The Extra the Vampire Bought Was Supposed to Die in Chapter Twelve novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Sixty-First Floor

Birdie shows her the tower, her father turns up in the lobby for his cut and she shuts him out in public, and that night Benedict asks her one question the book's villain never asked anyone.

Rhinelander Tower had eighty-two floors and a lobby the size of a church.

A woman in a tangerine cardigan was waiting for me there at two in the morning.

She was about five foot three, with a blonde bun, round glasses, and a canvas bag with knitting needles sticking out of it.

"You must be Duck," she said.

"Cassia."

"Cassia, sure. But you're going to be Duck."

She shook my hand with both of hers.

"Birdie Maguire. I run his calendar and everything else he forgets. Don't tell him I said that."

Benedict had already gone up in a separate elevator.

I watched the numbers climb to the top.

"Why Duck?" I asked.

"Because in a building full of wings and fangs, you're the only one who's calm on top and paddling like hell underneath."

I opened my mouth to argue and found I didn't have one.

She took me up to the sixty-first floor.

The guest suite had a wall of glass, a bed the size of a boat, and a basket of chocolate on the pillow.

"He ordered the chocolate himself," Birdie said.

"Six years I've worked for him," she went on. "Two winters ago he got some kind of fever and woke up a different man."

"Different how?"

"He says please now."

I looked at the chocolate and decided I would think about that tomorrow.

I slept anyway, hard, in a stranger's bed.

At nine, I came down to the lobby for coffee.

My father was standing in the middle of the marble floor with two security guards holding his arms.

He had the same navy suit on, wrinkled now.

"Cassia!" he called. "Baby girl, tell them who I am."

Forty tower employees in lanyards stopped on their way to the elevators.

I knew this scene.

In the book, he gets through the side door in chapter four, and tells Dorothea's people which floor I'm on.

If I made this scene in public, with witnesses, he couldn't slip through any side door.

"It's fine," I told the guards. "I'll talk to him here."

My father brightened, and I realized he thought I'd forgive him.

"They said you were sold," he said. "I told them you'd be fine. You always land on your feet."

He lowered his voice.

"Listen, I just need a little of the difference, honey. Lisle's already calling about..."

"Dad."

I said it loud enough for the lanyards.

"You borrowed two hundred twelve thousand dollars against me."

His smile slipped.

"And you sat in the front row while a room full of vampires bid on your daughter."

"It was a business arrangement..."

"The debt is paid. Clause two of my contract says you owe nothing and have no claim on me or on any money."

I turned to the guards.

"Please log his name at the desk. If he's seen on this property again, you call the police and Mr. Rhinelander's lawyers, in that order."

"Cassia..."

"And Dad, if anyone from Lisle Credit calls, tell them the truth. You don't know where I am."

"I don't!"

"Great. Keep it that way."

I walked away.

My hands didn't shake until the elevator doors closed.

Birdie was in the elevator, holding two coffees and a bag of pastries.

"That was the best thing I've seen in this lobby in six years," she said.

"Was it really that good?"

"Duck, the whole building once clapped because a vampire microwaved a bagel. This beat the bagel."

She handed me a coffee.

It was perfect.

At eight that night, Benedict knocked on the door of the guest suite.

He stood in the doorway with a paper bag in each hand, in shirtsleeves, with no jacket.

"Dinner," he said. "Birdie says a person can't live on chocolate."

"Birdie is wrong, but come in."

We ate at the low table in front of the glass.

Me with a pile of noodles, him with a glass of water he never touched.

He watched me eat.

"You're staring," I said.

"I'm not used to company."

"You live in a building with eighty floors of people."

"They work for me."

"So do I, technically. Allegedly. Fine print."

His mouth twitched.

I'd decided to be as hard on him as I would be on anyone's first draft.

He kept not being the man in the book.

When I put down my chopsticks, he spoke without looking at me.

"Your father. In the lobby." His hand was flat on the table. "Did he hurt you? Before. In the years before the card tables."

I stared at him.

Nobody had asked that.

Not in this body's memories, and not in mine.

"He mostly forgot I was there," I said slowly. "Which is its own thing."

He nodded, once, and a muscle jumped in his jaw.

"Then he won't come back," he said, very quietly. "Not past the security desk. Not while I'm alive."

At the door he stopped, with his back to me.

"Goodnight, Miss Haverty."

I sat there with cold noodles and a warm face.

In the book, Benedict Rhinelander never asked anyone that.

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