Black Widow

a dark romance

PJ Adams

James Grieve Press

Author’s note:

This is a dark romance novel. It contains themes of violence and mature situations that could make readers uncomfortable.

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www.pollyjadams.com/about.php

Contents

Black Widow

Outside

Inside

La Taberna

Before

La Casa Blanca

Epilogue

Afters: about the author, and hot samples from other books

Black Widow

When disturbed, the black widow spider may bite people or animals, but those most at risk from this spider’s bite are insects – and male black widow spiders, who may be killed and eaten after mating...

§

Outside

1

Prison had stripped her bare, and then some.

Eleanor Dryton had lost her husband, her job and her friends. She’d lost everything about her old life that had ever mattered to her. All she had left were her will and a burning desire for revenge.

First on her list was Danny Taylor.

§

Most people go through life oblivious to how thin a veneer of civilized comfort we cling to. That monthly salary, the comforts of heating and power and supermarkets full of fresh food – or restaurants and bars for those nights when we really can’t be bothered. But beneath that veneer it is a jungle, where sometimes mere survival is all we can ever hope to achieve.

Most people barely give all that a single thought.

But when reality rears up in your face it suddenly becomes clear just how precarious these comforts are, how easy it is to topple and fall and lose everything.

That is what happened to Eleanor Dryton almost two years ago, and now... now Eleanor had nothing.

Now, she stepped out through the prison doors into the damp morning air, a chilly drizzle drifting down, and the sky a steely gray. Cars rushed by, a red double-decker, a couple of black cabs; the lights of the newsagent across the street glowed eerily bright in the dreary morning gloom.

She was snatched out of her reverie when another cab sped past, kicking up an arc of dirty spray in her direction.

Welcome back to real life.

Two years ago she’d lived in a six-bedroom mock-Tudor home backing onto a golf course in commuter-belt Surrey. She’d worked three days a week in financial consultancy for a portfolio of charities. She would meet with friends for lunch and sometimes that lunch would extend to another bottle of fizz and an afternoon by the river. She dressed in Stella McCartney and Helmut Lang and had an account at Harvey Nichols.

She had a husband.

Now: she stood in the rain and all she had in the world were the contents of her shoulder bag and the pockets of her old Muubaa black leather jacket, and the plastic monitoring tag, like a chunky watch around her left ankle. At least the tag was black, like the rest of her outfit.

Wasn’t this where some old friend should roll up in a clapped-out car, all forgiven, ready to help you get back on your feet? Only in the films and TV dramas.

El – she’d shortened her name when she was inside to help her stand out less – had a purse with about fifty pounds in it, a cheap watch, and a stick of lip balm in one pocket of her Muubaa. She had her wedding and engagement rings tucked into a pouch in her bag; along with the jacket and her Michael Kors boots, they’d been taken into safe-keeping when she went down and she was amazed they hadn’t vanished at some point in the last twenty months. She had a wash bag with a few cheap toiletries, and some of the clothes she’d worn inside – t-shirts, sweatshirts, jeans, joggers and underwear – and that was about it.

A life stripped bare.

She reached up, teased the bobble out of her hair and shook her shoulder-length copper locks free. Jeremy had always said her hair was like a halo of flame. She’d kept it raked back and tied up when she was inside, another attempt to stand out less.

She tipped her head back and felt that soft rain on her cheeks. Now the day was no longer oppressive and gray. Suddenly she felt as if she could breathe for the first time in months.

She was free.

Outside.

§

She was out and she was surrounded by people and she’d never known panic like this before...

Other kinds of panic, yes. The panic of climbing out of the prison van, of entering prison for the first time. The looks as you pass officers and other inmates. The moment when it strikes you that this really is your reality now. The first time your cell door is shut on you and you really are banged up.

But now...

She had been given an Oyster card carrying a few pounds’ credit, but had never used one before. When the bus came she hung back, even though she was at the head of the queue. She watched as others stepped on board, casually swiping wallets and purses across the reader and then she stepped back into the line, climbed on, and swiped her card in its little plastic wallet. Nothing happened, but then nothing had happened for the other people either – they’d just swiped and found a seat.

She found a place to sit, one of the last double seats that were unoccupied.

She sat by the window and stared out into the gray morning.

Moments later a big black guy took the seat next to her, and his bulk overflowed into her space, meaty thigh and arm pressing against her.

What do you do when that happens? Is it rude to edge away? Do you say something? How do you not keep over-thinking every tiny thing?

She shuffled in her seat, but still he pressed against her.

She felt sick.

Her heart was pounding so hard that surely everyone could hear it, even over the sound of the engine.

She couldn’t even swallow, her throat suddenly dry.

She closed her eyes.

She just had to get through this. Each second, each minute survived was victory, a small step on the way to the only thing left for her.

Revenge.

§

She shut herself in her room, sat on the narrow bed, and hugged her knees to her chest.

She was out. She was free. And all she wanted was to shut that door so she could be alone in a room that was barely any bigger than her old cell.

It was evening now, and the guy who had come to install the electronic tag’s base station had finally gone. He’d been friendly enough, but El hadn’t been able to tell if he was just chatting to cover awkward silences or if he’d been pressing for something more. She knew many people found her attractive: she was young – still not thirty – and slim with a bit of curve. The guy knew this was her first day out: she must be gagging for it, he was probably thinking.

Or maybe not. Her social radar was out; it was as if she’d forgotten how to read people’s intentions. Prison had changed how she saw people. She seemed to have lost the ability to assume the good in anybody. When you’re inside, it’s a given that everybody wants something and everyone lies.

She’d felt that panic again, as he’d fussed about and joked about the weather – the rain had become heavier as the day went on. When he finally went, she’d stood with her back against the door, breathing as if she’d just run a marathon.

And now she sat on the bed in a sparsely furnished room in a hostel run by a prisoners’ rehabilitation organization.

She just had to get through this.

Six weeks on home detention curfew, electronically tagged to ensure she stayed in this room between the hours of seven in the evening and seven the next morning. She would go to the Job Centre to look for work – there was no chance of returning to her old role advising charities on their finances, given her record. She would check in regularly with her parole officer. She would recover what remained of her old belongings, put into storage somewhere by an aunt who no longer wanted anything to do with her; and then she would take great relish in getting rid of those awful jeans and joggers she’d worn inside. She must not leave the country, or travel anywhere that would take her too far away to get back to her room in time for curfew. She must not make contact with anyone associated with her case.

Six weeks.

She had endured far worse.

Six weeks before she could hunt down Danny Taylor.

She just had to get through.

2

Free.

She’d been six weeks on the outside and now, at last, she was untagged.

The panic attacks were not so bad these days. She had learned techniques to keep them under control. She had acclimatized herself to crowds and open spaces, to talking to strangers when she had to in shops and banks, to working shifts at a local supermarket, filling shelves or collecting stray trolleys in the sprawling car park.

She had got through, she had broken none of the rules governing her early release, and now she could track down Danny.

§

Danny Taylor.

Danny was a gym bunny, one of those guys you see in the free weights area, grunting and sweating with the others, all of them that broad-shouldered, no-neck shape. Every exposed part of his body was covered in tattoos, an eclectic, unplanned mix of St George’s flags, lions and dragons, and sweeping Maori tribal markings.

He was the total opposite of Jeremy, which was why their friendship had always struck her as odd.

Jeremy... even now, two years on, she found it hard to think about him; there were too many complicated, mixed emotions there, even when it was only a case of thinking about someone who embodied all that he was not.

Such an empty life now. But she couldn’t allow herself to dwell on all that she had lost. That way lay ruin and yet more heartbreak.

The phone box was the kind that was only partially shielded from the elements – not much more than a clear plastic hood around the phone – but still it smelled of urine. Hookers’ cards were stuck to every available surface. Busty Belinda, Strictly Sue, Schoolgirl Sally. They all seemed to follow the same pattern of alliteration tying a name to a particular kink, and each was accompanied by a glamour model photo no doubt culled from the internet.

She picked up the handset and keyed in Danny’s number.

He answered on the third ring, just as she thought it was going to go to voicemail.

“Yo, Danny here, what you wanting?”

He was so Jeremy’s opposite.

“Hey, Danny,” she said, surprised at how easy it was to keep her voice calm and friendly when she’d feared she might dry up altogether. “It’s El... Eleanor – Jeremy’s wife.” His widow. “It’s been a long time.”

There was a slight pause, then: “Hey, hey, hey! How you doing? Hey, how’s things? I heard about... well, you know. Good you’re back in circulation.”

“Things are ... well, they’re getting better. Listen, Danny, I’m trying to get my life back on track again and you were close to Jeremy. I just thought it’d be good to catch up. I’m sure there’s stuff to go through.”

She’d rehearsed this call so many times in her head. The right level of couldn’t care less; just the right little girl lost tone to bring out all that testosterone in him. Just a hint of vulnerability and need, mixed through with a subtext of responsibilities to old friends.

“How you finding it?” he asked. “Must get lonely, coming out. I know what it’s like getting out of stir.”

“You... you’ve done time, too?”

“Couple of stretches. Nothing major. You know how it is.”

“It’d be good to have someone to talk to, Danny. Someone who understands what it’s like.” Laying it on just a little more heavily now. “I feel so alone out here.”

“You fancy a drink some time?”

He couldn’t have made it much easier for her even if he’d had a clue what was going on.

§

She’d learned how to do cheap and trashy. She’d learned a lot in her time inside.

She got to the bar ahead of Danny, and perched herself on a bar stool so he couldn’t help but pause in the doorway and let his eyes track the line of her long, stockinged legs, the mesh a fine fishnet, the dark tops just showing beneath the hem of her little black skirt. Cheap black stilettos, a black t-shirt and her Muubaa leather jacket completed the outfit, complemented by plenty of mascara, teal eye shadow and lips painted a glossy bronze to pick out the darker tones in her fiery hair.

So maybe she brought a little class to cheap and trashy, but she was sure this was the kind of thing to catch Danny Taylor’s eye.

He arrived a few minutes after El. He paused in the doorway, spotted her, and then he did a double take and his eyes roamed up and down her length, before finally he approached.

She’d forgotten that swagger in his walk. The gym thing again: thighs too pumped to swing easily past each other, heavily muscled arms unable to hang vertically against a broad, inverted triangle chest. He was wearing faded jeans with rips across the thighs, Adidas trainers, and a football shirt she knew she should recognize. His hair was buzz-cut short, not much more than dark stubble, and his eyes always made you double-take and wonder why they were so startling until you realized that one was blue and the other green.

What she had not expected was the complexity of her response to him.

Danny had always set off lots of triggers for her. He came from such a different world, and for the longest time she had struggled to see what it was that tied him to Jeremy. He made her feel like a snob for reacting as she did. Perhaps it was only prison that had corrected her of that guilt: on the inside she had encountered women from so many different backgrounds, if she was a snob then surely it would show up when she was inside? But they were mostly just ordinary women, regardless of their crimes and their backgrounds.

So now she was confident that her reaction was not due to snobbery, yet still she’d always felt antagonized by his cocky, wide-boy presence. A jealousy thing, perhaps? That Jeremy had seen things in Danny that she had not? It wasn’t until much later that she’d come to understand a bit more clearly about her husband’s criminal double life.

Now, though... Now Danny set off a whole bunch of other triggers, too, ones she hadn’t anticipated. Alongside that antagonism there was an unexpected lift in her heart when she saw him. This was the first time in... in how long? The first time she had seen someone from her old life who didn’t appear to be loaded down with judgment and distaste for her.

And more than that, he was a link with her late husband. He had been a part of Jeremy’s life, and somehow she found herself able to think in these terms and not feel that agonizing pain of loss. Was this what had been missing, all that time she had been forced to grieve alone? Perhaps grief must be shared before it can transform into something else, something more manageable.

“Hey, hey,” he said, spreading his arms as if to embrace her, then letting them drop as she hesitated – an unexpected show of sensitivity on his part.

“Sorry,” she said, feeling the need to explain. “I... I’m still re-learning how to be on the outside, you know?”

He nodded. “I know how it is,” he said. “Been there, seen it, done it.”

He pulled a bar stool closer to her and sat. “Get you a drink?”

“Vodka,” she said.

“Something in it?”

“I guess.”

They laughed, and he ordered drinks, a pint of Stella for himself and a vodka and tonic for her.

The bar was starting to fill up with the early evening crowd now. El peered around, feeling that sense of panic rising a little. Even six weeks after her release she found this happening: crowds, confined spaces, wide open spaces...

“It never leaves you,” said Danny. “Not once you’ve been inside a cell and they shut that door on you. Never goes.”

Bastard.

How was it that Danny Taylor, of all people, suddenly had a sensitive, insightful side? Had the world really changed that much while she’d been locked away?

§

“I never understood how you and Jeremy became friends.”

She was on her third vodka now, and she knew she’d have to be careful. She had never been able to hold her drink well, but now she was completely out of practice.

Danny barked a short laugh, then said, “It was only ever work, Eleanor.” It was the first time he’d used her name tonight. “Can I call you that?”

She nodded, and said, “But I didn’t know then that you worked with him. I didn’t have any idea what he was involved in.”

“I didn’t either,” said Danny. “I was never much more than the errand boy. I just did what I was told, and knew what I needed to know. You know how what I mean?”

She’d never been aware of any of it, until things started to unravel and she’d done what she could to cover Jeremy’s back. All she’d ever tried to do was protect him, and hold her life together.

She looked down into her drink. “I miss him.”

When she looked up Danny was studying her closely. “He made his choices,” he said. “Like I say, I only ever knew what I had to. I wish I could tell you more. You look like you need a bit of closure.”

That damned sensitivity again. It wasn’t meant to be like this.

“Do you know who killed him?”

“It was an accident. It was all investigated at the time. You know that.”

“Is that a ‘yes’?”

It was Danny’s turn to look down into his drink.

“It won’t do any good,” he said.

“You were right, Danny. I need closure. I need answers. I know my husband had a whole other life that he kept from me until the end. I just need to know.”

“I don’t have those kind of answers, babe... Eleanor. I told you: I only know what I need to know, and Jerry–”

“He only ever knew what he needed to know, right?”

Danny shrugged.

“That’s what they kept pressing me for,” she said. “The police. The prosecuting barrister in my trial. They wanted to know where Jeremy fitted into the chain. Who gave him his orders. Who pulled the strings. It’s stuck in my head ever since. Someone gave Jeremy his orders, and that day that same person gave orders to someone else to kill my husband rather than let him go to trial.”

“I only know what I know.”

She reached out and put her hand on the wrist of the hand holding his beer. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean to... It’s just so hard.”

He looked up and she saw understanding in those mismatched eyes.

Please don’t do sensitive!

For a moment she flashed back to that tagging guy the first night she was out. The way he’d chatted and flirted and how she was sure there was a running subtext of how she must be gagging for it after all that time inside.

The thought had repelled her then. But now... this was the first time in so long that anyone had shown her any kind of sympathy or attempt to understand. The first time she’d felt any kind of connection, even superficial.

Those eyes, blue and green, were studying her now, as if he was trying to work out what was going on in her head.

Sensitive had been bad enough, but now he was doing cute, too, and it was just too much.

“Can we get out of here?” she said. “I... I just need to get out of here, you know?”

3

His place wasn’t far from the bar. She’d chosen carefully when she suggested a place to meet.

They walked the length of a couple of streets, an awkward distance between them, and in that time El managed to get her breath again. She couldn’t keep losing perspective like that. She had to stay in control.

Danny had the ground floor of a small Victorian terrace, two steps up from a street crammed with tightly parked cars and vans. He unlocked the door and pushed it open, then stepped back to let El through.

Somewhere nearby a siren blared and she flinched. Danny’s arms went around her and for a brief moment they paused in the entrance and she tucked herself into that strong embrace. He smelled of a peppery aftershave and that indefinable close-up scent of bare skin, hair, man. It had been a long time.

“I...” She pulled away and he released her instantly, laughing.

“It’s okay,” he said. “They’re not after you.” Then: “They’re not, are they?” He laughed again.

The door had opened directly onto his living room. A leather sofa occupied the space just inside the bay window, big stereo speakers to either side, and most of the opposite wall was covered with the largest flat-screen TV El had ever seen. The place was clean, with only a stack of DVDs on the floor and a few magazines to disrupt the impression that she had just walked into a show-home.

She turned to him, met those eyes and then immediately looked away. “I...” she said. “I’m not really sure what I’m doing here. I haven’t... It’s been such a long time.”

He smiled, and gestured at the sofa. “It’s fine,” he said. “That place was getting crowded. I’ll get you a drink. It’s all fine.”

She slipped out of her leather jacket and perched on the edge of the sofa.

Danny went through a doorway and she heard a fridge door opening and closing, then the clink of glasses. He came back with two shot glasses and a bottle of Grey Goose, and lowered himself onto the sofa, leaving a generous space between El and him.

She took one of the glasses and let him fill it, then raised it and chinked it with his, keeping eye contact with him all the time. Holding his look – such an incredibly intense thing, just then! – she raised the glass to her lips, tipped her head back and downed the drink in one.

He did the same, and they laughed as he poured more.

“Whoa,” said El. “I need to pace myself. I’m out of practice.”

She sat back and it was as if the sofa was swallowing her up. Drawing a leg up, she twisted to face him. “I’ve enjoyed this,” she said. “It feels normal. I haven’t felt normal in the longest time.”

His eyes kept wandering to those long stocking-clad legs. She shifted position slightly, and her skirt rode higher.

“I haven’t felt much of anything in the longest time,” she added, resting a hand on one thigh, her nails the same deep bronze as her lips.

He looked up into her eyes, raised an eyebrow, and then, very obviously, let his gaze roam down her body again.

“I’ve been out six weeks,” she said, “and I haven’t done anything like this. Haven’t felt ready. But now...”

“‘Now’?”

She tipped towards him, put out a hand to the side of his face, drew herself closer.

“Be gentle,” she said, and leaned in to kiss him.

His lips were hard, his stubble a fine fuzz. He tasted of vodka, and mint from the gum he’d been chewing earlier. She let his tongue press, slip between her lips, find hers, and then she pulled away.

Sitting back, finding that distance from him again, she wouldn’t meet his look.

“Hey, hey,” he said. “It’s okay. We’ll take it–”

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” she said. “Maybe it’s too soon. I don’t even really know you. All I do know is that you were involved in all that bad shit with Jeremy. For all I know you were involved in that ‘accident’ and... and...” Tears welled up. She had to stay in control.

“Hey,” he said. “Take a breath, babe.”

It was his turn to move towards her, to reach out a calming hand and put it on her arm.

“Breathe. It’s okay.”

She swallowed, then made herself look up, meet those eyes. “I’m sorry, I...”

“It’s fine,” he said. “You can’t help but wonder.”

His hand was still on her arm, the thumb gently caressing the bare skin.

“But for the record,” he went on, “You know where I was that night. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

With the ‘accident’, as he’d insisted it had been.

“But you must know who did,” she said.

“Nobody crosses the man,” Danny said, looking awkward. “You know what I mean?”

She looked down, away. “‘The man’?”

“It wouldn’t do you any good to know,” said Danny. “And it’d sure do you one fuck-load of bad to ask too many questions. Not from me, but, you know.”

“Maybe I could talk to this man?”

“Believe me, babe, you really wouldn’t want to. And anyway, he’s not here any more. Not in the country.”

She put a hand to the back of her head and started to rub the tense muscles there, dislodging his hand from her arm as she did so. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I kind of broke the moment.” Brief eye contact, a smile, then she looked away again, toying with him. But in that brief glance she had seen it in his eyes, the understanding that he had been reading the signals correctly and there had actually been a moment to break.

“It’s fine,” he said. He moved his hand back, turning it so he could run knuckles down the smooth skin of the underside of her raised arm. Such an intimate touch. “It’s bound to fuck with your head, know what I mean? All of it. Everything that’s happened.”

She stopped rubbing her neck, but kept her hand there, her arm raised. Now the only movement was his knuckles on the underside of her arm.

It shouldn’t feel so good, damn it!

This time his knuckles ran down farther, down the side of her ribcage. She arched her back, knowing how that pushed her breasts up against her t-shirt and emphasized the narrowness of her waist.

Knuckles, working gently back up to the bare skin of her raised arm.

Next time they ran downwards she gave a soft sigh and pushed up again, like a cat being stroked. She tensed the free hand, where it rested on her thigh, fingertips digging in. His eyes fixed on that tensing, and now she pulled her hand up, fingers clawed, raking the length of her thigh to where the stocking tops showed.

Keeping going, she hitched the hem of her short skirt a little higher, revealing the pale flesh of her upper thigh, then slid back down, letting the hem settle again, covering her.

Now when his knuckles stroked downwards, they pushed against the swell of a breast and then moved on.

Control.

She dragged those clawed fingers up again, this time taking a hold of the hem of her skirt and raising it higher until the black lace of her thong showed. Parting her legs a little, she pressed the heel of her hand against herself and gasped. Her own heat surprised her, and the wetness, too. She ground that hand into her soft mound, then ran it away again, down the inside of her thigh, allowing the skirt to cover herself once more.

And all the time: eyes locked on his.

“It’s been a while,” she said. She twisted more to face him, and now his knuckles were against the underside of a breast.

The hand moved up, turned to cup her, taking the weight of that breast, squeezing. Then he closed the hand into a fist, gripping her shirt tightly so that he could pull her into a kiss.

This time there was no hesitation, no gentle teasing, none of that damned sensitivity. His tongue drove deep, possessing her. He moved so that his body was against her and renewed the kiss, his hand at the back of her head now, fingers tangled in her copper hair. One knee planted beside her on the sofa, his other leg lay against hers so that when she shifted and allowed her legs to part that leg slipped between them and ground against her.

His muscles were so hard... As he pressed, she pushed up against him and felt that delicious awakening, a stab of pleasure opening up deep in her belly.

He pushed her shirt up, clear of her breasts, and buried his face in her cleavage. The scrape of stubble on that sensitive skin... she could feel that stab in her belly transforming, building, just from his touch. Her whole body felt alive to that touch, right now.

His mouth dragged down across the swelling of her right breast and his tongue stole inside the black lacy cup of her bra, driving deep until it found the hardness of her nipple. It pressed, it flicked, its wet, tactile touch making everything more sensitive.

She groaned in response to the flicking of his tongue. She couldn’t help herself, unable to clamp down on the immediate, animal response.

She put her hands to his head, that rough fuzz of stubble across the dome of his skull. Held him there, so that his tongue could continue to tease at her nipple. That repeated flick flick flick of his tongue and the pressure of hard thigh between her legs was taking her so close, so quickly...

