Starling (20 page)

with it before he tried to kill her. Cass was desperate to steal it back,
but if she did, then Cristian would know she had been there. Her
fingers closed around the soft leather. She held the book against her
chest, but something felt off. It felt . . . light. Her face crumpled as she
flipped it open. The book was empty. All of the pages had been torn
out.

The journal smelled faintly of ash. Had Cristian burned all of her
thoughts? How much had he read? Cass blushed as she set the hollow
book back into the stone box. There was no need for her to take an
empty journal with her.

Her fingers grazed something else as she went to replace the lid, a
piece of paper folded into a rectangle tucked against the far side of
the box. Perhaps one of her journal pages had survived.

Cass unfolded the faded parchment and wondered if Cristian had
put it in her box by mistake. It wasn’t part of her journal. It was filled
with strange chemical and mathematical symbols. And then she recognized the writing. She had seen the same tight slanted scrawl in
Piero’s journals while she was in Florence. She was holding a page
from the Book of the Eternal Rose. And that meant the book had to
be in Venice.

A door slammed and a sharp breeze blew suddenly through the
room. Cass dropped the stone lid back onto the box and turned
quickly from the shrine.

She paused at the doorway to the secret chamber, her ear pressed
to the wall, listening for footsteps. Nothing. She crept through the
opening, but couldn’t bring herself to pull the bookshelf back into
place. It would make too much noise. She peeked out into the dim
hallway, and her heart went still in her chest. A blond man was hanging his cloak on a hook just inside the front door.

Cristian.
His hair was shorter than Cass remembered, but it was him.
She stood statue-still, her breath locked inside of her chest, waiting, praying he wouldn’t come toward her. He hummed softly. Cass
heard him striking tinder and lighting a lantern. Footsteps. The
creak of a board. She chanced one more glimpse around the corner.
Cristian was heading up the stairs.

Panic clawed at her heart. Would he see her footprints on the
portego’s dusty floor? Could he sense her? Could he hear the blood
roaring through her veins?

She had to get out of there. She crept quickly from Cristian’s quarters into the dusty kitchen. No longer concerned about leaving footprints, she flung herself out the back door.

Dark clouds swirled in the sky, and a rogue drop of rain splattered against her left cheek. It wasn’t until Cass hit the cobblestoned
street that she realized she had not only the paring knife, but also the
palazzo key and the page of equations in her pocket. The key would
be useless—Cristian would change the padlock on the door as soon
as he realized she’d been there—but the page of equations had to
mean something.

She and Luca could study it later.
Flipping the hood up on her cloak, Cass hurried toward the Conjurer’s Bridge. She didn’t hear the footsteps until they were almost
upon her. Looking up at the last second, she collided with a lithe
figure dressed all in black.
The woman peered out crossly from beneath her black veil, and
then her expression melted into one of surprise.