All I Have

Chapter 17 ~ DIY SOS; Can You Use Human Intestines as Fairy Light Decorations?

The art gallery doesn't look anything like I remember it when I arrive the next day. I think we only ever visited a couple of times, but my brain looks at the white wood and doesn't recognise anything about it. I wonder for a minute if possibly I'm at the wrong place, but I double check the address and I'm right.

After I found Charlie's note, I spent a few hours looking up the gallery online, before cursing myself and wiping my internet history. I don't go as far as hiding my laptop under the drain grate in the shower, because if the agency ever thinks to check what I've been looking for, they could do it remotely anyway. That was stupid mistake number one.

My second mistake came when I began to look through the pages. Maybe I was hoping for another note from Charlie, some clue as to where he might be, but of course there wasn't. Charlie has always been cryptic, and he had to make sure it wasn't obvious enough for a maid to stumble across and realise the prince was actually alive.

I don't think writing down his impending return was the most subtle way possible, but he inherited Christopher's theatricality. It's an inescapable family trait.

I started looking for red ink that didn't fit the text, but I couldn't help myself. My eyes latched onto every typing of Christopher's name and every chapter that began with a tragedy and a dedication to a lost agent. I didn't realise until the sun rose that I had made my way through every childhood trauma and read each one in painstaking detail.

I ran my fingers over the words a hundred times in between chapters, knowing that Charlie's pen had written them, knowing that he had touched the same pages that I had. I don't know if Charlie read this book. I managed the whole thing in a night, but I was always the faster reader, and it's only been missing for a couple of days.

It was there on interview day, and gone the next.

I wonder how he came to have it at all. I know he wouldn't have risked breaking into the castle himself, so did he have help? Did Charlie have a friend, or an enemy, or an ally?

I walk about the castle for the day, waiting until five when the gallery opens, avoiding Asher and planning an escape, looking twice at the staff with curiosity. Which one of them could have been bribed into leaving the back door unlocked, or hiding a key under a plant pot? Did he offer them money, or threaten their family?

Was that the kind of man that Charlie had become? What means would my grown up brother go to for his ends?

I don't expect to see him when I enter the gallery, I know he was never one for public appearances if he could help it. With my fake glasses on my nose and a hoodie pulled tight around my chest and up over my hair, I just hope to see something, anything, to reveal him to me.

Luckily for me, the gallery isn't as big as some that Emilio and I have visited in Paris, and it's only two floors that don't cover much square footage. I look over all the art, hoping that my brother hasn't devised a plan that's too clever to catch my attention. The last time we had a conversation, I was twelve and he was running away from me and I don't have that same brain.

The gallery is beautiful, stretches of white pillars, curtains and crown molding span from end to end and the windows upstairs have stained glass right at the tops so the tiled floors swirl with puddles of bright colours. The furniture is all midnight black and wooden, collected from the thousands of dark wood forests that line the boarder between Alania and the northern regions of France.

There's a legend that the forests grow as tall and dark as they do as a result of their rich diet of soldier's blood from our independence boarder wars, led by the first Castille to the throne.

I keep my eye out for any paintings of our ancestors for my brother's instructions but the art is far more contemporary than I expected. I notice a portrait of the Saint Lawerence great grandfather who died last year, but all the plaque beside him reads is his obituary from his family and a quote of his, nothing that grabs my attention.