She couldn’t... she had to...

“Slow,” she said, pushing his head away. “Slow.” She kissed the crown of his head, then down to his forehead, his eyes, his cheek and then – briefly, chastely – his mouth.

He rocked back, taking his weight on his knee on the sofa while he extricated his leg from between hers. She sat forward so she could pull her black t-shirt free, then unzipped her skirt and tugged it clear. Now, only in her hold-up stockings, thong and bra, she sank back into the sofa, one hand on the flat of her belly, the other arm raised to lie along the back of the sofa.

His eyes didn’t know where to come to rest, exploring her near-nakedness hungrily, as if he’d never seen a naked woman before.

“You like?” she said, her voice a low purr.

He stood, and her eyes were drawn to the hard bulge in his jeans. He was very clearly a ‘yes’.

He pulled his football shirt up a body that was all rippling muscle and a mosaic of tattoos, pulled it clear of his broad shoulders and over his head. He stood, giving her eyes time to roam across his illustrated torso, a twisting, intertwined collage of dragons and flags and geometrical tribal markings.

She reached out and hooked the fingers of one hand into the waistband of his jeans, her fingertips finding smoothness where she had expected a coarse mat of hair. She’d never been with a man who was shaved – waxed? – down there, but now she realized that there wasn’t a hair on his body, not even under his arms. There was something strangely sensual about that smoothness. As she moved her hand, pulling him a step towards her, her middle finger came up against the hard base of his shaft and a muscle in his belly twitched suddenly in response to that touch.

Closer now, she brushed her cheek softly against the washboard ripples of his belly, teasing him with the soft brush of skin, the running of her hair across his abdomen.

“I need answers,” she said. “I can’t just let it lie, Danny. You have to understand that.”

She popped the top button of his jeans, turned her head, brushed lips across his belly.

“The man... I need to talk to the man, Danny.”

His body stiffened then, and she thought she’d blown it. “Oh no,” he said. “That’s not fair, babe. You can’t just–”

She popped the second button, and his jeans parted enough for her to see the soft skin where a tangle of dark hair should have been. She breathed out, sending a draft across that sensitive skin.

“I need to, Danny. I can’t let this lie.”

Another button, and she could see the base of his shaft, engorged but forced to lie downwards by the constraints of his jeans. No shorts... “Mmm,” she said. “I love a guy who goes commando.”

She kissed the smooth skin just above that shaft, her chin bearing down on hardness and then pulling away.

“I told you,” gasped Danny. “I don’t know anything.”

His hands found the back of her head now, drawing her in against him so that her cheek was on his lower belly, her lips pressing against the base of his shaft.

Another button.

“It must have been hard,” she said, emphasizing that last word. “Back then...”

She felt the movement in his body as he shrugged.

“It was,” he said. “It really was. Me and Jerry, we got on, you know what I mean? The man... The man got that. He said he looked out for his own, and he wanted to compensate me for my traumas, you know?”

Control.

She had to stay in control.

She pressed her face into his belly, hoping he’d mistake it for... for anything other than a sudden upsurging of grief and pure, bitter anger.

His ‘traumas’! His traumas!

Now, Danny’s fingers started to knead her scalp, rubbing at the tense muscles, working her head against his body, his crotch.

“A man like that...” she said. “Surely he’d be willing to talk to me? Can you contact him, Danny? Do you still work for him?”

She pulled at the waistband of his jeans, felt them start to work down over his hips, exposing more of that shaft for her face to press against.

“I can’t...”

Easing those jeans a fraction lower.

“This...”

Her lips pressed against that hardness.

“You don’t want to be asking questions, know what I mean?”

The tip of her tongue.

“I can’t...”

She pulled his jeans down until they were around his thighs and his dick sprang out, slender and hard, his nuts a compact bulge at its base, shrunken by steroid abuse, she was sure. The soft skin around the base of his shaft was tattooed with angry, dark swirls, but his balls and shaft were unmarked.

As she watched, his foreskin pulled back to reveal a purple mushroom head, wet with his juices.

She took him in one hand and peered up at him. “You can’t what?” she asked.

“I can’t talk about the man,” he said. “And if that’s all this is...”

She pulled, feeling the skin slide around the hard core of that shaft, watching as the foreskin came forward, sliding over the shiny purple head, and then retracted again as she pulled down the length once more.

She leaned forward, trailing that glossy head across one cheek and letting it run through her hair, then turned her head so that it slid across her cheek and across her lower lip to the other cheek and into her hair again as she buried her face in his groin.

“When I was inside...” she said now, one hand wrapped around the end of his dick, twisting and rubbing, lubricated by his juices.

He grunted.

“When I was inside, well, sometimes girls get to talking.” Her lips trailed along the side of his shaft, teased the head, and then she pressed her face into his belly again, still working him with her hand. “I didn’t know what a sheltered life I’d led,” she said. “Me and Jeremy... well he was never very adventurous, if you know what I mean.”

With her other hand she reached up and cupped those small balls of his, fingernails scratching at his perineum, teasing him. Reaching further back, she squeezed his tight butt, then let her fingers trail along his crack.

“I discovered there are all sorts of things I’ve never tried. Things I’d never even imagined.”

She slid a finger between his buttocks and pressed it against that puckered, dark opening.

“There was one girl I spoke to. Japanese. She said that in some high-class brothels in Japan they practice what they call the atsui ari.” She let her middle finger trail down from his anus, forwards, and then she cupped his balls, squeezing and rolling. “While a prostitute goes down on her client she releases ants on his perineum and balls. They release formic acid, sensitizing the skin, intensifying everything. It sounds weird, but apparently it feels incredible.”

She twisted, running his dick across her lips again, flicking the head with her tongue.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t bring any ants.” And with her middle finger she scratched his perineum hard, making him gasp.

“She also told me about the Chapelet Thai.”

“Hnh?” Her hand was steadily working his shaft now, pumping and  twisting.

“Teasing the male G spot, just behind the prostate.” She pressed her finger against his dark opening again, and felt him tighten in response. “The only way to reach it is through the anus. Do you like it when a girl fingers you, Danny?” Pressing at the opening, feeling it start to give and then tighten as she teased it. “They usually use anal beads. They feed them in and then, ever so slowly, pull them out again during sex or a blow job.”

She let the tip of her finger slip inside him, dry without lubrication, knowing it would be uncomfortable.

“I didn’t bring any beads, though, Danny. Are you disappointed?”

She let her finger pop out of that tight hole, and moved her hand so she was cupping that tight scrotum again.

“Did you learn anything else?” he grunted, barely able to form the words.

She tipped back so she could look up at him, and make contact with those startling eyes of his. Both hands wrapped around his shaft, she nodded.

“There was another girl,” she said. “We got very... close, if you know what I mean?”

He smiled, nodded, clearly enjoying the image she had planted.

“She was a Kurd. From a place called Arbil. She told me about a practice they call taqaandan. Have you ever heard of that, Danny?”

He shook his head, his eyes flitting between hers and looking down at her hands wrapped around his dick.

She tightened her grip, one hand at the base, the other wrapped around the head.

“It’s a thing Kurdish men do for control,” she said. Another tightening. “And pleasure.”

He groaned, then. She could tell he was close to climax.

“What... what do they do?”

“They hold the shaft just like this,” she said. “And then...”

With a sudden jerk of her right hand she snapped his shaft sharply downwards. There was a loud click, and Danny made a shrill squeal like a wounded animal.

He tried to pull away – a reflex action – but El’s grip was tight, and the movement made him cry out again.

In her hand, his dick was rapidly softening and when she looked down she saw that it was turning purple.

When she looked up, his whole upper body had twisted and then, abruptly, his fist was swinging towards her.

She dipped out of the way, still holding him tight, jerking his broken shaft and making him cry out once again.

“Don’t do it,” she hissed. “Don’t try to move. It’ll only make it worse.”

He made as if to swing again, but then caught himself.

Tears were streaming down his face and he was breathing rapidly through gritted teeth, biting down on the pain, powerless before her.

“Listen to me,” she said, “and listen carefully.”

He was groaning now, a long moan broken by the gasping sound of suppressed sobbing.

“You listening?”

She waited until he nodded, then continued.

“Taqaandan done carefully is harmless, like cracking knuckles. I didn’t do it carefully.”

He let a sob out, then bit back on it again.

“Done roughly and it causes penile fracture, a rupture of the tunica albuginea, and it requires prompt surgical intervention. Delay, and you might be permanently disfigured and lose functionality. Worse, that pooling of blood in the surrounding tissues can lead to gangrene and all they can do then is amputate. You understand?”

He grunted, and made as if to pull away, but she still had him tight and he cried out once more.

“So tell me: how do you contact the man?”

He glared at her, but kept his mouth shut.

She pulled down on him, just a little, and he gasped, his jaw still clamped shut.

“Do you call him? Does he call you?”

She pulled harder, twisting her wrist, and he cried out again. “Stop! Stop that! You fucking bitch...”

“How?”

“He... he calls me sometimes when there’s work needs doing.” His voice kept breaking as he spoke, the pain so intense.

“And the number’s on your phone?”

He nodded, unable to resist a glance across to where he’d put his phone and wallet on top of a unit when they’d come in. “Not in my contacts, but it’s under Recent. Just a number. No name. A Spanish number. Now will you just fucking well let me go? I told you I don’t know anything, you crazy fucking–”

She was the crazy fucking bitch who just squeezed his broken penis even harder and he fell quiet with another sharp gasp, mid-sentence.

She stood, every movement transmitted through her hands to his dick.

Eye to eye with him, she stared him down for long seconds until he looked away.

Control. She had to stay in control.

She let him go, turned away, aware in her peripheral vision that he had taken a step towards her and raised that fist again. She turned, and he was doubled over, clutching himself.

“I wouldn’t try moving,” she said. “It’ll only hurt.”

He looked up at her, and she saw that he was thoroughly broken.

She moved across the room, found the land-line phone and tossed it to him. He caught it and cried out again at the movement.

“Call an ambulance,” she said. “And tell them it’s urgent.”

She picked up his mobile, and while he called 999 on the land-line she checked through his recent calls. She took a pen from her jacket and wrote a foreign number on the back of her hand. Then she opened his wallet and emptied it of cash. She left the cards: she knew enough to sell them on to people who did these things, but he’d have canceled them before she reached the end of the street and she didn’t have time to waste.

She went to the door, then looked back to where Danny Taylor was curled in a ball on the sofa.

“You may not think it,” she said, “but you’ve just been lucky, Danny. Very lucky.”

Then she turned and left.

4

She’d gone to a cyber café, Googled the number, and found a listing for a bar in a resort near Alicante. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find any more information than that. Late by then, she’d hopped on a bus back to her room, and now she sat on the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest.

She felt safe here. The room was hers and no-one but the authorities and the prisoners’ rehabilitation organization that owned it knew she was here.

She surveyed the room.

She had almost no possessions, other than the clothes she was wearing and a few more tucked into a chest of drawers. All that she owned would fit into the shoulder bag she had come out of jail with.

She took a deep breath.

She was really going to do this.

She went to the window, opened it, leaned out and threw up, retching again and again, even when her stomach was empty.

She was going to do it.

§

The next morning she pawned her wedding and engagement rings for £250, even though they were worth far more. Then she went to a travel shop and bought tickets with cash.

“And a hotel?” the woman said, but El shook her head.

“It’s so much easier to have accommodation booked in advance. We can–”

“Just the flight, okay?”

Something in her tone cut the woman off, and stopped her pushing any more.

A few minutes later El was on a bus, heading for the station and a train to Gatwick, and by that afternoon she would be in Alicante, looking for a bar.

§

Inside

1

She tried not to remember.

If she could simply press ‘Undo’ and remove those twenty months then she would.

But instead that time haunted her, even now that she was out.

More than that: it had reshaped her, redefined her. It had made her the woman she now was.

§

The one who lay awake at night, her head full of vivid flashbacks. Her heart racing, her breathing madly erratic, feeling desperate to run but with nowhere to go: the bitter irony that even once she had been released she was plagued with that panic, the kind you get when you know you are confined, trapped behind a locked door. Once you had been imprisoned, it seemed, a part of you must always feel locked in.

And when she did manage to sleep, she dreamed, and they were the kind of dreams that when you woke in the middle of the night you could not ever go back to sleep again.

She burned with an anger she had never even imagined possible before. She would give anything not to have become the woman she was now but, failing that, she burned with the need to avenge.

§

Some things, no matter how hard you battle to suppress them, can never be buried for good.

“Just remember,” said one of the screws on her first day. “We get all sorts here. Nobody’s going to pick on you just ’cos you’re posh. They’ll pick on you ’cos you’re not polite or ’cos you look down on them, or ’cos you treat them like shit. But they’re always going to try it on, you hear? Jus’ need to learn how to stand your ground without rubbing people up the wrong way.”

Moments of kindness like that stick. The screw, a stocky black guy she later came to know as Sam, didn’t need to help her. All he had to do was get her from her orientation interview to her cell. He didn’t have to say a word, let alone give her any kind of hints about how in Hell she was going to survive in here.

What Sam told her was a pretty good guide. More than anything, the simple reminder not to treat her fellow inmates without respect was probably the best bit of advice she had ever received.

What he’d omitted to tell her, though, was what you do when you’ve been polite and not condescended, when you’ve treated someone with respect and still that’s not enough to protect you, not enough to help you escape from your past.

§

Anja found out about Eleanor’s past.

Anja was a big, strong woman with a heavy, angled jaw and an accent from some eastern part of Europe. At first she seemed friendly. She was one of the first inmates to approach Eleanor, coming over to join her during their association time after evening meal on Eleanor’s first full day inside.

“Hey, Red,” she said, referring to Eleanor’s coppery hair, “you got any burn?” Then, in response to Eleanor’s blank look, she explained, “Burn. Smokes. Tobacco.”

“I’m sorry... I don’t...”

“Hey, it’s okay, Red. You don’t smoke, that’s good. So when you get some burn you just give it to me, eh?”

Eleanor didn’t know what to say. Was this big, scary woman leaning on her to provide her with tobacco?

Then Anja laughed and said, “The look on your face! It’s okay, eh? Listen, you’ll get used to it here, you know? Most of us just a little mad, you know? You got any weed?” She laughed again. She seemed to get a kick out of confusing Eleanor and then acting as if it was all a joke. “So tell me: what you in for, eh?”

That threw her. She didn’t know what to say. I was protecting my husband who, it turned out, had a sideline in people-trafficking and drugs that he’d been keeping quiet from me. Nice little hobby of his, you know?

“I... I was an accountant,” she said.

Anja nodded, knowingly. “Is what I thought,” she said. “It’s what I said, isn’t it, Sylv?” She said this to the mousy little woman standing nearby, who had been taking everything in. “I said she’s white-collar, didn’t I? You fix the books and they lock you up. A real threat to society, eh?” Then, to Eleanor again: “You listen, girl. You stick with me, okay? I’ll get you through.”

§

You had to take help wherever you could, Eleanor had reasoned. She still hadn’t worked out that everything comes with a price.

Towards the end of evening association, the women started to drift back to their cells.

Eleanor watched them go, but suddenly found that she couldn’t move. Couldn’t make herself get out of her hard plastic chair and walk back to that tiny space, just to wait for someone to come and lock her in. She felt sick. She felt that rising swell of panic that would become a permanent feature of who she was. She couldn’t do it.

That was when Anja came across to her again, standing over her like a barn door, she was so big and square. “Hey, Red,” she said. “You got to do it. You can’t just sit there all night, you know?”

Eleanor nodded. “I know,” she said. “I just...”

Anja reached out and Eleanor took her hand, allowed herself to be hauled to her feet.

When Anja didn’t let go, Eleanor felt the first surge of a different kind of panic. She looked into those steely blue eyes and suddenly felt very small. She tugged her hand again, and this time Anja let go.

“Pretty hair,” said Anja. She reached up and brushed her fingers through Eleanor’s hair. “You scared to go that cell,” she went on, “we still got time before bang-up. You come back to my place, yeah?”

She didn’t have to say anything: Anja read her response, had probably read that kind of response dozens of times before when she’d hit on a newcomer.

“Is okay,” said Anja. “I’m just being friendly, you know? Need friends in a place like this.”

With that, she stepped back to let Eleanor pass. Then she said, again, “You stick with me, you hear? We’ll be friends.”

§

The kind of friends who lie in wait...

A couple of days later, as Eleanor walked from her cell, heading for evening meal, Anja and Sylv were waiting for her. One moment she was walking, head down as if she could melt into the background; the next there was a painful grip on her arm, a fist in her hair, a hand over her eyes, and she was being hauled off her feet into a cell she had been passing.

She opened her mouth to cry out, but a wad of coarse fabric was shoved in – a pair of socks, balled up together.

The fist in her hair tugged her head back and down so that she feared her neck might snap. It held her there, her throat exposed, and she knew this was it, the end. Everything had led up to this: a pathetic beating in an anonymous cell for reasons she didn’t understand.

“Hey, Red.”

Anja.

She couldn’t answer, could only wait to see what might come next.

“I said we’d be friends, you remember that, eh?”

She paused, as if waiting for an answer. The hand came away from Eleanor’s eyes, then, and she could see that she was being held by the short, mousy woman, Sylv and a big black girl who looked barely into her teens, although she must be much older than she looked.

Anja stood before her, staring at her, a muscle twitching in her jaw.

When she had Eleanor’s attention, the big woman took a step towards her and, with almost no back-swing at all, punched her hard in the belly.

It felt like an explosion in Eleanor’s midriff. A pain like nothing she had ever known, an intense surge of nausea, a feeling as if the air had been snatched from her lungs and wouldn’t return. She cried out, against the wad of socks in her mouth, and swallowed desperately for air. The pain just wouldn’t go. It transformed, and kept coming back in wave after wave of dull aching.

She couldn’t breathe. She was going to be sick against that balled sock, would probably choke on her own vomit.

She stared at Anja, through a mist of tears.

“We’re friends, right?”

She thought Anja was going to hit her again, but the woman tensed and held back, before continuing: “You should get to know me, eh? I wasn’t born here, you know? You hear it in my accent, eh?” She laughed, her tone vicious to Eleanor’s ears. “I grew up in Durrës. You haven’t heard of it. Second city in Albania, ancient place. I went to school, you know? I did good. I had dreams.”

She had come up close as she spoke, her words spraying spittle over Eleanor’s face. Now she reached up and brushed her knuckles against Eleanor’s hair again.

“So, Red,” she said. “Now you know me. And you know what? I know you. My friend, Sylv – she asked some questions, you know? She found out who you did your accountancy for.”

They knew.

A hand in her hair, the fingers locked together then and tugged, tipping Eleanor’s head back again. Now, Anja dragged a fingernail down Eleanor’s exposed throat, sharp and scratching, making Eleanor gag against that wadded sock again.

“You want to know how I got here?” said Anja. “You want to know what I did?”

Eleanor couldn’t answer. She could only fight not to choke and struggle to clamp down on her terror.

She had to get through this. She had to survive. That’s all she could do.

“I killed a guy. Judge was kind, though. Said there was lots of – what? – mitigation. That’s the word.”

That finger on her neck again.

“I got a guy, and I ripped out his throat with my bare fingers. You imagine how angry someone has to be to do something like that? How hard it is to do?”

That sharp, hard fingernail, dragging a furrow down Eleanor’s neck.

“You know what makes someone do a thing like that?”

Still, she couldn’t answer, still gagging against the socks, the angle of her neck, that sharp pressure on her throat.

“People like you.”

Anja’s hand closed around Eleanor’s throat now, a sudden hard pressure like a ring of steel clamped tight.

Eleanor’s body bucked in automatic response and the women at each side fought to hold her still.

It could only have lasted a split second, that sharp, sudden pressure around her throat, but it felt far longer. And then it was gone, Anja had stepped back, and now El slumped forward, retching so hard that the socks spat out onto the floor and suddenly she could suck air in through her bruised throat, tasting blood and vomit as she swallowed and that act of swallowing hurt almost as much as Anja’s grip had done.

They let her fall, landing on hands and knees on the hard floor. She was still sobbing and gasping for air, her whole body flinching at each swallow, each time she dragged air through her battered throat.

A kick to her side winded her again, and she knew beyond doubt that this was a beating she might not survive.

She fought each breath, tried to pull more slowly, tried somehow to calm herself.

She looked up at Anja. People like you. She didn’t have to ask what she’d meant by that.

Traffickers.

People who kidnap women like Anja from Eastern Europe, drug them and sell them to whoever pays most. People who steal these women’s lives, steal their dreams, steal their possibilities for a life anything other than this.

She hadn’t known.

She hadn’t known what Jeremy had been involved with. Hadn’t known her own husband, it turned out. She really had been blind to it all.

But when she had found out, she’d protected him. She’d helped him cover his tracks.

She hadn’t committed those crimes. She wasn’t a people trafficker. But the sentencing judge had said that didn’t matter, and she knew he was right. She might not be the person who had kidnapped and sold people like Anja, but she had protected a man who was responsible. She’d prolonged the suffering of Jeremy’s victims, and that made her as guilty as he was.

People like you.

Another kick, and something in her chest shifted – a rib cracking?

She felt dizzy, as if she was on the edge of blacking out.

Another. This time to the face, and there was a mushrooming of pain and the sudden metallic tang of more blood in her mouth.

She coughed, spitting blood onto the floor and gasping at the pain shooting through her face and chest.

She just had to get through.

Voices then. Raised voices, breaking through the blanket of pain that smothered all her senses.

Shouting.

Anja. Other women. A man.

She peered up, saw dark blue trousers... a prison officer.

Seconds later, Anja and the others had gone, and Eleanor was able to sit back on her haunches and look up into the sympathetic face of Sam, the prison officer who had first shown her to her cell after her orientation interview.

“It’s okay,” he said. “They’ve gone now. It’s okay. Can you stand up?” He reached down, put a hand under her elbow and helped her stand.

“It’s okay,” he said again. “Let’s get you out of here.”

2

Sam. He’d shown her that first spark of sympathy when she arrived. That first hint that maybe there would be a way to get through all this.

He was a stocky guy, not much taller than her five-six. His dark face was wide like a plate, and he had the kind of easy smile that inspired confidence.

Now, he guided Eleanor back to her cell.

All thoughts of evening meal and association were gone now. She just wanted to be in her cell. Wanted him to lock her in. Wanted the security of those four walls.

“You sure you don’t want to be checked out?” he said again. “There’s still a nurse on site.”

Everything felt swollen. Her chest, her face, her battered belly. Her throat felt like it was on fire, every breath hurting.

It was all she could do to walk. She just had to make it to her cell. That was all.

