive into it?”
There was a chorus of “please—for the love of god—fuck Bernard for real” to which Abe smiled discreetly. “We have the Deputy Director to thank for this, by the way. Though I did appreciate your father thanking Codex in his press conference about Bernard last week.”
“Sam may have had something to do with that,” Freya said. “Andrew Byrne might be… kind of… almost becoming a… half-way decent human being.”
“Finally,” Sam remarked dryly. “He was curious to hear our thoughts after we see all of these updates.”
Codex had still received its fair share of smaller cases. Bernard had fallen, but low-level book thieves were still using a stray Reichenbach Falls code word every so often. For the most part, they appeared opportunistic in nature, not orchestrated on a grand scale. Codex was grateful for a bit of peace and quiet.
Freya projected her laptop screen onto the large white wall and opened all the files Sam’s dad had sent. “Now our glorious leader has read through all of this, right?”
“I have,” Abe said. “If you pull up those first few pictures, I’ll walk us through.”
Bernard Allerton’s mug shot appeared on the screen. He bore a regal pose, academic, but there was true fear in those eyes. Henry let out a long, relieved sigh.
Delilah kissed his cheek. “You did it.”
“We did,” he said.
“We sure fucking did,” Abe said. More pictures appeared on the screen, more mugshots.
“The night that Henry confronted Bernard, he fled to London to hide away in the secret apartment at Adler’s Bookshop, owned by Peter Markham aka Jim Dahl. The Sherlock Society of Civilized Scholars had been using that apartment for years to host all manner of secret meetings or to store stolen books,” Abe said. “Bernard often used that space after he’d come into stolen inventory—it was an ideal place to hide things before being sold off to a private owner.”
“So that was always Bernard’s plan?” Henry asked.
“It seems like,” Abe said. “He knew that, as a wanted suspect, his ability to travel would be limited. He still went around London from time to time to meet with Eudora or interested buyers. That’s why Interpol agents were able to get a few pictures of him. But he was fast, and smart, so always evaded them in the end.”
Henry was shaking his head. “All this time, and he was thirty minutes from Oxford.”
“Those credit card charges in Prague and Germany?” Sam asked. “A red herring, like you thought?”
“Someone in his network did that for him, but we’re not sure who yet,” Abe said. He tapped on a picture of Peter Markham. “This man, Nicholas’s grandson, is an expert criminal forger. He’s been Bernard’s partner for years. Also known as Jim Dahl, he forged the George Sand letters. He forged Henry’s signature on those letters.”
“Jesus,” Henry said, fingers to his mouth. “An expert forger would have made Bernard’s thefts even easier to pull off.”
“And it did,” Abe said. “Peter’s job this past year has been to protect Bernard. Dresden guards were on sight at all hours at the bookstore. During the six months he was here in Philadelphia, pretending to be an intern at The Franklin Museum, the shop was closed down and protected by guards at all times. There was nothing to suspect, certainly not that a man was living in there behind a bookcase.”
Delilah’s brow furrowed. “Jim would have been an intern at The Franklin Museum while we were working to recover the stolen Copernicus.”
“Yes, he would have,” Abe said.
“We might even have met him,” Henry sighed. “And would have had no idea all the things he was planning on doing. Or that he was helping to hide Bernard all along.”
Abe leaned forward, brought up the mugshots of James Patrick, Julian and Birdie, and Eudora Green.
“James Patrick has confessed that he and Bernard had a decades-long partnership that involved the buying and selling of stolen books and antiques using the Kensley Auction House as a cover. Julian and Birdie—not their legal names—are good friends of Bernard’s. Like we suspected, they are con artists who provided the perfect fencing operation for a thief like Bernard to pass his stolen books through. They have been traveling the world for years, pretending to set up bookstores, only to con the hell out of both the buyers and the sellers.”
“And my favorite lady, Eudora?” I asked.
“Your favorite lady is currently in big trouble for concealing a wanted criminal’s whereabouts as well as for her part in buying and selling stolen books. Also for being in charge of the threats against Sloane and me.”
“Even in her mugshot, she looks like she’ll bake you a pie with venom in it,” I said.
“So what was the plot?” Delilah asked. “Did he actually want those papers?”
Abe crossed his arms, looking absurdly pleased to tell us this. “Bernard was informed by James Patrick that these new private papers were going to be auctioned off in a week. Bernard brought James into a scheme to gain ownership of those papers himself. Julian and Birdie were brought in to bid—legally—to provide a safe smokescreen between their purchase and Bernard receiving them into his private collection. As compensation, Julian, Birdie, and James would receive payment from Bernard as well as a few select materials from the collection.”
Freya leaned forward, adjusting her glasses. “And if Julian and Birdie’s bid hadn’t been the winning one?”
Abe knocked his knuckles against the wall of mugshots. “Then James would have worked with Peter Markham to steal the papers that night. Plan A, Plan B. Unfortunately for Eudora, she was used as cover for all of it.”
“Wait,” I said, smiling. “You mean Eudora didn’t really know a thing?”
Abe tilted his head. “Not exactly. It looks like Bernard used her to protect him. The plan she thought she was helping to execute was a fake one.”
“Well, no shit,” I said, astounded. “What did Eudora think was going to happen?”
“She thought Bernard was orchestrating a theft and that the Sherlock Society would ultimately get the stolen papers. She thought she would be getting them that entire time. When Bernard told her he was concerned for his safety—because you and I were following him—he sent Eudora after us.”
“In the form of guards and muggings and fires, I’m guessing,” I said.
Abe nodded. “Exactly. A guard took that picture of us, and Peter wrote a threatening note on it. The guards tried to mug us and attacked us outside the cocktail bar. They followed us; they lit our rooms on fire. Eudora did it without question because it’s Bernard. And because she wanted those papers just as badly. It’s why she told anyone within earshot that the Society would absolutely not be bidding on them. When they eventually ended up stolen, she didn’t want the Society to look suspicious.”
Delilah stared at Eudora’s picture. “How did Bernard know you were in London in the first place? That’s what I can’t figure out. If you approached Eudora as Daniel Fitzpatrick, why would she have reason to suspect you?”
Abe swiped his thumb across his lip—looking even more pleased. “The day after I met Sloane, I visited Eudora at 221B Baker Street. I gave her the code.”
“Reichenbach Falls?” Freya said.
“Yep,” he said. “Gave her the code and asked her to get a message to Bernard. That I might have special access to those papers if he was interested. Eudora, in her confession, told agents that when she reported this conversation to Bernard, he asked to review the security camera footage from her office.”
In the Clear (Codex Book 3) Page 32