When she reached the doorway, she almost collapsed. She caught herself against the frame, concentrating on breathing and staying on her feet.

Sam gave her a moment, then with that hand under her elbow guided her across to her bunk and helped her sit.

She looked up. Swallowed. Then managed to say, in a very small voice, “Thank you.”

That was when she realized that this was only the beginning.

The look in his eye.

Something different.

Something cold.

“You have to learn,” he said to her. “You have to learn how this place works.”

She watched him, transfixed by those cold eyes, and waited for him to go on.

“Nobody owes you nothin’ in here, babe. You’ve got to earn everything.”

She couldn’t tear her look away.

“An’ right now, babe, you owe me big.”

§

They called it ‘nosh’, she learned later.

Prison slang for food, but also for anything else that goes in your mouth.

Blow jobs for the male officers. Blow jobs for favors, for tobacco and drugs; blow jobs for protection; blow jobs because you’re powerless and if one of the male screws is one of the bad ones he can do just what the fuck he likes.

Nosh.

§

He reached out and buried his fingers in her hair, cupping the side of her head in a hand that was surprisingly big.

With his other hand, he reached for his belt and undid it, then freed the button at his waistband and slid the zipper down. Undone, his pants slid down to bunch at his knees, and he stood there with his pale blue shirt hanging down to his thighs, almost completely covering white shorts, a sharp contrast to his dark skin.

He drew his hand away from her hair and when she looked back up at those cold eyes he was smiling.

He pulled his shirt apart, hooked thumbs into his shorts and pulled them down.

“I...” Her face was throbbing with the pain of her beating, her neck on fire, her mouth still tasting of blood.

“You owe me.”

Freed from its constraints, his fat dick started to fill out and nudge upwards, pointing towards her as it stiffened. As she watched, the foreskin rolled back to reveal a shiny, purple head.

He put his hands to either side of her head, guiding her down on him.

When that wet head came to press against her lips she gasped, opened, and took him in.

The pain was turning to numbness now, as if her jaw had been injected with local anesthetic by a dentist, deadening everything. The same numbness was seeping through her head, dulling her to everything that was happening.

He pulled her towards him, filling her until she started to choke again.

Everything, from the neck up was numb now; everything below that on fire. Every movement sent pains stabbing through her chest and belly.

She closed her eyes.

She just had to get through.

Just had to survive.

Above all, she had to stop thinking. Stop that rush of understanding that this was how it was and how it would be. That this was her punishment, and it was a punishment she deserved.

3

She was stupid to ever believe that Anja would leave it at that.

The big Albanian had marked El out from the beginning, for whatever reasons. El stood out because of her hair and being ‘posh’ as everyone called her. Anja had wanted to befriend her and dominate her because that’s how she was, that was the way she had found to survive. But when she had found out El’s crimes, it had all changed and it had been Anja’s one opportunity in here to find any kind of justice for what had been done to her.

El understood all this, but it didn’t help her one bit.

Understanding gets you nowhere in prison. It’s all about favors earned and debts owed. And about not making it easy for someone who’s out to get you.

§

Four days on the inside was all it took for El to feel as if she’d never been anywhere else.

That six-bedroom mock-Tudor commuter home? The view from the back out over the golf course where Jeremy liked to take his ‘business associates’? A dream, a fantasy. Something from another person’s life.

The designer clothes? The champagne lunches? Distant rumor, no more.

Jeremy? Well he’d always been a fantasy, as it turned out. His respectable life had been a front. Their relationship? She’d only been starting to fathom just what that relationship really was, what it might have become, when he’d been snatched from her.

Now, this life of sheer routine seemed like the only one she’d ever known.

Four days: long enough to relax a little, to stop watching everyone, their every move and reaction.

Sam had come back to her twice in that time. The first time he’d brought her tobacco; the second it was pills that he said were speed. She still had those, saving them for when she really needed to buy favors.

That was how it worked: favors and debts.

She paid for those favors with more ‘nosh’.

She’d learned his signs, his tells. Knew when he was close to pulling back and coming all over her face, as he liked to do. Knew the little things she could do to speed him up, make him come, get it over with. The tongue, just there; the finger, just there; that moment when the sharp press of teeth would take him over the edge.

Favors. That’s all it was.

She had shut down so much of the person she had been.

You had to, in order to get through.

Favors to yourself.

§

After that first assault, El had learned not to walk near doorways, to stick to the middle, the open.

But it had only been a matter of time.

On the inside there really is nowhere you can hide for long. You have to take part in association. You have to do your jobs and your classes. You have to spend time in the exercise yard. You have to use the toilet and shower. And to do any of these things, you have to walk from one place to another.

You can do everything right to protect yourself, but you only have to slip up once.

§

Slip up or be sold down the line, which pretty much amounts to the same thing. Never trust anyone. How many times did she need to remind herself of that?

Sam cornered her in the sports center’s changing room.

El was cleaning there, slopping the floors with a mop and a bucket of soapy water. It was her first real job in the prison, working there with two of the other girls whose names she still did not know. One moment she was squeezing the mop out into the bucket, the next the other girls were out of sight and Sam was standing there, an odd look on his face.

She knew his tells by now, but this wasn’t one of them.

It wasn’t the hungry look, the one that told her exactly what he wanted from her.

It wasn’t that strangely paternal look, the expression she’d first seen on his face when he’d been explaining to her how this place worked and how to keep out of trouble.

It was something different.

“What’s up?” she asked him, and he looked away, and that was when she knew she was in trouble.

Movement, off to one side, and then Anja appeared in the doorway.

Sam glanced at her, then back at El.

“Sam? What’s going on, Sam?” She shook her head a little, then, tossing out her hair in the way she knew he liked.

“Such pretty hair,” said Anja, moving into the changing room.

“Sam?”

He met her look and shrugged.

“Favors,” he said. “It’s all about the favors.”

Anja.

Then he turned and left.

“We were interrupted,” said Anja, taking another step towards El. There was something in her hand, and from only a quick glance El knew what it was.

A shiv. A home-made knife. It looked like a razor blade embedded in something... a toothbrush handle?

§

Prison had changed her. Four days inside and already she was El, not Eleanor.

She had shut down a large part of the woman she had been and become something else.

She knew when to look away, look down, look anywhere but back into the eyes of someone on the edge of going apeshit.

She knew when to accept her punishment from the likes of Sam. When to close her eyes and open her mouth.

And now, she understood, there were times when you have to stand up and be counted or forever be trodden into the dirt.

“You’ve got no fight with me,” she said to Anja.

There were other women in the doorway now, crowding in to watch.

“I’ve always got fight with people like you.”

That phrase again: people like you.

“You get in any more trouble and you’re just letting the bastards win.”

“Trouble? The screws aren’t looking this way. Sam’s making sure of that. Favors.” She spat that last word out.

There was no way out, the entrance barred by watching women.

“So what are you going to do?”

Anja held her shiv in full view now, taunting El with it.

“Gonna cut that pretty hair,” said Anja. “An’ I’m going to mark you, bitch. Going to make you live with it, you hear?”

Four days.

Four days to go from the kind of innocent who would have fainted at this, to...

“You fucking try. Bitch.”

Anja lunged at her, aiming for a quick slash across the face.

El swung back, the blade swinging so close...

Momentum brought Anja another step closer as her swing missed, and El raised her broom and swiped it across the side of the big woman’s head.

Anja squealed, a mix of surprise and pain, and in that instant El followed through, one end of the broom still lodged against the other woman’s skull and now El’s full weight thrown against the shaft, turning it into a lever that flipped Anja off her feet and down into a heap on the floor.

El pulled back and swung, her wrists and arms jarring painfully at the impact of wood on skull.

She sidestepped and swung again, bringing it down in Anja’s face.

This time she didn’t pull away, but instead moved the broom so that the top of the handle came up into the hollow under Anja’s chin, forcing her head back against the floor, trapped against one wall.

She pushed, felt it give, and Anja made an awful retching sound, her arms and legs flailing.

“You listen,” said El. “You try that again and I’ll fucking have you. You hear that?”

Then she turned, reached for her bucket and walked away.

For a moment, the women in the doorway just stared at her, then they stepped back, parting for her so she could leave.

Four days.

Such a short time to make the journey from fearful innocent to a woman capable of bad.

Such a short time to be so brutalized and stripped bare.

Four days. And it only got worse.

4

They moved her to a different wing after that.

Nobody ever explained why. She guessed it might be something to do with Sam realizing he’d misjudged her and that now there was an explosive situation brewing between her and Anja. She rarely saw Sam after that, but she would come to understand that, while he was by no means one of the good guys, he certainly wasn’t one of the worst.

On D Wing the cells were shared. There was no more room, just a pair of bunkbeds where there had been one in her first cell.

Sitting on the top bunk with her knees drawn up as El arrived at her new cell, was a tiny woman in her early twenties. Her hair was black and tied back, her skin a golden Middle Eastern brown, and her dark eyes were wide and almond-shaped.

She nodded as El paused in the doorway. “Hello,” she said. “I am Ash. Short for Ashti, which means ‘peace’.”

El nodded in return, and said, “I’m El. Just El.”

Ash didn’t speak much, and when she did it was with a soft, hesitant voice, her nature true to the meaning of her name.

They spoke awkwardly that evening, neither giving much away. El was wary after her previous experience, reminded not to trust anyone here.

It was a few days before Ash asked the question El had feared.

“So what did you do?” Ash was on her now familiar perch on the top bunk, where she sat like a wary bird. It was lunchtime lock-up, 12.30 to 1.45, the quiet slot after lunch where they were shut away before afternoon activities.

Sometimes it’s the first thing that is asked and in many ways that’s easier to deflect: it’s out there, it’s a conversational gambit that you can deflect and move on. But when it’s held back, it’s a question that usually comes out when the asker actually cares about the answer.

Ash was from somewhere in the Middle East. El knew that much. Had she come to this country illegally? Very probably. In which case, had she been trafficked? What kind of awful depravity had she been put through in order to pay her way?

“My husband was involved in people trafficking,” said El, meeting the small woman’s look full on. “When I found out, I tried to protect him. So, technically, I was a people trafficker, too.”

Ash didn’t flinch away from her look; her gaze didn’t flicker. Instead: “He lied to you?” she said.

El nodded, that simple question somehow breaking through all her defenses so that suddenly she was fighting back tears.

“I was lied to.”

El realized that Ashti’s question had not been about the answer at all: it had been an opener so that the Kurdish woman could talk.

“Who lied?”

“My father’s brother,” said Ash. “He lied to my father, too. I grew up in Arbil in Kurdistan, in what is currently part of northern Iraq. My uncle, he told my father that he had made an arrangement with a security firm that the American soldiers were using. He told him he could get me and my sisters out to a life that was better, and safer.”

El shook her head. Jeremy had been that kind of man, like this girl’s uncle: the man who made deals and smuggled people out and then made them pay.

“It was a life that was better and safer for him. He did not tell my father that my sisters and I were an investment in my uncle’s future. He used us to pay for his own safe passage and then he used us to pay for his living.”

El didn’t know what to say, but she didn’t have to: Ash had clearly been bottling all this up, but now the words were gushing out.

“You,” she said. “You trying to play it tough in here. You have to do that, El. You have to be tough. You have to work out what it is that you want and how to get it. That’s how it works... In here, and outside. Life is simple when you understand that.”

“What did you do?” asked El. “What are you inside for?”

Ash peered down at her, and then, after a few seconds, said, “Revenge.”

After another pause, she went on: “I am imprisoned for revenge, and it was the best feeling I have ever known.”

§

Ashti’s words stuck. They went round and round in El’s head as she worked, they haunted her when she lay awake through the night.

You have to work out what it is that you want and how to get it. That’s how it works... In here, and outside. Life is simple when you understand that.

§

Her life with Jeremy had been a sham, a polite façade designed to conceal his criminal activities.

When Jeremy had been killed it was as if two lives had been snatched away from her.

She lost that comfortable, middle-class life they had built, but then she had been losing that already, as soon as she knew that it was built on falsehood. She had never really had that life in the first place.

Worse, she had lost the life that was emerging. She and Jeremy had made a fresh start, one based on an honesty between them. She was discovering the man he really was, not the bottled up polite version he had tried to be. And she was discovering a side of her that had been suppressed, too, a side of her prepared to live with all these aspects of Jeremy that were emerging. A side that was suddenly excited by him.

It had been a strange and precarious thing. A glamorous and exciting life where, even then, she was only barely beginning to understand what he had really been involved with.

There had definitely been something there, though. The man she’d fallen in love with, combined with a dark and exciting man who was just emerging... An extraordinarily intoxicating combination.

And then... gone.

A life barely even started. Stolen from her.

§

Revenge, Ashti had said. It was the best feeling I have ever known.

A couple of nights later El lay on her bunk, staring up at Ash’s mattress above her. Her cell-mate had been moving about, restless, still awake.

“Tell me,” said El.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me about revenge. Tell me how it feels.”

You have to work out what it is that you want and how to get it.

El had worked that out, and what she wanted was revenge.

Revenge for losing a life that had never really existed, and for that brief dream of a life barely started that had been snatched away.

Revenge.

§

La Taberna

1

She didn’t think they would let her out of the country. Every stage was an opportunity for them to draw her aside, her passport no longer valid, her name popping up on a watch list. Even the security x-ray machines – she was sure they had been set to scan for both metal and anyone who was a former convict with revenge on their mind.

Even when she sank into her seat, she thought it must be some kind of trick, and that at any moment an air marshal would emerge from the cabin and come back to seize her before the plane had even left the ground.

When the jet finally started to taxi out on its convoluted route to the runway, she began to relax.

“Don’t like flying?” said the white-haired woman beside her, smiling sympathetically.

“No, I don’t mind flying,” said El. “I just don’t particularly like where I’m going, or where I’ve been.”

§

With no luggage, she just walked straight through Customs at Alicante airport. A quick passport check and that was it, she was just another tourist among many. She changed her remaining cash to euros at the Exchange Cambio, then found her way to the bus and taxi ranks, her only guide a scrap of paper on which she had written that telephone number and the bar’s name and address that she’d found on Google.

She asked a guy in some kind of uniform, and he smiled and answered in near-perfect English, “That’s about thirty kilometers. A taxi would be very expensive but easy. You want a bus, you get a Costa Azul towards Torrevieja, yes? Show the driver the address you want and smile and he’ll do anything you want.”

Out in the full sun she thought she might melt. She took off her Muubaa jacket and slung it over her shoulder, then scanned the buses for the right one. Minutes later, she was in a window seat, savoring the air-con and the tinted windows. She would need some sunglasses and some cooler clothing before she did much else, and she tried not to think too hard about how little cash she had.

Unexpectedly, she dozed. She’d barely slept the night before, and on the flight she’d been too wired to relax. It must have all caught up with her, and the deep seat, tinted windows and gentle motion of the bus had just set her off.

She woke to a voice. Someone shouting back along the bus, a hand on her arm, gently shaking her.

She started, sat bolt upright, arms raised to fend off that shaking hand. For a moment, then, she was back in prison and... and...

There was a babble of voices, a woman backing away – the one who had woken her. She was only on the Spanish bus.

She didn’t know what the woman was saying, or the driver, as he shouted back along the bus at her.

This must be her stop, the address she’d given him as she climbed on-board.

She stood, walked forward, muttered “Gracias” several times to the driver, who was still speaking, his voice lower now. She remembered what the guy at the airport had said and smiled at the driver, and that seemed to calm him. There was something about the language that seemed to make everyone sound irate.

She stepped down into a blast of heat. If it was this hot in the evening, what must it be like during the day?

The street ran parallel to the beach, one block back. White stuccoed apartment buildings with ornate balconies rose three or four stories around her, and a line of palm trees cast their jagged shade along a central strip in the road. She crossed, and found a side street that ran down towards the blue Mediterranean.

Shops and bars lined this street. A supermarket with bright yellow and black signs and spinning racks of newspapers outside; the ‘Family Fun Bar’ selling John Smith’s and Carling and offering traditional fish, chips and mushy peas; a perfumaria and a parafarmacia; countless tapas bars and Chinese restaurants.

She found a shop with a board outside offering ‘Sunglasses Game Boy Watches Shavers Binoculars & Gift Articals’, and bought a pair of ’50s-style wayfarer sunglasses with thick frames for five euros.

It was only when she walked back out into the street that she realized... the panic was gone. There was something about this bombardment of sensations – all the people and shops and bars, and the heat and the bright sunlight – that made this place different enough that she didn’t have that feeling of constantly being on the verge of a panic attack.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had been free of that feeling.

She came to the beach. A wide promenade ran for as far as she could see in either direction, separated from the pale silver sand by ornate iron railings painted white. Apartment buildings and clusters of stark, white tower blocks formed the backdrop to the promenade, and sandwiched between these and the prom was a line of bars and restaurants. Striped canopies provided shade where the seating spilled out onto the prom, and placards stood outside, chalked with beer lists and menus, and adorned with flyers for music and karaoke nights.

She turned right and started to walk.

She recognized this place, having walked this virtual walk several times on Google Streetview after she had found the bar’s address last night.

A short time later, she came to the bar. The slightly crooked board above the door read, simply, La Taberna. A white canvas canopy stretched over a cluster of cane-framed tables and chairs, and then, farther back, the indoors area was a small space with only room for the bar and a single line of tables.

The place wasn’t busy; she could easily go in and have a table to herself.

There was a guy in a black t-shirt at the bar. Tousled blond hair, a stud in the earlobe she could see and a group of three rings in the top part of the ear. He was leaning on the bar, talking to a young dark-haired woman who looked like she probably worked there too.

El hesitated in the entrance, then turned, moved away, kept on walking.

It was late. She had no plan now that she was here.

She came to a place where thatched umbrellas on poles were dotted in a geometric pattern across the beach, and then she stopped, leaning on the metal railing.

She swallowed, trying to squeeze down on that familiar flutter of panic that was just starting to ball in her chest.

She was in a country she had never visited before with maybe a hundred euros in her purse and nowhere to sleep. These things didn’t matter, she knew. She really didn’t care what became of her. But she still had needs: she was hungry and thirsty, and she would have to find somewhere to pass the night – she had already gone something like 36 hours with virtually no sleep.

She’d been operating on shutdown, she realized. She’d stopped herself thinking for so long now, restricting herself to only what she needed to function. Now, though, she needed to wake up.

Now, she needed a plan.

§

She bought a cone of French fries doused liberally with mayonnaise, and carried on walking along the promenade. A soft breeze came from the sea now, and at last that heat was lifting. This was a more residential district; the buildings rising up behind the beach were lower and flat-roofed with wide balconies. Gates that opened onto these buildings’ cactus-filled gardens bore signs that read Propiedad privada, and then, for good measure beneath, PRIVATE.

She came to a beach stall selling soft drinks, inflatable sharks, polystyrene body boards and other cheap tat. Next to the stall: a canopied bar, bedecked with English and Spanish flags, someone singing bad karaoke from inside the building. On the beach stood a row of six blue toilet blocks covered in posters for a long-past cabaret night.

As she walked it became dark, and the people she passed grew rowdier.

She suddenly felt unsafe, alone out here with these groups of young men, loud and threatening with drink.

Increasingly, now, there were gaps between the buildings, some of them sealed off with wire-mesh panels and signs that read Construcciones. At the next empty lot it was easy to prize two panels of fencing apart far enough for her to squeeze through. The ground was uneven here, chewed up by excavation work that looked long abandoned; piles of bricks and gravel were overgrown with sparse grass and creepers. She passed these, and found a place against the off-white wall of a neighboring building, dropped to her haunches, then sat.

The wall was cool against her back, the ground hard.

Someone passed by the fence, a man with a German Shepherd dog, and she was sure it was a security guard come to eject her. She held her breath, and the man passed.

She knew she would not sleep. She was too uncomfortable, and her head was racing from thought to thought.

Practical concerns about what she would do with no money and nowhere to stay.

Thoughts of what she was here to do, how she might track down the man who had ordered Jeremy’s murder.

Thoughts of what she might do when she had done so.

And then, just as sleep stole up on her, vivid flashbacks to what had only been the night before, even though it seems so long ago now. The look in Danny Taylor’s mismatched eyes, the sheer, venomous hatred. The popping sound as the shaft of his penis had fractured in her grip. The feelings she had experienced at that: the shock, the sickness, the horror ... and the utter conviction that this was just the first step of whatever journey lay ahead.

She remembered Ashti’s words: I am imprisoned for revenge, and it was the best feeling I have ever known.

She slept, finally, curled into a ball and lying on her side on the hard, dusty ground of that abandoned building site.

She slept, and she dreamed, and in the morning she knew what she must do.

2

The sun didn’t breach the horizon until well after six, but the sky had been lightening for a good hour or more before that and El had woken early. She tried to get back to sleep again, but it was cold and her shoulder and hip were sore from the hard ground, her whole body stiff and aching. How had she slept so soundly? She must have been exhausted.

She let herself out through the gap in the fence panels and went down to the beach. The sea was a deep golden color from the rising sun, as if someone had spilled paint into the water.

She found a bench and sat, pulling her leather jacket tight against the chill in the morning air. Her stomach felt raw and empty, but it was still far too early to do anything about that. She had hours to kill yet before anywhere would be open.

When she could make herself sit no longer she stood and started to walk, heading back the way she had come the previous evening. Back to the cluster of tall hotels set back from the beach, to the start of the long strip of bars and restaurants. Past the hole-in-the-wall fast food place where she’d bought fries, now with a metal shutter pulled down across its frontage. She came to the thatched umbrellas dotted across the beach, and then, at last, La Taberna.

The front of the bar’s white canopy had been pulled down, flexible plastic windows and a zip-up door like the awning of a tent. Inside, chairs had been placed upside down on the tables and a small woman was sweeping the floor. Other than that, the place was closed to the world.

El walked on past.

§

She walked, because she didn’t know what else to do.

With only 85 euros in her purse and no idea how long she would have to make it last, she couldn’t afford to sit down to breakfast in one of the numerous beach-side cafes. She couldn’t afford even to buy a coffee and sit there nursing it. Any non-essential food or drink would be an indulgence right now. She bought a cheap and nasty hot dog from a stall, and carried on walking.

When she passed La Taberna again mid-morning the cleaner had gone and there was no-one there, so she carried on walking.

The day had heated up quickly once the sun lifted clear of the horizon. Now, El carried her jacket tucked through the strap of her shoulder bag, but even so she was soon far too hot in her black skinnies and t-shirt. Her big Michael Kors boots didn’t help, either: they were comfortable for all the walking she’d done this morning, but so damned hot!

She found another shop, one that spilled out onto the promenade with its displays of sunglasses, straw hats, postcards and yet more inflatable sharks. Inside, she found a white camisole top, flower-patterned shorts, and flip-flops, and it all came to less than fifteen euros. At the café next door she walked straight through to the toilets, washed her face at a sink, and then ran wet hands through her hair, before changing into her new clothes. Wearing black since she’d come out of prison hadn’t been a conscious choice, but now it seemed unnatural to see herself in pale summery clothes in the mirror.

When she left, one of the waiting staff gave her a dirty look and babbled at her in Spanish, but El just smiled, shrugged and walked out.

On the promenade again, she turned back in the direction of La Taberna and almost immediately she spotted the square blue column of a public telephone. The phone was attached to the side of the column, partly shielded by a Perspex case. She stared at the instructions, but couldn’t follow them, so she just fed euro coins into the slot and dialed the number she had taken from Danny’s cell-phone.

A male voice answered almost immediately. “La Taberna. Dígame?”

“I... Hola. I...”

“Inglés?” Then: “Hi, I mean, you’re English, right?” His accent was London with that Australian upwards inflection at the end of everything.

“Yes, yes I am. I’d like to talk to the owner.” The man, as Danny had put it.

“That’s what you’re doing. So what can I do for you?”

“I... can I come in?”

“Ah, you’re after the job? I didn’t know Lucy had even put the card up yet. Sure, come in. You know where we are? Gimme ten minutes and I’m yours.”

§

Her grand plan, the best she’d been able to come up with, had been to call and wing it. Well if winging it was just a case of responding to opportunities then that’s exactly what she was doing.

Someone had rolled up the front of La Taberna’s canopy now, and a couple of the tables were occupied. Somehow eleven in the morning didn’t seem a bad time for your first ice-cold beer of the day when the temperature was this high and the sky a flawless azure.

The same guy she’d seen last night was sitting at the bar reading a newspaper. In his frayed denim shorts and white t-shirt with the arms torn off, and the golden stubble, ear-rings and tattoo on one arm, he looked the perfect model of the beach bum bar owner.

He glanced across as she came to stand  under the canopy, and she saw he had pale blue eyes, almost silvery blue. “Hey, El, right?” he said, standing and giving her the once over. “You want to come through here so we can talk?” He indicated a table at the back of the bar and went over to sit.

She joined him, and lowered herself into a chair, dropping her bag on the floor beside her. Close to, he was far younger than she’d expected, mid to late twenties, perhaps – about the same age as El. Those silver eyes fixed on hers, a gentle smile tugging at his wide mouth. Somehow, he wasn’t at all what she had anticipated.

“Rob,” he said, leaning across the table to shake her hand. “So, El. Are you going to give me your résumé and  tell me about your experience, or shall I just give you the job and sack you if you’re shit at it?”

“I... I don’t know much about the job,” she said. “I just heard about it. Can you tell me some more?”

He laughed. “So you’re interviewing me before you decide to take it, eh?”

He spread his hands to cut off anything she might say in response to that.

“It’s fine,” he went on. “I’m joking. Bar work. Hours as required, which right now looks like most lunchtimes and evenings, given that Keira’s just upped and left with no notice. Pouring drinks, cleaning up, running food orders out from the kitchen and clearing tables if you’re on floor. Looking shit hot and kind of available and making this the kind of place someone comes for a drink and stays for the evening. You think you can do that? Pay’s minimum wage and tips.”

She nodded. She could do that.

“So, have you got any experience at all?” he asked.

She shook her head. “None,” she said. “I’ve never worked in a restaurant or a pub. I’ve never worked tables.” She glanced across at the bar. This looked like the kind of place where you’re lucky if they offer a choice of red or white when you ask what wine they have. “I’ve drunk enough wine to know I’d drink vodka here. I can look shit hot when I choose to and I can get on with anybody. Have I got the job?”

He’d started laughing when she’d mentioned the wine, and now he sat back, grinning. “You’re going to fit in just perfect,” he said. Then he nodded down at her bag. “You need a place to stay, too? There’s a couch out back, and we’ll all turn a blind eye if you decide to sleep there until you get sorted. It’ll be like having a night watchman on the premises.”

§

She learned quickly. Lucy, the dark-haired girl she’d seen the previous night, showed her the ropes and talked her through the process of getting food orders through to Inge in the kitchen and back out to the right tables.

She started that lunchtime, serving chilled drinks to a steady flow of customers – holidaymakers from Britain, France, Holland and Germany, mostly. Language wasn’t a problem: everyone either spoke English or was accustomed to dealing with people who only spoke English.

Rob had vanished shortly after El’s perfunctory interview. He hadn’t even taken her details: payment was cash and tips, no paperwork involved, Lucy explained when El asked how things worked.

It was odd being left to help run this place when she was a complete stranger with no experience, but Lucy and Inge didn’t seem too concerned, and the customers just assumed she actually knew what she was doing, which made it a lot easier.

For a time, she lost herself in the work, dealing with customers and cleaning glasses and cutlery when things fell quiet. It was a skill she’d acquired inside: the ability to shut yourself down and merely function. It was a way of getting through, and that’s what she needed right now: get through, survive, get away with this for long enough to work out what she was going to do next.

Revenge had burned in her heart for long enough. She could do this. She was so close now!

3

She felt so close, and yet she felt as if she was making no progress at all.

She knew Danny and Jeremy had taken orders from someone – the man, as Danny had called him. And everything pointed to that man being responsible for her husband’s death. She’d followed Danny’s telephone number out here to La Taberna, but then everything had dried up.

In her first few days here, she hardly saw a thing of Rob, but he hardly seemed like... well, the man. He was too laid back, too young. It was hard to believe that all that might just be a clever disguise, camouflage to protect his life here on the Spanish coast.

But if Rob was not the man, then how was she going to dig any further? And what was she going to do if she did manage to follow the trail back to the man?

She had come here for revenge, but increasingly she had come to understand that the need that burned deep within was more complicated than that.

When she had been in prison, that need had worked to reduce everything to black and white simplicity: revenge was something she held out ahead of herself, a desire that helped get her through.

But now...

Now, she saw that it was as much a need for answers. She needed to understand what had happened. She needed to know who her husband had really been: that was something she had been starting to do when he was snatched away from her.

§

“So, how long have you been here?” she asked Lucy, that first evening when it was just the two of them and the chef Inge on duty.

Lucy was pale-skinned and petite, her English immaculate and very probably not a first language. “Oh,” she said, “I am into my second week now.”

She knew very little, beyond the day to day operation of the bar. She told El that Rob was a good guy to work for, and not to be surprised if he made a pass at her within the first few days. He’d had the bar for a year or two now, and she thought it must have been bought for him by rich parents or something. “He acts as if it is just a pastime,” she said, eyes wide. “He is rarely here for long, and no one knows how he makes it profitable.”

“What about Keira? That’s her name, right? The one who was here before me?”

Lucy rolled her eyes dismissively. “There were only two reasons Rob hired her,” she said, and then a family group came in asking about food and the chance to dig further had gone.

§

You’d probably find bigger kitchens in a caravan. Inge was even smaller than Lucy, but she could stand in one spot and reach almost everything. She was a slight, blonde woman who was probably in her early forties. She’d been here for three months.

“I travel,” she said, laughing. “I left home when I was twenty-one. A... What? A gap-year, you call it. I am still on my gap-year and I tell you, sweetie, I am no longer twenty-one.”

“Here: let me do that.” It was past two in the morning, and the last group of customers had just left, reeling off haphazardly along the promenade. Lucy had left immediately, but Inge was still clearing up after that last late serving. She let El take the spray and scourer from her and start cleaning down the food prep area.

“It’s okay,” said Inge. “You don’t need to impress just because you’re new. And even if you do, it’s not me you need to impress.” She didn’t stop El from helping, though.

“No? So who do I need to impress?”

“Rob, of course.” Inge snorted a laugh that sounded almost like she was coughing. “But I tell you, you’ve impressed him already.”

El raised an eyebrow at the cook, remembering Lucy’s comment about how likely it was that Rob would make a pass. “I heard Keira impressed him, too.”

That laugh again, and then Inge said, “She got herself noticed.”

They didn’t say much more before Inge left, and it was only later that El started to wonder about Inge’s words.

In the back of La Taberna there was a small office. There was room for a stool and a half-sized desk, barely large enough for a laptop; above it on a shelf there was a printer, and a wall-mounted telephone. And then crammed into the remaining space was a two-seater sofa; its cover was threadbare and its foam filling was uneven and thin. It was actually a sofa-bed, she realized, although there was no room to open it out.

That phone on the wall. That would be the one, the number she had called. The number that called Danny when there was ‘work’ to do. Was it the phone that had been used when the man had decided Jeremy had become too much of a liability?

She put those thoughts out of her mind.

She lay there in the dark, her legs tucked up to her chest, not quite believing that she was almost as uncomfortable as she had been the night before on that abandoned building lot.

It was much later, as she lay there unable to sleep, that she started to think again about Inge’s choice of words.

She got herself noticed.

Such an odd choice of phrase. The chef’s English was broken, it was true, but her words seemed very specific. Why not simply say that Rob had noticed her? Did she mean something else, or was El just clutching at anything in her frustration?

Earlier in that exchange, Inge had told El that she’d impressed Rob already. What did she mean by that? Just an obvious sexual thing, given that it appeared Rob would make a pass at any woman who worked here?

She thought of him, his silvery blue eyes, his wide smile. And then she drifted into sleep.

§

She freshened up in the washroom first thing, then washed through her panties, bra and camisole top from the day before and hung them out of the back window to dry, before putting on her old black t-shirt and skinnies.

When Inge came in mid-morning to start cooking breakfasts she took one look at the underwear silhouetted against the frosted window and said to El, “You want to shower, you come to my place in the morning, okay?”

For a moment El could have cried at that unexpected flash of kindness, then she bottled down on her feelings. She smiled and thanked Inge.

She just had to get through, that was all.

This second day was manic, and it was just the three of them again, no sign of Rob.

Neither Lucy nor Inge would give her any more, in response to her gentle nudges about Rob and any other activities he, or anyone else associated with La Taberna, may be involved with.

She bit back on the desperate need to push harder until she got more information.

She had to be patient.

She would only ever have one chance at finding the truth.

§

Inge had a room above a pharmacy, four streets up the hill from the beach.

Early the next morning, El came to the chef’s door, checked the address she had been given again, and then knocked.

Inge opened the door, wearing just a pair of shorts and a black sport bra.

The place only consisted of a bedroom and a bathroom. Everything was clean and precise. Potted cacti lined up in the window, a stack of neatly folded clothing and towels sat on a chair waiting to be put away, a set of simple framed photographs of seascapes were evenly spaced along one wall.

“I don’t have anything,” El said apologetically.

Inge waved El’s words away. “I put a fresh towel for you,” she said. “Use whatever you need. It’s all just stuff, you know?”

El remembered that Inge had spent maybe the last twenty years traveling the world. You could only really do that if you never became attached to possessions. ‘Travel light and far’ – who was it who had said that?

A short time later, she stepped into the shower and tipped her head back, letting the water run over her face, through her hair, down her body. She had rarely ever felt anything more luxurious than that water, soaking everything away.

After a time, she found shampoo and conditioner, then she used a loofah to scrub. There was a razor. Had Inge really meant to use anything she needed? Was there an etiquette to these things? She was over-thinking everything again, but where she had come from you used whatever was available to you: toiletries, razors, anything. Sometimes it was hard to remember how different the rules were out here, and how sometimes what people said wasn’t what they actually meant.

She shaved under her arms, and then her legs. After hesitating for a moment, she started to shave the bronze triangle at her groin, wary of nicking herself with the blade.

When she was done, she looked at that bare, pale skin. It looked so vulnerable. She placed a hand against it, savoring the smoothness. Such an intimate sensation!

Funny, but it made such a difference to be clean, and so smooth. That very private sense of vulnerability somehow gave her more confidence.

She had been in here for far too long. Inge must be cursing her.

She emerged into the main room, wearing the white towel the chef had put out for her, and using another to rub at her hair.

Inge watched her, and for a moment El thought she had misinterpreted this whole situation.

What had she walked into here? Why had Inge invited her back?

Everybody is after something. She knew that well enough.

No one is simply kind.

Then the moment had gone. Inge picked up another towel from that stack of clean washing on the chair and stepped past El into the bathroom.

Pausing in the doorway, she looked back.

“I do not know what you are here for,” she said. “But believe me, El, it is not worth it. It could never be worth it. Leave now, while you can. There is a whole world out there. You are young and beautiful and intelligent. You have so much ahead of you. So go. You hear me? Just go.”

4

Inge would say no more, and El had the distinct impression that the chef felt she had already said too much.

They walked down to La Taberna together, an awkward silence broken only by generalities about the weather, and how busy the place had been recently.

When they reached the bar, the cleaner, whose name El still did not know, was rolling up the front awning for the day. El and Inge paused to help with the catches, then with a gentle hand on the small of El’s back the chef guided El through ahead of her into the bar.

She was trying to be kind, El knew, but hints and veiled warnings were no help at all.

She didn’t need a stranger to be looking out for her, and she certainly had no need for sympathy.

She went through to the back office and changed into the black t-shirt that was the informal uniform here. When she came back out the first breakfast customers were waiting and Lucy hadn’t turned up yet, so she went out front with a big smile on her face.

“Hola,” she said. “Good morning. Can I get you drinks while you choose?”

§

Rob showed up late that morning. El didn’t know if he’d been out of town, or simply distracted elsewhere for a few days.

He came to stand in the entrance, peering around while his eyes adjusted from the bright glare of the sunlight to the relative gloom of the bar’s interior. Then he spotted El and that wide grin split his face in two. “Hey!” he said, striding in through the tables. “Hey, El. So tell me: how’s it going?”

She thought for a moment that he was going to hug her, but then he paused at the last moment and pulled back. Any kind of intimacy made her flinch, even now. It was a gut reaction. Had he sensed that, or had she simply mis-read him?

She cut herself off. Over-thinking again.

She smiled, and said, “It’s good. Thank you. Lucy and Inge have been great.”

“You’re an old hand now. No, believe me: places like this have a high turnover of staff.”

She thought of her predecessor, Keira, but said nothing.

“Listen, you eaten yet? Let’s grab breakfast and you can tell me all about it.” Without waiting for an answer, he stepped past El, dipped his head through the kitchen doorway and said, “Hey, Inge. Two full English with orange juice and coffee out front, okay? You’re an angel. No, really you are: that’s your angel look on your face right now. I’d recognize it anywhere.” He backed away, laughing, and turned to El. “Shall we?”

§

They took a table out under the canopy, separated from the promenade only by the line of low, cactus-filled planters that marked the boundary.

“You sure this is okay?” El said. She peered back into La Taberna but the place was quiet, now they’d hit the lull between breakfast and lunch. Lucy stood at the bar, polishing glasses and reading something on her phone.

“It’s all good,” he said.

He seemed content just to sit there, while they waited for the food.

She should feel uncomfortable, she knew, the way his eyes kept flitting away towards the beach, then back to her, working over her. Somehow, though, it didn’t seem to matter. There was something about the sun and the laid-back atmosphere of this place. Something about Rob, too: he had a way of making you relax in his company.

She remembered Inge telling her she’d impressed him, that he’d noticed her. She tipped her head back and shook her hair, and his eyes followed her every move.

“You learning the ropes?” he asked, finally.

She nodded. “Like I say, Inge and Lucy have been great.”

“Yeah. I called Inge. She said you were doing well.”

She made a mental note of that: Inge was the one he turned to when he was away. But it was also Inge who had warned her to get out while she could. The chef clearly knew more than she was letting on.

Lucy brought their breakfast over, two large plates loaded with sausages, bacon, fried eggs, hash browns, beans and more. Rob tucked in straight away, as if he hadn’t eaten all the time he had been away. After a short time he paused, as if noticing that El was only politely picking at the food.

“Not your thing?” he asked. “Sorry. I shouldn’t assume.”

“No, no,” she said. “It’s good. Just a bit... you know, a bit much.”

“My bad,” he said. Then: “Hey, maybe I’ll take you for that vodka some time instead. What do you say?”

She smiled. He’d remembered her joke about how, as a wine-drinker this was the kind of bar where you’d drink vodka. She didn’t know what to say. Was he actually asking her out on some kind of date, or was this just him making a casual pass, as Lucy had said he would?

“Hey, no pressure,” he said. That was the verbal equivalent of when he’d gone to hug her earlier, sensed her hesitancy and moved things on. “So, you okay with sleeping in the back office? That sofa’s not... well, it’s not much of anything, is it?”

She smiled. “It’s under cover,” she said, and he nodded. “And right now it’s bang in my price range. That’s two things in its favor.”

He laughed, and she tried not to stare. Rough around the edges, with shaggy, neglected hair and several days’ stubble, dressed in cutaway jeans and a t-shirt so old the design had all but washed away, he was a long way from anything she would ever say was her type, but she had to admit to herself that there was something there. That smile, the silver-blue eyes, the way his whole laid-back demeanor seemed to come through in the way he looked, too.

The bastard wasn’t supposed to make her feel like this.

She remembered the conflicted mess of feelings she’d experience that evening with Danny Taylor. How she’d been drawn to him, attracted to all the things she had found so unattractive and irritating before. Was this some kind of damage that had been done to her in the past two years? Had she sunk so low that she would feel pathetically grateful to any man who gave her the time of day?

Or perhaps worse, was it that experience had chipped away some of her layers to reveal something that had always been there? Did men like Danny and Rob actually have something that connected with her in some way? Was this actual attraction, for God’s sake?

She really was in a bad way, to be feeling like this.

He was eating again, stealing the occasional glance up at her as she stared out across the beach.

She couldn’t allow herself to get like this.

Her head was messed up. Her feelings screwed up and twisted. She couldn’t let that distract her from the one thing she knew, the need that burned deep inside. She needed answers, and she needed some sort of revenge for all that had happened, all that had been destroyed.

She had to focus.

“Have you been out of town?” she asked. “It seems like you just hired me and then vanished.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, sorry about that,” he said. “Business. You know how it is.”

“You do more than just run La Taberna?”

Another shrug, as if he believed he could use that gesture to deflect almost anything. “I keep myself busy,” he said, and returned to his food.

He was a curious mix, one she didn’t feel she was even close to fathoming. He came across as such an easy-going guy, the typical beach bum who’s found a way to get by in the sun. But then sometimes there would be a chink in his armor, a hint at depths and complications.

“You own this place?” she asked, nodding towards the bar. “Or are you running it for someone else?”

“It’s complicated,” he said. “Spanish law, you know. But yeah: La Taberna is mine. I’m the man...”

The sun was burning down hot now, close to midday. Although they were under the shade of the canopy, the heat rose in waves from the stone slabs of the promenade, the kind of heat that had a brute, physical presence.

But despite that heat, his words just then turned her cold.

The man.

That was what Danny had called him: the one who gave the orders. The one who called from that mysterious Spanish telephone number – La Taberna’s number.

The one who had been behind Jeremy’s murder.

The man.

“So, El,” Rob said, apparently unaware of the effect his words had just had. “I don’t know anything about you, really. I’ve been trying to work you out, but you’re just one great big heap of contradictions.”

She raised her eyebrows, not trusting her voice, and waited for him to explain.

“You’ve got class and style, clearly,” he said. “But you walk into my bar one morning having slept the night rough God knows where. You’ve never worked in a bar before but you’re a natural: you can mix with anybody and you’re not afraid of long days and hard work. Closest I can describe it is you’re like a chameleon: you can blend in just about anywhere.”

She swallowed. She still wasn’t confident she could find any words yet.

The man.

“You okay?”

Those silver eyes were fixed on her. She looked down. Her food was mostly untouched. “Yes,” she said. “It’s just...”

“It’s okay,” he said, reaching out to put a hand on her arm.

His touch – she couldn’t put a word to the sensation. Intimate, sensitive, but at the same time... the man.

“It’s fine,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me anything. We’re all cool. We’ve all got stuff we’re running away from.” Then he smiled, and added, “At least, those of us who end up some place like this have.”

5

Back in prison Ashti had described revenge as the best feeling in the world.

El had come to believe that, too.

With Danny... that mad, intoxicating adrenalin rush had swept over her, through her, and it had been unlike anything she’d ever known.

She’d made someone hurt, like she’d been hurting.

It wasn’t something to be proud of, she knew. It didn’t make her a better person. If anything, it dragged her down to their level, or below.

But that mad rush!

She’d had a long time to build up to that, though. She’d known Danny was first on her list, and she knew he deserved everything that came his way. Just the thought of it had kept her going through the darkest times in prison.

But now... Now she had a face to attach to all those gathered up feelings. A name.

Rob.

It should have made things simpler, but it didn’t.

How could she transfer all that anger onto an easy-going, wide-smiling beach bum like Rob?

§

She couldn’t, because he wasn’t the man.

He was just an easy-going bum who was running a beach-side bar, who liked to sit down with a pretty waitress and impress her with bragging about how he was the big everything. The kind of guy who’ll say pretty much anything to get into a girl’s panties.

The man... the real man... well, tonight he was a no-show, but at least he was out there, he was real, and that alone gave El the sense that she was getting close.

Tonight...

It started out as what El was coming to know as a typical evening at La Taberna. Early evening, the sun dipping low and that furnace heat starting to ebb away, and it was family time. Parents with their kids, out for drinks and food – anything with French fries, and preferably an old favorite: fish, pie, steak, and for the kids, fish fingers or sausages or chicken nuggets. Increasingly, the families drifted away and were replaced by groups of young drinkers, older couples, expats who were always clearly identifiable by their leathery sun-wrinkled skin.

Rob manned the bar, while Lucy and El worked the floor, a constant stream of clearing tables, taking orders and ferrying food out from Inge’s kitchen.

Around mid-evening, Rob went to take a call in the back office. El went across to the bar to cover for him, but also because he’d left the door open and she might just catch what the call was. This was the place he used to call people like Danny – and her late husband... It made sense that any use of that phone might give her some kind of lead.

A middle-aged couple came to the bar then, talking loudly in German to each other, then pausing to address El in faltering, and even louder, Spanish.

She raised her hands, gave them the smile, and said, “Guten abend. What can I get you to drink?” By the time she’d finished serving them two Carlings and talking them through the menu, she turned and Rob was coming through the doorway.

He nodded to her, and said, “Thanks for that,” as she threaded out from behind the bar. Then he went on, “Looks like we’ve got some company tonight. Might need cover on the bar again if he wants to talk, okay?”

“‘He’?”

That shrug again. “So when I told you I own this place, like I said, it’s complicated. The lease is mine, I run the bar, but, well, this is an expensive place to be running a business.”

“So this man,” said El. “He’s coming here now? And he’s the owner? The man?”

Rob nodded. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “He’s a good guy. It’s just a matter of running the place like any other evening, okay?”

She hadn’t seen him like this before. Edgy, nervous, trying to make out that this was no big deal when it clearly was.

She was getting close, all of a sudden. Just by putting herself in the right place at the right time she was getting close!

§

Now, every time someone new showed up at the bar’s entrance, El studied them carefully. An elderly couple in shades and sun hats. A group of twenty-somethings, drunk already. All of them holidaymakers or expats.

Then three men came in, one in dark linen trousers and an untucked, short-sleeved white shirt, the other two in black jeans and t-shirts. Surely that must be him? He looked like he owned the place, and the other two looked like hired muscle. But no, Rob took one look at them and ignored them, leaving Lucy to seat them at a table over to one side of the covered area. Whatever dodgy business they were here on, it didn’t seem to be anything to do with Rob.

By eleven it was clear the mysterious owner wasn’t going to show up.

“Change of plans?” El asked, as she collected another tray of drinks from the bar.

Rob shrugged, and gave that easy smile of his. “Happens sometimes,” he said. “Busy guy. No big deal.”

The place was heaving tonight. Every table was taken for most of the evening, and there was standing room only at the bar. Nights like tonight they needed double the staff. It wasn’t until after midnight that things started to ease, and then, abruptly, by shortly after one the place was almost empty.

“Well damn, but that was a good evening,” said Rob, taking a stack of notes from the till. Then he cracked that grin at El and said, “Maybe now’s the time for that drink. What do you say?”

Inge had gone already, and Lucy was just threading her way through the tables to leave.

“I... maybe,” said El.

He took that as a ‘yes’, and leaned back to grab a bottle of Smirnoff and a bucket of ice.

“Show you something?” he said, turning back to face her. Then he laughed, and added, “It’s okay. It’s cool.” And with that he stepped past her and led the way out of the bar, only pausing to roll down the front canopy and hook and zip it into place.

Instead of heading up into town, or either way along the paved promenade, he led the way through a gap in the iron railing and out onto the silver-white sand. Now, in the darkness, the sand had taken on an almost eerie glow. Beyond, the sea was dark, the crests of the occasional low waves glinting pale in the light from the town.

“I love it like this,” said Rob, turning right when he reached the edge of the water. “It’s suddenly a different town. Peaceful.” He reached into the bucket and withdrew a glass full of ice, then paused to pour vodka for El, before doing the same for himself.

She took a drink, and the blast of icy alcohol made her eyes water. There was something decadent about drinking vodka neat like this, but the ice took the edge off it and it seemed somehow right.

“So what did you want to show me?”

He stopped and turned to face her, and for a moment she thought he was going to take that one step to close the gap and kiss her.

Instead, he hooked the bucket over the arm holding his drink and with his free hand he waved in a wide sweep to indicate the town.

She turned to look. Most of the beach-side strip of restaurants and bars was in darkness now, save for a few night-lights, and a bar that was still open and lit like a casino. Beyond, lights stacked up the hill away from the beach. It was almost geological, that layering of lights in strata; rock formations that followed the contours of the land. Further still, and the lights petered out, leaving just the looming dark shape of the hills that formed the backdrop to the town.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

The effect of the town’s lights was totally artificial, yet the way it delineated the landscape was so dramatic, a rugged thing, almost. El looked at Rob, and his features were picked out by the lights, almost as the landscape was. “You wuss,” she said, and carried on walking.

He laughed, and caught up with her.

“So where are you from?” she asked, getting in before he could start questioning her.

“Stow-on-the-Wold,” he said. “Exotic, huh?”

“Pretty,” she said. She’d been there with friends a few years ago, an attractive little market town in the Cotswolds, all golden limestone walls, cottage gardens and wonky buildings. She paused to remove her shoes, then stepped past him to walk in the surf. The water was surprisingly cold, given the heat of the day, and the sultry mugginess of the night air.

“Is that what you’re running from?” she asked. “Chocolate box villages and BMW drivers?”

The question appeared to throw him, then he nodded and gave a brief laugh. Earlier, he’d told her everyone was running away from something.

“Nah,” he said, joining her in the waves without bothering to remove his canvas sneakers. “Just... you know. Too many bad choices, I guess.”

He moved up the beach and flopped down on the sand, leaning back on his elbows.

El stood before him, looking down at him. He should be on a beach in Thailand, or Goa, or Australia, with his lazy, rugged look and his lean surfer’s body. “Your accent,” she said, pressing him. “You don’t sound like a Gloucestershire boy.”

He shook his head, peering back up at her. What was in his head just then? Was he studying her as she had studied him? Was he trying to work her out?

“I left when I could,” he said. “Went to art school. Yes, that’s probably why I take a girl like you out to see the lights and the hills: the artistic temperament, darling. Dropped out, went traveling. Spent time in Nepal and Kerala, then found my way to Australia. Traveled the Queensland coast, working in bars and campsites, lived in Gold Coast for a  while and then ended up down in Sydney. I found a place in Cronulla, a little bar like La Taberna, only with a cook who really knew her seafood. The snappers and calamari really were to die for. Bless Inge, but... you know what I mean?”

“You still haven’t told me what you’re running from.” She dropped to sit beside him, knees drawn up to her chest.

“You take that kind of thing for granted, don’t you?”

“What kind of thing?”

“Twenty-three years old. Running your own business in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Beautiful girlfriend who just happens to cook the best salt and pepper squid you’ve ever encountered. You don’t realize that’s something you have to fight to hold onto. You don’t realize just how easy it is to wreck it by acting like any other twenty-three year-old boy who doesn’t know when he’s got it good. Guess I hit the skids after that. You don’t know what it’s like to lose everything.”

She said nothing. Instead, she drained her glass, crunching on the last of the ice and then reaching for the bottle.

“So you’re running from a broken heart?” she said, after a time.

“You make it sound romantic,” he said. “When in truth I’m just running from a big fuck-up.”

“So how did you end up here?”

“Friend of a friend,” he said. “Guy I met in Oz. Put me in touch with the guy who owns La Taberna and here I am, in charge of a bar that’s not a patch on my first one and running all kinds of shitty errands to pay back favors... Sorry: I’ll stop bitching. I didn’t bring you out here to complain about my lot in life. All in all, it’s pretty good, you know.”

For a time there, she’d forgotten everything. All the weight had lifted from her frame, all the anger and the burning resentment. There was just the gentle lapping of the waves, the lights of the town, the surrounding darkness, the soft tone of Rob’s voice.

She still couldn’t claim to really know Rob, but... somehow it was hard to believe that he was any more than a bit player in all this. A front for the bar’s real owner, a guy who runs errands because nobody would ever suspect easy, laid-back Rob.

He was watching her. Those silver eyes glinted in the light spilling down from the town.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, out of the blue.

She looked away, down towards the water.

“Lucy said it wouldn’t be long before you made a pass at me.”

“Can you blame me?” He had turned onto his side now, propped up on one elbow, still studying her.

“You need to take your time with me,” she said, surprised at her own words. He didn’t need to take his time, he needed to stop. She couldn’t do with this kind of complication.

“Sure,” he said. “Something to do with the shit you’re running from?” He didn’t know how close he was to the truth with his damned smooth talking.

And so much for taking his time: he took that moment to lean in, put his hand to the side of her face and press his lips softly against hers. It was a brief, chaste kiss, and so incredibly tender and intimate because of that: the press of lips, the touch of his hand, and then he withdrew, leaned back on both elbows, tipping his head up towards the stars.

She took another drink, a deep breath, and held both before swallowing and then exhaling.

“So who’s the man?” she said, after a time. “Why the drama about him visiting this evening?”

Rob shook his head. “You really don’t want to know,” he said. “You know I said I got here as a result of too many bad choices? Ever hooking up with him was probably the worst of them all.”

“That sounds dramatic.”

He sat up now, and drained his glass. “Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe it’s just the vodka and the late night talking. But I’ll tell you one thing: you don’t ever want to get dragged into his world, you hear?”

“Is that what happened to Keira?”

Silence. Those silver eyes studying her again.

“It’s just... one of the girls said Keira had been ‘noticed’ – I wasn’t sure what that meant. I wondered...”

“Best not to do that kind of wondering, okay?”

He stood, hooked up the bucket in one hand and offered his other to El. “It’s late,” he said. “I’m sorry. Just tired, I guess.” That smile again, but this time it looked distinctly forced.

She took his hand and allowed him to draw her up to her feet. He wouldn’t meet her look now. Had she pushed too hard?

They walked back up the beach to the promenade and then back the short distance to La Taberna, silent.

At the zipped up doorway of the canopied frontage they paused.

“I’m sorry,” said El. “I didn’t mean to–”

He raised his hand to her cheek again. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s just... Some of the stuff I’m involved in... Like I say, I’ve made a few bad choices and drifted into a life I’d never have anticipated. I like you, El. I like you one Hell of a lot. But you have to understand: if you go asking the kind of questions you’ve been asking you’re going to end up in a lot of trouble. There are some seriously bad people out there.”

Was he threatening her? Warning her? Or merely trying to explain his responses?

He probably didn’t even know, himself, she thought. She had been right earlier: he was just a bit-part player in something way bigger, and for the first time she had a real sense that she might be blundering into something a long way out of her depth.

She pressed against his hand on her cheek, then stretched up towards him and kissed him softly. Just as brief and chaste a kiss as before and, if anything, even more intimate and loaded with promise because of that.

Then she turned and slipped through the narrow opening in the canvas and turned to zip it closed.

6

Rob went AWOL again the next day. There was no sign of him when they opened up, which wasn’t unexpected. But then as the lunchtime rush built up, and it was still just the El, Lucy and Inge, it became clear that he was unlikely to show.

Dropping one order off in the kitchen, El paused and said to Inge, “So no Rob today?”

“He called,” said Inge, and it sounded as if she would have left it at that if El hadn’t loitered and caught her eye again, prompting for more information. “He’s been called away,” she added. Then: “So he hit on you, did he?”

El shrugged. “He might have tried,” she said.

“No surprise.”

Inge clearly wasn’t going to tell her anything more, so El returned to the bar, where two more tables had filled up already. It was going to be another busy one.

§

He was away all that day and most of the next, and El had to clamp down on her growing sense of frustration.

Most of the time it felt as if she was getting nowhere, and it gave her plenty of time to think. When she was inside, she’d had all the time in the world to think and plot, but now, here on the ground in a foreign country surrounded by the complications of real people, everything seemed so different.

Second thoughts? No: that would be a betrayal of herself. She couldn’t abandon the one thing that had got her through the last two years. She had to see this through.

But she remembered that sudden sense that she might be getting out of her depth.

There are some seriously bad people out there.

She did her best to shut out those thoughts. They would do her no good at all.

The next day was just as busy, and now she fully understood Lucy’s frustration at Rob’s approach to running La Taberna. Back on El’s first day Lucy had said he treated it ‘like a pastime’, absent more often than he was there. So most of the time it was just Lucy and El out front. It was only a small place, but when the tables were full and the customers were lined up at the bar it needed more than just the two of them.

For once, though, things quietened down earlier than usual. By not long after ten the throng was thinning and there were only a few drinkers left at the tables. Lucy was behind the bar, talking to an old English guy El now knew as a regular. A group had just left from one of the tables out under the canopy, so El went to gather up their abandoned glasses.

As she approached, she glanced across to the entrance and Rob was standing there, a strange look on his face. Had something happened? Something to do with his ‘business trip’, perhaps. Maybe this would be an opportunity to press him for more information.

When he caught her eye, he nodded back towards his shoulder, indicating that she should join him.

She smiled and went over. In that moment of eye contact, she had a brief flashback to that kiss on the beach, and then again here at La Taberna. Given his reputation as a bit of a player, she’d been surprised at his restraint. Perhaps, like his claims to be ‘the man’, he was far more talk than action.

Before she had even joined him he turned and stepped out onto the promenade.

It was quiet out here, deserted save for a few holidaymakers wending their way from bar to bar or back to their hotels.

“Is everything okay?” she asked, addressing his back.

Something was wrong.

Badly wrong, she realized.

He turned, and fixed her with those silver-blue eyes. “You tell me,” he said.

That was when another figure appeared, stepping out of the shadows to one side of the bar’s canopied frontage.

It took her a moment to recognize him. The shaven head, the inverted triangle shape of his upper body, the arms and thighs pumped up with weights and steroids. The tattoos that emerged from his white t-shirt and ran down his arms, bold Maori patterns and on the left forearm a St George’s flag.

Danny Taylor.

It was Danny Taylor and the look in his blue and green eyes was sheer murder.

§

Before

1

Is it worse to have lost all that you had, or to learn that you’d never really had it in the first place?

Either way, it was a life stolen from her.

She wasn’t a particularly materialistic young woman. It wasn’t the house, the cars, the freedom to eat out in the finest restaurants whenever the mood took her. She appreciated these things, but they did not define her.

She was a good person. She worked for charities, for God’s sake! She’d had plenty of opportunities to carry on working in the City, but no, she’d chosen to work for next to nothing, helping charities make the best of their financial resources. A conservation group, a children’s trust, a humanitarian charity, even.

Her friends were good people, too. People who cared and made sacrifices.

The lifestyle was just... well it was nice. She’d grown up comfortable, and her marriage to Jeremy gave her the freedom to make choices that would otherwise have been much harder.

The irony of all that did not escape her later, when she learned that it had all been a lie, and worse, a lie paid for in human suffering.

§

Jeremy.

Tall and dark, not a hair out of place. That was his life: not an element astray.

She had never known a man so considerate. He forgot nothing. Her favorite food and drinks, the designers she liked, the stories from her past, everything. Their last anniversary together: a private dining room at her favorite Michelin-starred restaurant, the music from their wedding day, two slender vases of Marchessa Boccella roses on the table. Everything, just right.

If anything, Jeremy had been too restrained, too controlled. He was never a man to let himself go. He liked to be in control of every element of his life. That had been one of the attractions to Eleanor: a man who cared about the details was a man who cared. To have a man ten years her senior and clearly very successful pay that kind of attention to her had been quite breathtaking.

They were together for three years, and in that time Eleanor had been unaware of the gradual shift in her own perception. She had not noticed the point at which that fastidious attention to detail had translated into a conservatism, a sense of life’s potential being constrained.

She had not seen their relationship like that at all until that night when he had come to her late and falteringly said, “Eleanor... My darling Eleanor. I have something to tell you...”

§

It was an evening when their plans had abruptly changed, and that in itself was unusual for a man who so liked to be in control.

They’d planned an evening out together with friends from Eleanor’s conservation charity. A few drinks, something to eat at the gastro pub in the next village, nothing too fancy. Jeremy had arranged to meet her there, and it was only as she drew up in the car park that her cell phone buzzed with a new message. Pausing in the dark, she found her phone and read his brief message. Sorry, my darling. Unavoidably detained. Please share my apologies.

That was so Jeremy. Polite to the point of formal, even in a text message to Eleanor.

She found her friends, shared her husband’s apologies and thought little more of it until later, at home, when he still had not turned up and there had been no more messages.

She went to bed, the lights dimmed.

Some time after midnight she heard a car door outside, then noises of someone entering the house. Moments later the bedroom door opened and he stood there and she felt that uplifting rush of happiness that her life was like this and that he was the man who had made it so.

That was the last time she ever felt quite like that.

He came around to her side of the bed, dropped to his knees and put a hand on her bare arm.

“Eleanor,” he said. “Are you awake? I’m sorry, so sorry.”

For a moment she thought he was apologizing for the evening, but then she realized it was something more than that.

“Eleanor...” he went on. “My darling Eleanor. I have something to tell you...”

She sat up. The bedding fell away and, strangely before her husband, this made her feel suddenly exposed so she pulled the sheet up again and folded her arms across her chest to keep it in place.

“Jeremy? What is it?”

He was having an affair. He’d been in an accident. He–

“I think I’m in trouble,” he said. “We need to prepare ourselves for the worst. The police are involved.”

She stared at him. His words didn’t make any sense to her. He lived so cautiously... how could he ever end up in trouble with the police?

“Our life,” he said. “My life. My work. They are not what they appear. All of this... the life that we share, my darling. Well, it didn’t come about from me just working in the City. I’ve taken risks, and some of the things I have done have pushed the boundaries of what is legal.”

“You were always so careful about everything,” she said, struggling to keep up with him.

He smiled then, and she saw something in his eye that she’d never seen before. A hint of something, a spark of danger.

“I always try to give that impression,” he said. “The best gambler must always appear to be careful when taking the biggest risks...”

§

“What’s happening? What have you done?”

He was still kneeling, his eye level a fraction lower than hers.

“I promise,” he said. “I will tell you everything, but right now you are best protected if you do not know anything specific. You have to trust me. Can you do that for me?”

“How can I do that when I don’t know what’s going on?”

“You know me. Is that enough?”

But did she know him? If all this had been an act, a front, then who was the real Jeremy Dryton? Who was this gambler who had always pretended to be so safe?

“I...”

“Trust at least that I love you, Eleanor.”

Those dark eyes seemed to be pinning her to the spot, searching deep inside her for an answer she suddenly did not know.

“Trust that I know what I am doing and we can get through this. That at last we can drop all the barriers, all the layers of protection I’ve always hidden behind. That we can be the real us. Can you do that, Eleanor?” He put a hand to her cheek, then slid it around to cup the side of her head, his fingers buried in her long, copper hair. “Can you trust me just this one time that I will see us through?”

His fingers tightened in her hair, and he drew her closer. Such strength... how had his touch never felt like this before?

So close, and those dark eyes were still fixed on hers.

“Take this chance to explore what we can be, my love.”

His kiss was hard, hungry, a kiss that possessed her from the moment his lips pressed against hers. He drove his tongue deep, that hand now at the back of her head, holding her hard against him. Then he tugged back, down, yanking her head back by the hair so hard that it hurt, but then immediately that pain transformed into something else.

His teeth raked down her exposed throat and she gasped. She moved her hands behind her to stop from toppling backwards and the sheet fell away.

His mouth reached her collarbone; lips and tongue working across smooth skin pulled tight.

Down to the first swell of a breast, and then a great sweep of lips and teeth moved across that breast, caught on the nipple, clamped tight. He sucked her in, drawing the nipple between sharp teeth, flicking it with the tip of his tongue, and bolts of pleasure stabbed through her body.

He stood, and she lay back, pushing the sheet away with her feet. She drew one leg up, half-turning towards him as he tore at his clothes.

He pulled his shirt over his head without unbuttoning it, then yanked his trousers open, pulled them and his shorts down, kicked them clear.

On his knees between her legs, he put a hand on her sex, pressing, sliding his fingers between her labia. She pushed against him and one finger slid into her. So hot and wet!

She studied him as he kneeled there, his lean body, his manhood standing hard and high, and that look in his eyes! It was as if she was looking at a different man, and God it turned her on!

She reached for him, but he cut her off, grabbing her wrist. Bearing down on her, he caught her other wrist and pinned her arms above her.

She took his full weight, his hardness pressing against her mound, the base of his shaft against her clit and the wet head sliding across the flat of her belly. He started to thrust, and his mouth found hers, his tongue driving deep.

Almost immediately she was on the edge of orgasm. She’d never known anything like it, never even imagined that Jeremy could be like this, that he could take her like this.

He drew back, and the head of his manhood slid down through the neat triangle of hair at her groin, pressed against her, parted her and then, with an abrupt, hard thrust, slid home.

She cried out.

Hell, she nearly blacked out, the feeling was so intense. The sense of being so suddenly and completely filled, the sensation of being parted, almost split in two. The feeling of his full weight on top of her, driving him into her.

It was more than merely physical, though. He was having her, possessing her. In that moment she was totally his.

No man had ever done that to her. No man had owned her like this.

He pulled away and thrust again, repeating that sensation of filling and splitting her. His mouth moved down her body again, his back arching and twisting until he found a breast, a nipple. His teeth latched on, his tongue started that flicking thing again, and now it was as if those bolts of intense pleasure were arcing through her body from the nipple, from her groin, sensations meeting somewhere deep in her belly where they combined and grew.

She was crying and groaning like some kind of animal now, her entire body bucking up against him until that heat in her belly transformed into something else and she was taken over with wave after wave of tightening muscles, the nerves alive with sensation, her heart thumping and her breath ragged.

She’d closed her eyes, lost in all that was happening, but now, as those sensations ebbed, she opened them and his dark eyes were boring into her. At that moment, she saw the change, saw the slight widening of his eyes, the sag in his jaw, his mouth opening narrowly, and then he threw his head back, arched his spine and thrust deep into her as wet heat suddenly filled her.

He thrust again, even as he started to soften, and she felt another pulsing somewhere deep inside.

Again, and then he was growing rapidly soft, holding himself in her, clinging onto every last wave of his own orgasm.

§

She’d never known anything like it.

She’d never thought he could be like that.

She’d never... she’d just never...

She slept, and the last thing she knew before drifting off was his reassuring presence beside her.

And when she woke, just as dawn’s light was breaking, he was gone.

2

He called her, though.

He called her just before she was due to leave for the commute into London.

She didn’t know what to do. Whether to treat this as a normal day, or to abandon all pretence and stay home, waiting.

“Eleanor?”

“Jeremy.”

“I had to leave, or I could never have left. Do you understand that?”

“I think so.”

“I’m safe. And I love you.”

The line went dead. Was that it? Had something happened. Was that his way of saying he was gone from her life?

She didn’t know.

She went to the station, caught her train, had her meetings.

She just didn’t know.

§

Four days passed, and she heard nothing.

It was long enough for people to ask questions, and all she could say was that he had been called away on business. She was accustomed to evenings on her own, but now those evenings were different, something worse than empty. She was never without her phone, but it remained silent. She wouldn’t leave the house in case he returned. She canceled dinner with her aunt Lydia, making excuses that she was sure must not ring true.

Nothing.

On the fifth evening, a Friday, the doorbell went and she almost leapt from her chair. She had not believed there would be anything by now; that last call really was the last she would hear and at some point she must work out how to rebuild her life.

It wasn’t him, though. Why would he ring the bell?

Was it the police?

She paused in a doorway, suddenly scared.

He’d said he was in trouble, said the police were involved.

She’d promised to support him, but if this was the police how could she know what to say, other than the truth? Could she even bring herself to say something that was not the truth, if the police asked?

The house had a wide entrance lobby, with windows to either side of the double door. She paused by one of these windows and peered out through the stained glass. She saw a silver car, distorted and tinted blue by the hand-made glass. If it was a police car then it was an unmarked one.

She opened the door to a man about her height, head shaved smooth, broad shoulders almost splitting a brown leather jacket.

“Hey, Mrs Dryton,” he said.

It was Danny Taylor, a friend of Jeremy’s. She’d never known what had connected the two. They had nothing in common. Probably unfairly, she’d always seen Danny as the male-friendship equivalent of her husband’s bit of rough.

All this time she’d vaguely known Danny, she’d never worked out what it was about the way he looked at you that was so unsettling. He’d always made her uncomfortable, and she’d put it down to something not quite right, that pervy way his eyes kept wandering down her body before leaping back to her eyes. Well there was that, but also... his eyes were different colors, one blue and the other green. How had she not noticed that before?

“Danny? What is it? I’m afraid Jeremy’s not–”

“It’s okay, Mrs Dryton. Eleanor? Jerry’s been in touch. Asked me to pass on a message.”

For a moment she felt that as a physical blow: he’d been in touch with Danny, but not her.

Perhaps Danny read some of that in her face, because he raised his hands defensively, and said, “No, no: I’m just the messenger. He said he couldn’t call you. Didn’t know who might be listening in.”

She felt instantly guilty for her reaction, couple with alarm at Danny’s words. How had she entered a world where a husband didn’t dare phone his wife for fear that their line had been tapped? How had a world that had been so safely middle class only a few days before now have this Kafkaesque paranoia running through every action, every thought?

“He wants to see you,” said Danny. “He said he wants you to give him a chance to explain.”

She wanted nothing else in the world, other than to see her husband again.

“Where?” she asked.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Midday. Said you’d know where. Said it’s the place with the roses. I don’t know any more than that. Does it make sense to you?”

She nodded. “It does. Thank you, Danny.” Then a thought occurred, and she said, “If he’s worried our phone might be tapped, might we be watched, too? Right now, is someone watching us? Will someone follow me when I leave tomorrow?”

Danny shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Like I say: I’m only the messenger. I don’t know where he is. He called me on a number I didn’t know, and he’s probably binned that phone already.”

They said their goodbyes, and she waited at the half-open door as Danny returned to his car, climbed in, and headed back down the graveled drive.

§

She went upstairs and packed an overnight bag, then came back down, took the through door into the garage and sat in her BMW, gathering her breath and her thoughts.

Her first instinct had been to flee the house, but now she hesitated. If she was being watched... If someone might follow her when she left here tomorrow, would they not be watching the house already? If she checked into some quiet little guesthouse would the use of a credit card be flagged up somewhere in some monitoring system?

Just how paranoid was she being?

She keyed the remote for the garage door and pulled out onto the driveway.

When she had driven a short way from the house she pulled into the mouth of a field gateway and killed the engine and lights.

Minutes passed and there was no sign of any other vehicles.

She felt stupid. She felt paranoid. She felt really, really scared.

She started up again and drove for ten minutes, pulling up outside a row of thatched cottages.

It was late, she knew, but she couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

She knocked on the front door of one of the cottages and a dog started to yap from inside. Seconds later, the door opened a little and halted, restrained by a security chain.

“Lydia?”

“Eleanor?”

The door pushed shut so the chain could be released, and then opened wide. Eleanor’s aunt stood there in striped pyjamas, holding back a Westie that glowed white like a ghost in the gloom of the cottage’s interior.

“What’s wrong, Eleanor? Is something the matter?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know what’s the matter, but I just need to stay somewhere tonight.”

“What’s he done? It’s Jeremy, isn’t it? If he’s hit you, I’ll–”

“No. No. He hasn’t done anything. He’s not at home. I just needed to be somewhere else for tonight. Can I come in?”

3

The place with the roses. That was a private joke. It was a pub out by the river, west of Kingston. They’d stopped there for an impromptu drink one time a couple of years back, before they were married, because Eleanor liked the name: The Marchess. “It’s like the roses,” she’d told him. “Marchessa Boccella.” They’d always been one of her favorites: delicate pink petals crammed into tightly-packed heads, with a real old-fashioned rose scent.

The beer garden stretched right down to the river, where today she could see a line of cruisers and a single, traditional narrowboat moored. The early morning drizzle had cleared, and now it was a beautiful, sunny spring Saturday, and the benches and tables were all occupied by the time Eleanor arrived.

She walked down towards the water. There was something calming about this place, such a very English beer garden. It was a place where nothing bad would ever dare happen.

What wasn’t apparent from the pub was that the beer garden took an ‘L’ shape, one leg hidden from view by a hedge until you were most of the way down to the river. More tables occupied this quieter area and there, at the farthest table, Jeremy sat, looking out across the river.

He had a whisky, not normally a lunchtime drink for him, and by his glass was an untouched white wine spritzer, made with soda, not lemonade, and with a slice of lime wiped round the rim and squeezed into it. Jeremy knew how she liked her drinks, and what she would choose on a day like this.

He saw her as soon as she rounded the corner of the garden, and he stood, always the English gentleman.

For a moment this could have been any other day, but then, when she drew close to him, he put both hands behind her head and drew her in to a hungry, brief kiss.

She could get to like this new Jeremy. She could get to like him a lot if only he would–

“Where in fuck’s name have you been?” she said in a low voice. She almost never swore. He had probably never heard her say that word before. “I was scared. I didn’t know what had happened. You say you want me to trust you, well you have to give me something to trust.”

She sat across from him as she said this, and now he nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “But if I make one mistake, then it will be to protect you too much, Eleanor.”

He reached across, took her hand, and kissed her knuckles, the gentlest of touches.

“Where have you been hiding?” she said softly, and she didn’t mean just for the last few days.

§

Since leaving Eleanor that night, he’d been here at the Marchess. Not in the pub itself, but in one of the boats, a 26 foot cruiser owned by someone Jeremy described as ‘a business associate’.

The main cabin in was in the rear, the foam-topped bed narrower than a normal double. They lay there some time later, hot limbs entwined, breathing hard. It was as if a dam had burst. As if he’d been holding himself back all this time.

“I could never let myself go with you,” he tried to explain, his head buried into the hollow between her neck and shoulder. “That hurt so much, Eleanor, to hold a part of myself back from you. But I always feared... it sounds stupid, I know, but I always feared that if I ever truly let myself go with you then you might see past all of my defenses, and see who I really am.”

“Would that have been so bad?”

Those dark eyes. There was a darkness within him, she saw now. “I’ve been responsible for bad things,” he told her. “I feared you could never have loved me if you were aware of that.”

“But I do love you.”

She couldn’t remember the last time she had said that out loud, and even now it surprised her. It was true, though. The safe veneer of her life was in the process of being stripped away and right now she did not care. She had made her choices, and she was here, lying in the cabin of some stranger’s boat with her husband, naked and exhausted and buzzing with an exhilaration she had never known.

“It can be dangerous loving me,” he said. “This isn’t a game.”

“The police are after you, I know. I don’t know what for, but I can see that you’re scared.”

“It’s more than just the police,” he said. “If it was just the police I’d be laughing.”

He really was scared.

“Who is it? What are you involved in, Jeremy?”

He sat up, shuffling up the bed so he could lean on the headboard. He looked vulnerable like that. Exposed.

“I’ve been involved in all kinds of things,” he said, hesitantly. “It started with a little import and export. Things that may or may not have been illegal. I knew who to pay off in Customs so that it was never something that was tested in court. But one thing leads to another. What had been alcohol and electronics became pharmaceuticals, and then the guy who was financing things from the other side started to get ambitious. Once you’re involved in something like that, though, it’s just not possible to extricate yourself.”

“What have you been doing, Jeremy?”

“Trafficking,” he said simply. “Anything that the man on the other side wanted us to traffic.”

It was only much later that Eleanor would learn the full extent of that. The people. The women living in camps at Sangatte who would do anything to cross into the UK, and anything to stay once they had done so. The women from Eastern Europe and further afield, sold on the promise of a better life, and then just sold.

Now... Jeremy drew the line at what he had already told her: protecting her from the details, she understood, so that she would not have to lie for him. “I’m mixed up with some bad people,” he said. “I need to get out. I have money put aside. A new identity set up, a passport I can use. I’m going to get out, Eleanor, and then I’m going to bring you away from all this, if you’ll come. We can start again. A new start: the real us.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“You have a choice, Eleanor. You can stay here, you can start again without me. But I have to go. If I stay here then I’ll be arrested, or worse. Far worse. I know too much. I know I don’t have long. Will you come with me, Eleanor? Will you take that chance on a future together?”

4

He’d told her she should trust Danny Taylor. No one else. Just Danny.

To do such a thing went against her better judgment, but Danny had already come good, delivering Jeremy’s first message to her. Was she just being a snob? Distrusting him because he was rough around the edges and put on that tough, wide-boy act all the time?

“I know you don’t like him,” Jeremy had told her, shortly before she left him at the boat, “but Danny’s a good guy. And there’s one thing I know for certain: his loyalty is to me.”

She’d nodded, and agreed to trust Danny. In an odd kind of way that felt reassuring. She’d had nobody she felt she could turn to and now there was, at least, someone. He’d made her memorize Danny’s number, and if she needed to call him she must do so from the village call-box, not her mobile or the landline. It felt good to have something there, in her head, that she could fall back on.

“Are you going to be okay?” she had asked before leaving the boat. “You’re not going to do anything foolish...?”

He shook his head. “I’m too scared,” he said.

For a moment she thought it was a glib joke, but no, he really was. That, more than anything else up to now, impressed on her the seriousness of the situation.

§

She heard nothing the next day, and the time passed slowly, even for a Sunday. She didn’t feel she could go out, she felt so exposed, but staying at home just made everything worse. She worked in the garden, always feeling that there were eyes on her. Every car that went past was going to be the police, or a car full of some kind of gangster, until it went past harmlessly and she could calm her rising panic.

The evening was worse. The house seemed so empty, even though she was accustomed to Jeremy being away. This was her life now: one filled with fear and uncertainty. Her old life, the comfortable one built on deception and self-delusion, seemed so far away.

Monday, she should have had meetings in the city but she rearranged everything. It wouldn’t do any good to mope around at home, but then trying to work when she was so distracted wouldn’t do anyone any good.

By Monday evening, she thought she might be going steadily mad. She trusted nothing, no one. Every shadow contained a potential stalker, every slight noise was the first sign that they – whoever ‘they’ might be – were finally closing in.

She decided to walk into the center of the village and call Danny. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know if she wanted to even do anything more than just hear his voice on the end of the line. Just that moment of normality, of a voice she could trust... suddenly that seemed such a precious thing.

§

So much for memorizing his number. When she opened the front door a silver car was approaching slowly up the drive, Danny at the wheel.

She waited as he pulled up, and then climbed out.

Standing in the driveway, he shrugged, his hands spread wide, eyebrows raised. It was a very open gesture, one that said I don’t know what the Hell’s going on but it’d be good to share it with someone right now.

She stepped back and waved him in. “Come on,” she said to him. “I have wine. Beer. Whatever.”

They sat in the conservatory, a large construction of finely leaded glass at the back of the house, built carefully to catch the best of the evening sun. Danny had opted to join her with a bottle of Marlborough Pinot Noir. She couldn’t tell if it was actually his preference or if he was just trying to make a point; maybe he’d picked up on her snobbery from the start.

“He’s scared,” she said, after a short period filled with small talk about the house and garden, and long silences.

“So you did go to see him,” said Danny. He’d been very careful not to ask questions. Perhaps that was out of respect for her feelings, or maybe because he didn’t want to be told anything that might turn out to be incriminating.

She nodded.

“I don’t know if he’s more scared of the police or whoever else is after him.”

Danny looked away. “I don’t know much,” he said. “I just pick up on a few bits and pieces, you know what I mean?”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I wasn’t digging.”

He took another sip of his wine. “I just hope he’s okay, you know? He’s looked out for me in the past. He believed in me when everyone else just treated me like shit.”

“He’s okay. Or at least he was when I saw him on Saturday.”

“They’ll find him,” said Danny. “Nothing will stop them.”

“He’s okay,” she said again. “He’s somewhere only he and I would think of. The only thing is...”

Danny leaned forward. “Is what?” he asked. “What is it?”

“Well, he’s staying on a boat. One that’s owned by a what he described as a ‘business associate’. So this business contact must know he’s there... You think that’s safe? Do you know who that might be?”

Danny shook his head. “Don’t know nobody with a boat,” he said. “Unless it’s... Guy has a motor cruiser out on the Thames, out Twickenham way. If it’s him then it’s not too bad, I guess.”

She felt herself relax, just a fraction. She took another sip of her wine, aware of Danny’s mismatched eyes on her. She sat back in her chair and closed her eyes.

She just had to get through this.

And she just had to hope Jeremy would, too.

§

Danny stayed the night in a spare room. By the time they’d moved onto the second bottle of Pinot he’d have been foolish to try to drive, and Eleanor wasn’t disappointed to have someone else in the house again, particularly someone with a reassuring physical presence like Danny.

She woke late, her head pounding and her mouth and throat fuzzy and raw.

She lay there for some time, thinking she really should move. Suddenly it didn’t seem such a smart move to have someone like Danny stopping over in the house. Whereas last night his presence had been reassuring, now she felt even more vulnerable than when she had been on her own.

She needed to move, get dressed, get him out. She needed to decide how she was going to handle another day of waiting on the end of the phone.

It wasn’t until she heard a car on the drive that she sensed that this would be any different to the previous days spent waiting, in uncertainty. She thought at first it was Danny leaving, but then she heard doors slamming. The car had stopped and someone had got out. More than one person, as she’d heard two doors.

Seconds later she heard the doorbell, and from that point on what remained of her old life, and of the new life she had been in the process of constructing, was irrevocably stolen from her completely.

5

“Mrs Eleanor Dryton?”

The man at her door was fortyish with thinning sandy hair and an awkward, tired manner. He was wearing a slate-gray suit, the tie loosened, the top button of his shirt undone. Standing at his shoulder was a younger man in police uniform.

She nodded, swallowed. They’d come for Jeremy. They were going to ask her where he was and she was going to have to decide right now whether she was going to tell them, whether she was going to dodge the question somehow, or whether she was going to downright lie.

Suddenly she hated Jeremy with all her heart for doing this to her, and then she caught herself, staggered at how her feelings could swing so dramatically.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Bradley. I’m sorry to have to inform you that your husband, Jeremy, has passed away.”

She... what?

His words didn’t make sense.

She wasn’t prepared for this. She didn’t know what to say or do.

She stared at the man, but his eyes wouldn’t leave her. He was studying her for her reaction, she realized.

Her reaction to...

“He’s dead?”

“There was an accident,” said Bradley. “He was driving alone, late last night. We’re still investigating the circumstances.”

Just then Danny appeared on the stairs. “What’s up?” he said, pausing partway down.

Eleanor turned. “It’s Jeremy,” she said. “There’s been an accident.” She hadn’t made all the connections then. She didn’t think back to the evening before when Danny had gently extracted from her the information that Jeremy was hiding out on the boat, and that Danny had worked out whose boat he was on. She didn’t work out that Danny had had plenty of opportunity to make a call last night, to get some kind of message out.

All that came later, in the long hours and days when she had plenty of time to think and make connections.

Right now: “Oh, Danny!”

He came to her, took her in his arms, and right then, at that moment, his strong embrace was the only thing that stopped her from losing it altogether.

Bradley gave them time, and then, finally, Eleanor pulled away, turned, and the two policemen were still standing there.

“And you are, sir?” Bradley said to Danny.

“Danny Taylor. I’m a friend.”

Bradley nodded, no doubt leaping to all kinds of conclusions.

“I... I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“Were you aware that your husband was being investigated?” asked Bradley.

That was it. The first question. All it required was a ‘yes’, a dodge or a ‘no’. She’d had so much time to anticipate this moment, and yet she still did not know what she should do.

“I... No. No, I wasn’t.”

She wasn’t really thinking. There was no rationale to her choice. A loyalty, perhaps: loyalty to the path they had chosen while Jeremy was still alive.

“I’m sorry, Mrs Dryton.”

For a moment she thought he was still expressing sympathy at her loss, but no...

“I’m sorry, Mrs Dryton, but we’re going to have to take you into custody. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

“You’re what?”

“You’re under arrest, Mrs Dryton, on suspicion of conspiracy on a number of offenses, including aiding and abetting in illegal immigration, trafficking in prostitution, fraud, and assisting an offender. We have evidence that your late husband was preparing to leave the country and that you are at risk of fleeing and so we are taking you into custody.”

All that, and the only words that really cut through her sudden numbness were late husband.

§

The rest was a blur.

The police station. Long hours being questioned by Bradley. Trying to make arrangements following Jeremy’s death, while she was locked up until finally she broke down and her solicitor – Jeremy’s solicitor – took control, said she’d take care of everything.

The connections, all falling into place. How Danny must have leaked Jeremy’s whereabouts: the look in his eyes that morning when the police had come. The news of Jeremy’s ‘accident’ was no surprise to him: he’d known already.

They knew she was lying, and the more she lied the more she wrapped herself up in Jeremy’s criminal double-life. Bradley was a master at leading her deep into a tangle of untruths and then pointing out how none of it hung together and she might as well tell him the truth. It was a game to him, and one he’d played many times before, while she was a complete novice.

They knew she’d been helping Jeremy. That she’d been to visit him at the boat moored by the Marchess. She had known he was being investigated by the police. She knew he’d been planning to flee the country under a false identity.

She couldn’t deny that she’d protected him, and that she had knowledge of at least some of his crimes. He had never explicitly told her what he had done, but looking back, it had been obvious: he’d used the word ‘trafficking’, and you don’t traffic in antiques or macramé.

Every tiny admission was a chink in her defense.

Yes, she’d known he was a wanted man.

Yes, she’d known he had a criminal life.

She didn’t know the details but... yes, he’d mentioned trafficking.

Yes, she’d known he was planning to leave the country, and that he had a false passport.

Was she planning to join him? He’d asked her to. So was that a ‘yes’? She didn’t know. But it wasn’t a ‘no’.

“There was someone else,” she said, at one point. “Someone he was scared of. Someone above him. That’s who he was running from. Not the police. Not just the police...”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Someone who didn’t want him to go on trial. Someone who would rather have him dead.”

“It was an accident. It’s been investigated. Your husband panicked and decided to leave. He was heading for a ferry. He was driving fast and lost control.”

“He was murdered.”

“If you know who would want to do that, you must tell us.”

“I don’t. I don’t know who it is.”

Over and over and over again.

It was all a blur.

A massive blur with just a few details that stuck in her mind.

A blur that had become a nightmare that had made her the changed, damaged, vengeful woman she now was. A woman who blinded herself to risk, who threw herself into the single-minded pursuit of revenge, and exposed herself to...

§

La Casa Blanca

1

Her room had a view that must have cost a fortune. Out across the terraced rooftops of the town, as they tumbled away down the hill, to the Mediterranean beyond. She could see the narrow white strip of the beach, those thatched umbrella shades stuck into the beach, the cluster of tower-block hotels that were just along from La Taberna.

She could even see La Taberna itself, or at least the strip of restaurants and bars with canopied frontages tucked in at the top of the beach.

If she stretched against her chains, she could see down to the garden below her room, all spiky palms and cacti.

The room itself was simply appointed. The bed consisted of a double mattress on some kind of block. There was a bedside chest of drawers with a stylish, angular lamp, and an archway through to an en suite bathroom. Everything was white, giving the light a dream-like atmosphere.

She could reach none of the furniture, of course, because the chains attached to cuffs on her wrists only extended far enough from their anchor points on the inner wall to allow her the choice between standing and sitting.

Now, she sat. One leg was tucked under her, the other drawn up, so her chin could rest on the knee.

She was naked, but even so... the heat!

Up here on the hill, the house was like a trap for the sun’s heat.

She didn’t know how long she had been here.

She didn’t know what had happened, what had been done to her.

Her head was fuzzy, confused. She felt sick and dizzy, and unwashed.

They had drugged her – but was that at the bar, when Rob had summoned her outside and Danny appeared from the shadows? Or later?

She did not know.

She could not think.

She drifted again.

§

She just had to survive. To get through.

She’d been recklessly stupid.

So damned naïve! Blinded by her own anger and need for revenge. Those were things that had got her through prison: you would survive anything when you have such a rage giving you reason to survive.

But now... they had blinded her to all risk, and put her in this position.

She needed to drink. Everything was so dry.

But there was nobody, and the plastic water bottle on the floor beside her was long since empty.

§

“You fucking psycho bitch!”

Danny was leaning in so close to her that every word sent a spray of spittle across her face.

She was standing.

They’d made her stand, even though her legs felt like rubber and she must collapse at any moment.

Rob was out on the balcony, the floor to ceiling glass doors slid open so that a delicious breeze stole into the room. He had his back to her and Danny, as if he was trying to shut them out.

Danny was in long shorts and a muscle shirt, revealing his thick, tattooed arms. Suddenly, he swung one arm back and then whipped it forward, the flat of his hand striking her face in a stinging blow that sent her reeling to her knees, thumping back against the wall, her head ringing.

“Hey, easy,” said Rob from the balcony. “She’s not yours to–”

“Shut it, barman,” said Danny.

There was something in his look, in the way he held himself, and in a moment of clarity she realized...

“Still sore?” she said.

He tensed, ready to strike her again, but then checked himself.

“You fucking wait,” he said. “I’m going to fucking break you.”

Then he came to squat before her and, calm and controlled, he drew his arm back and then sent a short, stabbing punch to her belly.

She doubled over, retching and gasping for air, knowing from bitter experience that in a calculated beating like this there would be another carefully-judged blow, and then another.

When she managed to peer up she saw that Danny was standing and Rob was there, one arm across Danny’s chest. Not physically restraining him – Danny would have broken free in an instant if Rob had tried to do that – but his arm a psychological barrier, a reminder.

“She’s not yours,” he said softly into Danny’s ear.

Slowly, the tension slipped away from the shorter man’s body until he turned and walked away, out to the balcony where he circled like a trapped animal.

Rob stood there, uncertain. His eyes met El’s and then he looked away.

Now, Danny came back in and squatted once more.

For a moment, El thought he was going to hit her again, but he didn’t.

He was smiling.

“You know what this place is?” he said, in an almost conversational tone. “La Casa Blanca. It’s a luxury home, surrounded by walls and high-tech security. Nobody can get out without permission, and nobody can get in. It’s like a separate country. The rules are different here. In fact there’s only one rule: you do what the man wants. You know what I mean?”

The man. The man.

“I want to meet him,” she said. “The man.”

That’s why she was here. The only reason.

She had to see the man.

2

Danny came back to her later, alone.

He came to her and he had sheer murder in those blue and green eyes of his.

She’d been dozing, hunched up against the wall.

She couldn’t lie down, so she had to sit like this, propping herself into the least uncomfortable position.

At least the drugs numbed her to the pain and discomfort.

§

She woke when he took a fistful of her hair and jerked her head up.

She cried out and opened her eyes and he spat in her face. She could smell the saliva, feel it running down her cheek, pooling in the crack of her tightly closed mouth.

She went to wipe it off and he released her hair and cuffed her hand away with the back of his fist, hitting her so hard she thought for a moment that her wrist might be broken.

The room was in darkness, lit only by what spilled in through the balcony doorway, starlight and light from the rest of the villa. Enough for her to see the evil glint in his eyes, the tight smile on his face.

He squatted down low in front of her. “You want to know what’s going to happen when the man gets back?”

Until then she hadn’t known that he was away.

She said nothing, just sat there, her legs drawn up defensively, and waited for him to go on.

“He’s going to have to decide whether he wants to keep you, or sell you on, you know what I mean?” He reached for her long copper hair again. “All this...” he went on, “well, it’s got to have a bit of value, hasn’t it? There’s some parts of the world they pay a fortune for blondes and redheads.” He laughed. “I reckon he’ll sell you on. He’d get a kick out of that. He’s got plenty of toys already.”

She tried to shut him out. She couldn’t let herself think about the future. She had to just get through this.

He moved his hand to her cheek, fist clenched so he could run his knuckles down the line of her jaw.

“You scared?” he said. “You should be. You should be very scared right now.”

She couldn’t let herself think. He was toying with her. She couldn’t let him win.

“You want to know what’s going to happen now your barman boyfriend is safely out of the way?”

His tone was so light; he could have been talking about the weather.

His knuckles pressed harder. She met the pressure, unwilling to give ground of any sort.

“Are you going to hit me again?” she asked. “Is that what you like doing?”

She couldn’t stop herself. Chained, naked and drugged, she still had to provoke him like that.

He shook his head. “Rob was right,” he said. “I can’t go damaging the goods.”

A sudden chill took her.

“You’re going to rape me...”

He stood, turned away, went across to the window. There was a tension in the way he moved, a tightness.

“You can’t can you? Did they manage to fix you? Are you still out of action?”

He looked like he was about to explode, rocking from foot to foot, fists clenching and then unclenching.

Then she went on: “You killed Jeremy, didn’t you? Just as much as if you’d been driving the car that forced him off the road, you killed him. You tricked me into saying where he was and then you killed him.”

Then she pulled against her chains, tipping forward, and spat at him.

A long trail of spittle arched out, but didn’t reach him. He looked down, then back at her.

“You fucking psycho bitch,” he said, and then he walked past her, out of the room.

§

Danny Taylor was a known quantity.

He was a violent man who lived life on a short fuse. He was devious and he had the deceptive cover of coming across as far less clever than he really was. She’d fallen for that more than once.

But she had his measure.

Right now he was holding himself back. He’d said he didn’t want to ‘damage the goods’, and maybe that was at least part of the truth. But he was scared, too: the subtext beneath everything he’d said was that the goods weren’t his to damage.

They belonged to the man.

It wasn’t until the morning that she started to see just how much she should fear that man.

§

She woke to sunlight angling in from the balcony doorway. The sky was deep blue once again, and the heat in the room was already building.

It wasn’t the sunlight that had woken her, though. There was someone in the room.

She twisted, and as her eyes adjusted to the relative gloom by the doorway she saw a shape there, a person.

It was a woman, dressed bizarrely in fishnet stockings, suspenders, black lace thong and a push-up balconette bra from which her nipples poked out. She was a schoolboy fantasy of a slutty sex siren, a caricature.

The woman’s skin was a honeyed mid-brown, her hair long and black, and her mouth... It was hard to see properly in the shade, but there was something very odd about the way she held her mouth open like that.

“Hello,” said the woman, her words strangely distorted. “Can I get you anything? Water?”

This woman must have been here before, El realized. Until now she hadn’t seen who had been replacing her bottled water and emptying the plastic bucket she peed in. She’d been too drugged to notice almost anything.

Stepping into the room, the woman came into the light more and now El saw what was wrong with her mouth.

Someone had cut it and stitched the wounds back together again so that her mouth took on the permanently open ‘O’ of a sex doll.

Was this a warning? Danny perhaps? Sending this mutilated woman in to show El what lay in store?

The woman was carrying a plastic bottle. She stooped, squatted, and placed the bottle by El. Then she paused and looked at her. “They drug the water, you know,” she said. Her words were distorted, her lips unable to close. “They drug it to subdue you. If they want to keep you, they use needles.” She turned one arm and El saw track marks on her wrist and the inside of her elbow.

Then the woman added, “My name’s Keira, by the way. They said you were asking questions about me at the bar.”

El stared.

Then, slowly, she reached for the bottle, flipped the lid and took a long swallow.

She needed the water, but more than anything she needed that fuzzy blanket to descend across her senses. Something to stop her thinking, to stop her seeing.

Something to stifle that crystal-clear comprehension of just how bad a situation she had put herself in.

3

Rob came to her later that day, some time past the peak of the heat.

She was lying there, delirious with thirst, and with the drugs they put in what little water she had. She slept, and dreamed of a Keira further mutilated, new orifices carved into her body. In the dream Keira had been sitting right here in this room, on the bed, eyes fixed on El while she drove a needle into her arm.

When El woke, she had lost the ability to distinguish between dream and reality. At first she believed that Keira had actually been here, injecting herself, showing off her new wounds. And then, slowly, she reassured herself that she had been dreaming, delirious, and that Keira had not been here since that early morning visit.

That was worse, though.

That reminded El of what she had seen, of the real, mutilated Keira.

The image of that distorted mouth trying to speak haunted her when she was awake, and when she was asleep.

She tried not to think. Tried just to get through.

§

She’d reached a kind of blankness by the time Rob entered the room.

Not quite awake, not quite asleep. Just sitting there, her back to the wall, her legs drawn up so her chin could rest on her knees.

Her mind empty.

Nothing.

She heard the door open, then close again.

Sensed a presence, someone moving into the room.

There was movement in her peripheral vision, and now she began to stir. Her brain started to work, her senses; she started to process images.

Rob. Barman, beach bum Rob.

Standing there in leather flip-flops, frayed denim knee-length shorts, white t-shirt with some kind of faded print across the chest. His stubble was shorter, his hair as tousled as ever, his silver-blue eyes examining her.

“You okay?” he asked.

She said nothing.

He made to hand her a bottle, then put it down next to her when she didn’t respond.

She ignored it.

She needed water, but... They drug the water, you know.

“Can you stand?”

She looked up at him. He was reaching towards her. She didn’t know what he wanted.

He stooped, found the cuffs on her wrists, did something and then they sprung open.

She allowed him to help her to her feet.

It was hard to stand, and she had to lean into his embrace to support herself.

He turned her, helped her walk through the archway to the bathroom.

Water started to run. A shower.

She shrugged him off, and stepped under the spray.

The water was barely lukewarm, deliciously cool on her body after the heat of the bedroom.

She stood, her hands flat on the tiled wall in front of her, jets of cool water coming down from a wide showerhead.

She started to come to her senses. Started to focus.

She tipped her head back and let the water run down over her face. Opened her mouth and let the water pool before she swallowed. Delicious, clean water.

She turned and he was in the archway, standing with his arms folded, watching her.

“You’re not going to let me go, are you?” she managed to say. She’d thought at first that he might be here to save her.

He shook his head. “Where would you go?” he said. “Where would I go?”

“You’re that scared?”

He shrugged, his stock response.

“Or are you just as bad?”

He looked away.

“I’m in it too deep,” he said. “Which I guess makes me just as bad.”

She turned away from the wall, so she could face him. His eyes went everywhere, then flitted away, then came back to meet hers.

“I’m in too deep, too, aren’t I?” she said.

He didn’t need to answer.

§

She walked past him, out into the bedroom again. There was a towel on the bed but she ignored it. Her skin was drying almost instantly in the heat.

She didn’t look at Rob. She didn’t need to in order to know that his eyes were following her every move.

She’d seen the hunger there, seen how much he was torn between desire and... what? Duty? Fear?

She went to stand on the balcony. It was enclosed by a waist-high frosted-glass wall, the garden some distance below. She couldn’t see any neighboring houses, which confirmed that this was one of the large villas you could see from the beach, each isolated from any neighbors by some distance.

She reached up and pulled clawed fingers through her hair, teasing it out as it dried in the sun.

The sun on her skin felt like that damp north London morning when she had stepped out of prison. A sudden liberation, the luxury of a freedom she had not had in... how long had she been here?

Like that morning, though, that sense of liberation was an illusion. She had never been free, never really been released from the Hell her life had become. That she was captive now somehow seemed no different. Locked up in prison, or in this luxury villa; trapped in the cage of her own anger.

Freedom was an illusion.

§

Rob had stayed in the room, giving her a little distance.

She couldn’t work him out. Early on, he’d told her he’d just kind of drifted into the life he had here. He’d come to owe people favors, and he’d found ways to pay them back.

She didn’t know what he did, though, what kind of double life he had. All those periods when he was away from the bar. Was he up here at the villa, or was he elsewhere, doing whatever it was that he had become involved with?

She knew all about double lives, though. She’d lived one for so long without even knowing. And Jeremy...

She turned, resting the small of her back against the rail that ran along the top of the balcony’s enclosing wall.

Eye contact was all it took.

He came to her, slowly, like a fish being reeled in, the eye contact never breaking.

She stretched up and kissed him, their bodies still a short distance apart. His lips pressed against hers, hesitant, holding back. Stubble scraped her face.

His hand moved to her waist, and came to rest on the spread of her hips.

She put a hand to his face, finding the roughness of that stubble.

Such an intense moment.

She hadn’t expected that: the way such a hesitant, minimal contact could send sensations ripping through her body like this.

None of this was what she’d intended.

She pushed away from the railing, standing, finally pressing her naked body against his. Feeling the rough denim of his shorts against her belly, his thighs against hers, her breasts squashing against his ribs through the thin cotton of his shirt.

She hadn’t expected to suddenly need this so much. Not now. Not like this.

She couldn’t allow herself to be so weak.

She just couldn’t...

She swung her foot, hooking his instep and swinging his leg away so that suddenly he was teetering on only one foot. It was a move she’d learned in prison. One that worked on even the biggest assailant: take them off balance, then use their weight and momentum against them.

As he flailed for control, she drove her shoulder against his chest, knocking him further off balance, and suddenly he was leaning over the railing, starting to fold over, his arms spreading as he tried to catch himself.

She ducked down to grab hold of that swinging leg by the ankle and yanked it up with all her strength. Now he was at the pivot point, his weight equally distributed either side of the balcony’s retaining rail.

She heaved harder, felt him start to go, and she knew she had him, he was going to fall over the edge, crash to the ground below.

He caught the railing and somehow managed to stop himself. She felt that balance point shift, start to come back, and then he hauled himself back, beating the momentum that had been taking him over the edge.

Suddenly that leg was swinging back down, her grip on the ankle slipping.

She fell away, crashing into the glass balcony door, pain jarring through her body. There was a ringing blackness as her head struck something hard, a sudden dizzying rush, and when she was able to focus again he was facing her, his back to the drop, standing with his legs and arms spread, poised like a wrestler about to engage an opponent.

“What the fuck?”

He stepped towards her, reached out, and his grip on her wrist was like a vise.

He hauled her up, and for a moment they stood in a crude mockery of how they had been before: bodies pressing, her breasts squashed against his ribs, the hard roughness of denim against her belly.

His mouth almost touching hers, he hissed, “Just what the fuck did you think you were going to do next?”

She didn’t know. Hadn’t thought beyond the moment, the opportunity. Hadn’t thought how she might escape this place, this country, this life.

Nothing beyond...

She crumpled against him, hating herself for the tears that started to spill. She buried her face against his chest, tried desperately not to sob, not to let him feel the heaving of her chest as she fought this sudden eruption.

He released her wrists and wrapped his arms around her, his grip on her just as secure as the one he’d held before.

Slowly, her sobbing eased, and she just stood there, leaning into his embrace, feeling his strength against her, all around her.

Now... she was very aware of his touch, of the hand resting on the small of her back, the other higher up, between her shoulder blades. Of the rise and fall of his chest against her face. Of the pressure of that denim against her belly and... lower down. Her smoothness pressing against a denim-clad thigh, not moving, just... there.

She tipped her head up, and his eyes locked on hers, a hungry look, a breathtakingly urgent look.

His mouth, so close to hers. Closer, and their lips brushed. Such a delicate touch it might not have happened at all. The brush of a butterfly’s wing, the lightest breath of air.

He pulled away, stepped back, releasing her.

He was shaking his head, and now his eyes wouldn’t meet hers.

She stood there, her heart pounding. The physical memory of his touch still such a powerful thing, even now that it was gone.

He reached for her, took her arm roughly, making her gasp with pain.

When he pulled her into the room she thought for a moment that he was going to throw her onto the bed, but no, that moment was gone.

He dragged her so roughly she had to scamper to keep up and not fall and be dragged.

Seconds later, she was standing there, her back to the wall, her wrists secured before her in the cuffs again, held by a short loop of chain to the ring set into the wall.

Rob backed away from her then, turned and headed for the door. Pausing, he looked back. “You can’t do that,” he said, his voice tight. “You can’t fool me like that.”

§

That moment when she’d just folded into him...

Had she been trying to trick him? Had she just been angling for another chance to break free, as she had on the balcony?

Had she only imagined that there had been anything more to it than that?

Her mind playing games with her.

Confusing her.

The drugs, screwing with her senses. Distorting everything.

4

Those moments.

The ones where you’re pulled up short, when you realize that everything you had believed has been built on a foundation of lies and misperceptions.

The ones where everything you had believed, the things that guided and shaped the person you were... all of them: snatched away.

Those moments.

Eleanor Dryton had known far too many of those moments.

§

They came for her that evening. Danny and a man she’d never seen before. Tall, dark hair slicked back, eyes all over her nakedness. For a moment she thought this must be him, the man. The one who had taken it upon himself to decide when Jeremy had been more valuable to him dead than alive.

But no.

“Uncuff her,” snapped Danny, and the new guy stooped, and yanked at her chain to pull her cuffs up so he could unlock them.

El winced at the pain in her wrists when he pulled the chain, but bit down on it. He’d deliberately tried to hurt her, and she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

Danny nodded his head, indicating the door.

“Time for you to meet the man,” he said, a cruel smile on his face.

§

La Casa Blanca lived up to its name. Everything was white, and the place had been built cleverly so that sunlight angled in through windows, and high, domed skylights, flooding the interior with light to emphasize that whiteness. Decoration was minimal, making the few big, abstract canvases on the walls all the more dramatic.

Danny led her through the building and down wide stairs to ground level, and then down another level to a basement. Unlike the upper floors, this level was dark, lit only by a few spotlights around the walls of a wide room.

There were more chains here, attached to the walls, and in the middle of the room there was a wooden bench that made her think of an operating table.

She stood where Danny had indicated, a sudden cold nausea deep in the pit of her belly.

Was this where Keira had been mutilated? She remembered her dreams, the images of Keira further mutilated.

Was this where the awful reality of her pitiful quest for revenge would reach its conclusion?

How had she been so stupid? How had she put herself in this position?

At another nod from Danny, the other guy stepped behind her and slipped a band of fabric across her eyes, knotting it tightly at the back of her head.

Now she was in complete darkness, and this made her feel so much more vulnerable, standing there naked, waiting.

Just standing there.

§

She wanted to sit, she’d been standing so long, but she didn’t dare. The last words she’d heard were from Danny, before she’d been blindfolded.

Stand there, bitch, and don’t move.

She was alone. She was pretty sure of that. She’d sensed movement, sensed them leaving.

She could sit. Just lean back against the wall, slide down it.

Her hands were free. She could reach up and remove this blindfold. She didn’t have to just stand here, senses cut off like this. She was a strong, independent woman. She could do what she wanted.

She stood, blindfolded and naked.

And waited.

§

He came to her.

The man.

The one responsible for everything.

The one she had come here to find.

The one she had come here to kill.

She’d never allowed herself to think of it like that before. Never used that word, not even in her thoughts. But it was true: she had come here to kill him for all he had done.

She heard a noise, from over where the steps led down from ground level.

Then she sensed him approaching: the sound of his feet on the hard floor.

Closer: she could hear him breathing, she was sure. Hear the pounding of his heart, louder than her own.

She could just reach up now, and remove her blindfold so she could look him in the eye, but she didn’t. She stood where she had been told, and waited.

A finger on her breastbone, dragging slowly down. The touch was so light it was almost imperceptible, passing between her breasts, and down the flat of her belly.

She thought it would keep going, but it paused just below her belly button and then withdrew.

She’d been holding her breath, and now she let it go in a soft sigh. It was a sexual sound, the gasp initiated by a lover’s touch, and it surprised her.

Since when had vulnerability and fear ever been such a turn-on for her?

She was entirely at this man’s mercy, and here she was... gasping at his touch.

Something brushed against her hair now. His hand, the knuckles coming to run down her jawbone.

There was something about senses being shut off, and others compensating: unable to see, unable to move from the spot, everything combined to magnify that touch, and her response to that touch.

His mouth pressed against hers, then – a sudden and unexpected thing. His lips were hard, his tongue darting, withdrawing, pressing again. His skin smooth, only a faint, almost velvet, fuzz of stubble.

She pulled away, a wild storm in her head, and in her chest and belly.

She staggered back a step, put a hand back to catch herself against the wall, put the other hand up to her face, to the blindfold, and–

“No.” A sharp, powerful command she just had to obey.

She let her hand drop, and stood upright again, away from the wall.

The kiss.

The voice.

The touch... that finger running down between her breasts again, down her belly, and this time going further, brushing softly against the smoothness of her sex before pulling away.

Those moments.

The ones where you’re pulled up short, when everything you ever believed you knew is turned on its head. The ones where everything you had believed, the things that guided and shaped the person you were... all of them: snatched away.

Those moments when all it takes is a kiss, a voice, a touch, and you no longer even know who you are or how to stop your world spinning madly out of control.

The ones where you manage to catch yourself, swallow, find your voice and say, “Jeremy?”

5

He took her. Hard.

His hand closed on her face, cupping her chin, fingers up one side, thumb the other. His grip on her hurt, was meant to hurt.

There was no hesitancy in his kiss now. He closed his mouth on hers, guiding her head with that vise-grip on her chin. His tongue drove deep, stabbing into her mouth, forcing her open.

His other hand reached down, palm flat against her smooth mound, fingers sliding underneath, forcing her legs apart. One finger slid through the wet folds of her sex, bent and pushed upwards, the sudden penetration making her cry out, a cry that tailed off into a long groan.

She staggered backwards, two small steps and then her back was against the wall. His mouth mashed against hers as the wall broke her momentum, his teeth against her gums, and there was the metal taste of blood.

Her arms went up – to fight him off? She didn’t know. Didn’t know what she was trying to do.

Her hands came to rest against his chest. Smooth silk stretched across that familiar, tight ribcage, not an ounce of spare fat on his body.

He manipulated her like a puppet, that one hand clamping her jaw and the other cupping her so hard that with each upward thrust as he drove his finger into her he pushed her up against the wall, raising her to her toes.

She started to doubt. A small part of her brain, a thought process detached from the immediate rush of responses to what was happening.

It couldn’t be him.

Jeremy was dead.

The police had told her he was dead.

She’d organized his damned funeral!

This man... he was like an animal, a beast. Jeremy had always been so polite and restrained, never a man to let himself go, emotionally unable to lose himself to the moment.

This man... when he lifted her to her toes it was as if every sensation focused on the pressure of his hand and that finger driving deep inside her. And then as she sank to her heels again there was a roll of his wrist, grinding the heel of his hand against the softness of her mound, sliding that protective hood across her clit, turning that pressure into sudden stabs of sensation darting up into her belly and through her body.

She started to pull at his shirt, tugging it free of his waistband, fumbling with the buttons.

His hand came away from her jaw so that now there were just those two points of contact: his mouth on hers, and that one hand, cradling her, penetrating her.

His trousers came free, slid down around his thighs, the soft fabric brushing against her and then... Oh my God! The finger withdrew, the hand shifted and now there was a new presence down there as he guided his manhood against her. The bulbous head slid through the folds of her sex. The hardness of his shaft ground against her.

He cupped himself between her wet heat and the palm of his hand, steering himself into position, and then he pushed up and she felt that delicious parting, opening her up and filling her, as he slid home.

Slowly, he pushed, as if savoring every moment, every sensation.

She clung to him now, all confusion lost.

She knew that feeling. She knew the way he did that, the control it took to enter her so deliciously slowly, always moving, but so damned slowly!

She felt it building at that first parting, as the swollen head of his dick slid into her. Felt that tightness in her belly, that weakening in her legs, that sudden raggedness to her breathing.

So slow that everything was magnified, every slight pulse and twitch the trigger for another tightening.

His balls came to press against her thighs, and then she felt that rough rasp of hair against her as – finally! – he filled her completely. That roughness against her shaved smoothness was a new sensation for her, another thing that intensified everything.

He pressed, filling her, and then he reached up and took a fistful of her hair and yanked her head back.

That was what pushed her over the edge: the sudden pain, the abrupt sense of him taking possession again, of him taking complete control.

He pulled back a fraction and then thrust hard, and it was like nothing she’d ever felt. Again and she groaned. Again and it was a scream this time and now her belly tightened and the muscles of her sex clamped hard around him, pulsing again and again in climax.

He wasn’t done.

He pulled out, turned her so she stood with her face up against the wall.

Now he guided himself into her again, taking her from behind with long hard thrusts, the head of his manhood pounding repeatedly against that sensitive spot on the front wall of her vagina.

A fist in her hair, he pulled her head back. His other arm curled around her, the hand cupping a breast, finding the nipple and squeezing hard.

She cried out again, and now he thrust hard and held himself there. There was a pulsing deep inside her and then an explosion of wet heat, a sensation of being filled all over again. Another brief flutter of tightening took her as he started to soften, a faint echo of that first orgasm, and then he pulled clear and she slumped to her knees, spent.

§

He took her head in his hands, an almost tender gesture, his touch suddenly light.

When he turned her head, she realized he was positioning her, positioning himself.

The head of his dick brushed against her lips. Wet. Still semi-hard.

He pushed against her, and when she opened her mouth he slid inside.

She swallowed him deep, taking his softening dick completely into her mouth, tasting herself on him – he was so wet with her juices!

When she sucked, a final pulse of semen came out and she swallowed.

She pulled on him with her mouth and he continued to soften, until finally his shaft was limp in her mouth.

He pulled away, then.

She sensed him stepping back, then heard the rustle of clothing.

Moments later he was gone.

§

It wasn’t him.

It couldn’t be.

She had misinterpreted, misheard, misremembered.

He’d only said a single word in her presence. No. Not enough for her to be sure. Just enough for her to grasp at something tenuous and impossible.

Jeremy was not such a sexual animal. He was not one to take control, to demand, to force.

He had always been gentle and restrained. Too restrained.

Where Jeremy had always made love to her, this man – the man – had fucked her. He had possessed her. She had never felt so totally had.

§

The other guy came to her a short time later, and she was still on her knees, shell-shocked by what had just happened.

She didn’t even notice him until he was standing there, looking down at her. For a moment she thought that it had been him, that they had just been playing games with her and this man who Danny had bossed around had come and had her.

But no, he was too tall. The geometries were all wrong. And his dark stubble was too coarse: not that velvet smoothness she had felt. He hadn’t had her, she knew that.

Then she wondered if that was what he’d come for now, if he was about to reach for his belt.

He stooped, took hold of her wrist and tugged her to her feet, then nodded to the stairs. Could he not speak?

She walked across the room, and up the stairs.

Outside, the evening sun must be low, because now it lit the inside of the villa in its golden, setting light.

Upstairs, the man locked her into her room, but this time the chain and cuffs were gone and she was free to move around.

She went to the bathroom, turned the shower on and stepped under its cool jets.

She pressed herself against the tiled wall, squashing her breasts against that hard surface, pressing her cheek against it.

She remembered the sensation of being lifted to her toes by that cupping hand, the growing tightness in her belly.

She reached down and cupped herself, pulling hard upwards as if she could somehow replicate that sensation. She started to roll her hand from side to side, working her clit beneath its protective fleshy hood. She let the tip of her middle finger slide inside, then pushed it up to the second knuckle, still rolling her hand against herself.

Soon her breathing was fast, her heart racing and then she felt that butterfly flutter of tightening muscles around her finger, a rapid pulsing as orgasm took her once again.

It couldn’t be him.

It just so damned well couldn’t.

6

It was him.

He left her all night, her mind racing from one impossibility to another. She lay there, unable to sleep even though she was on a proper bed for the first time in... how long? And all night, she kept returning to one question.

If it was Jeremy, then why did he not just say so? Why had he kept her blindfolded and then sent her away again? Why the mind-games?

§

She’d never really known him. Not the true him.

She’d never known a Jeremy capable of such manipulation. A Jeremy so dark and thoroughly chilling.

She’d always believed him.

She’d believed the smooth and conservative Jeremy she had married.

Then, when things had gone wrong for him, she’d believed the man who told her to trust him, that everything would work out.

She’d believed he was dead.

All of them: fictions. Masks. Smoke and mirrors.

He sent Keira for her in the morning. She was in her boy’s slutty fantasy outfit again: the fishnets and heels, the basque, the tiny thong. Perhaps the strangest thing was that El took the young woman’s mutilated features for granted now: it was just Keira.

El pulled on the shorts and t-shirt Keira had brought for her, and followed her out of the bedroom.

She could easily have overpowered the poor woman, but somehow that made the fact of her imprisonment even more disturbing. Were they that confident that either she wouldn’t try to escape, or that she couldn’t?

She followed Keira down to the ground floor and then out to a wide, tiled terrace. Off to one side there was a figure of eight swimming pool, but El’s eyes were drawn to a recliner, positioned with its raised back to her so that its occupant could look out over the lush gardens towards the Mediterranean. To one side, a tall parasol cast the terrace’s only shade over the recliner. There was someone there, she was sure, but it was hard to be sure because of the angle.

Even this was posed for impact, she understood. More mind-games. More delay.

Keira had remained in the doorway, so now El was on her own as she walked towards that recliner, and then skirted around it until she could confirm that it was occupied.

A man, in a short-sleeved white shirt and knee-length pale gray shorts. Neat dark hair, cropped short. Small oval shades that sat close over his eyes, so that depending on the angle you could almost make eye contact, but then with a slight tilt of the head it was snatched away.

“Eleanor,” he said, a smile playing on his mouth. “Why don’t you take a seat?” He indicated a stiff-backed wooden chair that had been placed facing him.

Jeremy.

She’d known it was going to be him. She just hadn’t trusted her senses, trusted all the signs and clues.

§

She wanted to go to him, to fall into his arms. She wanted him to tell her the nightmare was finally over and that everything would be okay. He’d miraculously recovered from the accident and it had taken him all this time to track her down.

She stood there, looking down at him.

“You bastard,” she said, her voice low.

He didn’t respond, that smile fixed on his face.

“You left me to rot in jail,” she said. “Do you know the things they did to me in that place? You let me believe you were dead, Jeremy. How could you do that?”

“Sit,” he said. There was a tone in his voice she’d never known from him before.

She sat, without even thinking about what she was doing, or why.

“What happened, Jeremy?”

He reached across to a low table at his side, picked up a long glass of something sparkling and clear, and took a leisurely sip.

“I had to leave,” he said. “You were aware of that. If I’d gone to trial they’d have locked me away for life.”

She stared at him. It seemed surreal, hearing these words from Jeremy. They’d have locked me away for life... Such a chilling revelation, and yet he mentioned it as if he was talking only about the weather.

“You didn’t say anything to me. Or rather, what you did say was all lies. You set me up, Jeremy. You set me up and left me to suffer. What was it? Did you have someone else killed and pay off a coroner to identify the corpse as you? And all that talk of a plot to kill you, someone who wanted you dead so you couldn’t talk... Was that all just for my benefit, so I’d tell the police and it would sound credible? Was that why you let me believe you were dead? Real grief is so much more convincing than pretend.”

“Cut the melodrama and you’re not far off,” he said. “If it helps, I was advised on good authority that you would present a sympathetic profile. I didn’t expect them to make an example of you and lock you away.”

So calm and logical. Had he really made those calculations, judging that it was preferable to risk her in order to protect himself?

Then he went on: “You’re angry, Eleanor. I don’t like angry. I like obedient.”

She swallowed. That tone of voice again, the command thing. How had she never heard that from him before?

He raised a hand and snapped his fingers. Immediately, Keira emerged from the house and approached across the terrace. She looked even more incongruous now, dressed in exotic lingerie out here in full sunlight, that perpetually surprised ‘O’ carved into her face.

At a gesture, she dropped to her knees beside Jeremy’s recliner. He reached out a hand and started to stroke her black hair.

“Obedience,” he said, and she rested her head in his lap, her cheek against the bulge at his crotch, her mouth permanently ready.

For a moment El thought he was going to make her watch Keira sucking him, but he seemed content to have her resting her head there while he stroked her hair.

He studied El, clearly amused.

“You’ve met my little toy, haven’t you?” he said.

Keira: his toy.

“When I heard Rob had found a new waitress to replace her at La Taberna I wanted to go and see. Rob always has good taste in waitresses. Oh, except that other one... Lucy? Is that her name? Far too Eastern European for my tastes.” He shook his head.“I was called away,” he went on.

El remembered that night when Rob had said the bar’s owner was going to visit, but then never showed up.

“He’d described you to me,” he said. “It sounded so like you, and yet... so unlike you to be out here like that. I thought prison would make you hide, Eleanor. I never thought... well, I heard what you did to poor Danny. You’ve changed, Eleanor. You’ve changed and I think I like it.”

§

How had she forgotten that magnetism?

Jeremy had always been a man who at first appeared unassuming, but then you would realize that he was the one in control. He was a man you would do anything for.

Now, she hung on his every word. She sat when he told her to, without questioning. She felt a thrill when he fed her positives.

I think I like it.

She’d always been willing to do anything for him.

She’d shaped her life around him.

Maybe that was why she’d been prepared to mutilate Danny, why she’d been prepared to kill. Even with Jeremy dead – as she had believed – she had been prepared to do anything for him.

Anything.

§

She sat there, while Jeremy fell silent for a time, still idly stroking Keira’s head in his lap.

“You present me with a dilemma,” he said, eventually. “You see, you were always part of a life that never really was, and now, all of a sudden, you have become part of a life that so very much is. Do you see my problem?”

She didn’t.

She was his wife. Was he telling her she was no longer needed? That she really had been just one long-forgotten element in his respectable cover story?

Their old life... Had none of that mattered to him?

“Things are going to have to change,” he said, and she hated herself just then: hated herself for the sudden surge of hope his words inspired in her. He wasn’t dismissing her. He wasn’t saying she had no place in his life.

“‘Change’?” she said.

He nodded.

Then, so casually, he closed his fingers in Keira’s hair and twisted her head so that she was facing El. Her eyes were wide and watering – how tight was his grip in her hair? – and that gruesome mouth gaped.

“You, Eleanor. You will have to change. Are you prepared to remold yourself? Are you prepared to be, truly, mine?”

She met his look.

She’d changed before. She was unrecognizable from the woman she’d been two years ago. For a moment she found this dizzying. Was that old Eleanor the real her, or had this been a process of discovering who she really was? A process of peeling back the civilized layers... When you looked at it like that, there was no escaping the conclusion that she was still on that journey, still working to reveal the person she really was.

“What do you want of me?” she asked him. “What do I have to do?”

She saw it in his face. At that moment he owned her, and he knew it.

7

Danny Taylor.

That’s what Jeremy wanted of her.

Was he seeing how far he could push her? How much would she be willing to take, just because he told her she must?

Or was he trying to break her, as he had broken Keira and how many other women before her?

§

“I think you kind of owe Danny, don’t you? After what you did to him...”

She stared at Jeremy.

He’d let Keira rest her head in his lap again now, and had resumed stroking her hair.

“Danny...”

“Sounds like the two of you got quite intimate, from what Danny tells me. Oh, don’t look alarmed, please! We’re above all that. I’m a generous man. I like to share.” He laughed. “I really don’t mind that you’ve been with other men, Eleanor.” His hand ran down Keira’s back then. “But Danny... You owe Danny big time, don’t you, my love? Shame you broke him so well.” He laughed again.

“There are others, of course,” he went on. “You’ve met Bruno, haven’t you?”

He must mean the man who had been with Danny the previous evening.

“As I say, I do like to share. We have plenty of visitors here. Maybe Danny would like that, too? Maybe he would like to watch? I’ll have to discuss the matter with him. I do know one thing, though, Eleanor: Danny would really like to humiliate and hurt you. When a man hates so strongly, it really is very easy to read on him...”

§

He came for her that night, revenge and hatred in his blue and green eyes.

Back in her room, the evening air was muggy and hot, heavy with a storm that had not yet broken. Even naked there was no respite. She ate a little paella, and drank from a bottle of chilled water, not caring if they were drugging her again.

It was so hard to care about anything in this heat. So hard to even think. And a small part of her brain was rational enough to understand that maybe this was a sign that it was not the heat at all: her head was messed up – so much to take in! – and maybe they’d been drugging her all along. Even that day, out on the terrace... it was all a blur. Images running together, fragments of conversation all disjointed, no sense to it.

Now, she had to really concentrate even to remember Jeremy’s features, and every time her concentration wavered it was Keira she saw, peering up at her from Jeremy’s lap, eyes and mouth wide.

The glass balcony doors were wide open, and she went out, hoping for at least some breeze, but the air was motionless. She went to lean on the railing, and looked out across the garden. Now that she had her bearings a bit more, she could see that the tiled area off to the left was one end of the terrace where she had seen Jeremy earlier that day.

Falling away into the distance, she could see the lights of the town, and somewhere down there would be La Taberna. She wondered if Rob was there. Would he have replaced her already? He had such good taste in waitresses, after all, Jeremy had told her.

Even that... even La Taberna seemed another life altogether.

Another her.

She looked down. She was on the third floor and the drop was sheer.

She’d fought with Rob here. She’d come so close to toppling him over the railing!

She heard someone enter the bedroom, the door shutting with a soft thud.

When she turned, for some reason she expected to see Rob. He was in her mind, just then, remembering the bar and the fight. Why was her mind drifting like this? Why was it so hard to... to just focus?

Danny came to stand in the balcony doorway.

“Hey, Danny,” she said. Then: “Hey, Danny. Why are you looking so angry?”

He punched her – his fist against her jaw felt as if she had been hit with a brick, and then it felt of nothing at all.

§

She came to, lying on a hard surface.

Wood, she thought – not cold like metal or stone. A wooden floor?

There was something around her wrists... cuffs of some sort. Hard and cold.

She turned her head and felt a stab of pain through her jaw.

He’d hit her. The bastard had punched her!

The room was dimly lit by a few spotlights around the walls, and there was a raised bench in the middle of the room like an operating table. There were metal loops set into the walls, and the cuffs on her wrists were attached to one of these by a slender metal chain.

She remembered the basement. She’d been here before. Brought here by Danny and the other guy – Bruno? Was that his name?

Danny...

He’d hit her.

So hard to focus.

She made herself sit, her back against the wall.

She waited. She just had to get through.

§

He came to her. Down those stairs, and then pausing at the bottom to look across the room at her.

The hatred in those eyes!

Danny... You owe Danny big time. Who had said that?

§

He squatted before her, an evil grin on his face.

“You think you matter to him?” he said. “You think you ever did?” He spat, off to one side. “You don’t mean shit to him. Don’t you get that yet? You don’t mean shit.”

She turned away from his look and his hand darted out, caught her jaw in a tight grip and turned her so she had to look at him.

“He just gave you to me, you dumb bitch. Just told me I can do whatever the fuck I like with you. He doesn’t care, bitch. He doesn’t care a bit.”

He was making that up. It wasn’t true.

She couldn’t let it be true.

He released her with a violent flick of the wrist so that her head jerked sideways and pain stabbed through her neck and down her spine. That casual gesture said so much about the man’s power: all that muscle...

He stood, so that she had to crane up to look at him. “I’m going to own you, bitch.” Eyes fixed on hers, he pulled his t-shirt up over that tattooed body and tossed it away to one side.

“Fuck off,” she hissed. “You lay one finger on me and–”

“Yeah?” He was grinning. So confident. “And you’ll do what?”

He reached for the button on his shorts, hooked a thumb behind it and flipped it undone.

She narrowed her eyes, but bit back on the words she wanted to spit at him.

He slid his zipper down, pulled his shorts open, exposing the base of his shaft and the bare skin around it, shaved smooth and tattooed with angry, dark swirls.

Now... the purple extended down his shaft. Not more tattoos, but bruising. He let his shorts slide down to bunch around his thighs and his slim dick sprang out towards her, semi-hard and kinked 45 degrees to the side at the point where that dark bruising was the most intense.

She glanced up into his eyes again. So much anger!

“You’re mine,” he said, through gritted teeth. He reached forward and took a fistful of her hair, bringing her face up close to his damaged manhood.

“Fuck off,” she said again.

“He’s watching,” said Danny. “CCTV. He likes to know what’s going on. He watches everything.”

She glanced past him, around the basement, looking for cameras. Watching?

Danny... You owe Danny big time.

The purple head of his dick brushed across her lips, and she clamped her mouth shut.

You owe him.

With his free hand, Danny took hold of his damaged shaft. It looked so painful. Why was he doing this?

He guided it towards her and she felt him, smooth and wet against her lips again.

Jeremy was watching. That’s what he’d said. What would he want her to do? How could she prove herself to him?

He’d want her to let her lips part the next time Danny’s dick brushed against her. Take him in gently. Work him with her tongue and the roof of her mouth. Take him deep and squeeze her throat around him. Ease him gently until he came in her mouth.

Would this be the first time for Danny since... since she’d broken him?

Was this what Jeremy wanted to see?

In her head it made so much sense: something simple and clear among all those other swirling, confused thoughts.

They drug you, you know.

She was drugged to the eyeballs. Moments of relative clarity and then... confused, her head full of random, swirling thoughts and memories. Fragments bleeding into one another. Somehow... she had to focus.

She tipped her head back a little, Danny’s fist still tangled in her hair.

She parted her lips, made eye contact. Saw that moment of recognition in his eyes: he was going to fucking own her.

“You do that again,” she said, “and I’ll bite down so fucking hard you won’t have anything left but a stump. And you know what? I’m so stoned I wouldn’t care what the Hell else you did to me afterwards. You hear me? Bitch?”

He slapped her across the cheek, hard. Made harder by the fact that he was still holding a fistful of her hair so that there was no recoil from the impact.

He swung his hand back across her other cheek, hand open, knuckle-side first. It was almost a casual double blow, as if to say there was so much more where that came from.

All the time, his eyes never left hers.

He tugged her hair hard, tipping her head up so that her throat was stretched, tight and exposed. He slapped her throat now, and she gagged as pain exploded in her neck. Then he slapped her face again, just once this time.

He was trying to make her hurt, she realized. If he’d wanted to damage her he would be punching her again. Kicking her as she kneeled before him.

Another slap, and her whole head was a numb, ringing mass of pain.

Another.

She must have closed her eyes, lost herself in the blackness of that ringing pain. When she opened them it took a moment to focus, and then she met Danny’s look again.

His grip still tight in her hair, he brought his dick close to her face and started to slide his other hand along the shaft. As he pumped, the foreskin slid back and forward across the purple head, and as she looked a clear, wet bead appeared out of the slit end.

When she looked back up at his face, she was sure there were tears in his eyes, tears starting to spill over onto his cheeks.

Why was he crying?

His jaws were clenched tight, his breath short, rasping.

He was hurting.

He was hurting even more than she was.

But there was something relentless in that look. A grim determination.

He had to do this.

Had to get it done.

Had to... his jaw sagged open, his eyes widened. She looked down and there was a sudden creamy blossoming in that tiny slit in the head of his dick, a blossoming that expanded and then shot through the short space between them to leave a wet trail across her nose, her cheek, her jaw.

He cried out, an animal squeal, and then another pulse of semen spat out at her, wet and sticky against her neck and then running immediately down between her breasts.

One more pulse pooled, but didn’t spit out, just gathered in his hand around the head of his dick and then ran down across his knuckles.

The tension went from his grip in her hair, and then he straightened, pulling his hand clear. His other hand still clutched at his manhood, cradling it protectively.

He paused, looking down at her, and then spat once again, leaving a trail of his spittle running down her neck and breasts.

8

He left her there all night.

Was this how it was going to be now? No bedroom with its balcony and view out across the garden to the town and the sea. Just this basement, and Danny coming back to do whatever he wanted with her?

She woke some time in the middle of the night. Sore from the beating and from lying here on the cold, hard floor, her wrists still cuffed and chained to the wall.

She put a hand to her face. It felt puffy, tender to the touch. A dry crust had formed where Danny’s juices had landed.

She remembered Danny telling her there were cameras, that Jeremy was watching everything. What must he have thought? Had he enjoyed it? And was it the violence or the act of seeing her with Danny he had enjoyed the most?

She scrubbed at the dried patches on her face with the heel of her hand.

What had she become, that her thoughts focused first on what Jeremy must think?

That magnetism. The hold he had over her. Her immediate gut reaction was always to be his.

Someone had brought her water.

She took the plastic bottle, raised it to her lips, and drank.

The water gave her release. Or whatever was in it did so.

She slept, dreaming of Danny and fists, of his skinny, broken dick pulsing with semen and Jeremy always there, watching, smiling, nodding.

§

She had no idea how long they left her in the basement.

She drank the water, ate the bland microwaved food Keira brought her, allowed herself to be unlocked and led to a bathroom, slept on the hard floor.

The drugs made it easier. Everything just ran together into one bad dream.

Then Keira came for her again and it was different. She unlocked El and helped her to her feet, then led across to a doorway that opened into a bathroom.

El could barely walk straight. She allowed Keira to guide her onto the toilet, and lower her until she was sitting. While Keira stood there, El peed, sitting with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands.

She heard water running, and looked up to see that Keira had started the shower. “He’s back,” she said, through that mutilated mouth, the lips painted a glossy red to emphasize the ‘O’.

She didn’t need to ask who Keira was referring to.

Him.

The man.

Jeremy.

Again, that first reaction: a racing of the heart, a need. Always: that initial response before anything more rational took over.

She stepped under the jets of cool water, letting them run down her body for long minutes before she started to rub at her wrists and then at her shoulders. She found some gel, filled a cupped hand and then rubbed it over herself, working it up into a froth before allowing it to wash away again. Shampoo. Teasing the knots out of her hair.

Keira was standing in the doorway, arms folded beneath her breasts, watching her.

“Did you choose this life?” El asked her, over the hiss of the water. “Or did they fool you into it? Did they lure you in and trick you until you realized you were so far in there was no way out?” A moment of clarity made her ask that question, but then it vanished again, as her thoughts tangled and she started to lose her words.

She tipped her head up, caught water in her mouth, and swallowed.

When she looked again Keira was just watching her. Was she considering an answer? Or was she simply ignoring the question? It was so hard to read any expression on that perpetually surprised face.

Then, finally: “He’s back,” she said, as if El had asked her nothing at all.

When El made to leave the shower, Keira stepped forward, shaking her head. Reaching over to a cabinet by the door, she produced a little leather pouch.

Before El knew what was happening, Keira dropped to her knees and put a hand on El’s hip to steady her. With her other hand she opened the pouch. Inside there was a safety razor and a plastic bottle of something clear. Keira took the bottle, squirted some gel onto a cupped hand, and then pressed it to El’s pudendum – a sudden, unexpected pressure.

El gasped and took a step back, but Keira’s hand went to her hip again, stopping her. Deftly, Keira applied the gel, rubbing it into the stubble and then sliding her hand under, between El’s legs.

El stepped back, this time moving clear of Keira. She glanced around, suddenly remembering what Danny had said.

He’s watching, you know. CCTV.

Was this another of Jeremy’s games? Was he watching this right now?

She held out her hand. Keira hesitated, then passed her the razor, still on her knees before her.

El ran the blade down across her mound, then in from the sides, running a thumb along afterwards to check for any missed stubble. Raising one leg, she rested a foot on the toilet, and then she reached down, spread the folds of her sex smooth, and shaved between her legs.

Done, she dropped the razor by the pouch then stepped back under the shower to rinse herself again.

Finally, reaching for a towel to dry herself, El said, “So? Where is he? I presume he wants to see me.”

§

There were no clothes for her, so she followed Keira up into the main part of the villa naked. If anyone was to somehow catch sight of the two of them it must be such a strange sight: Keira with her sex-doll mouth and her basque and fishnets leading El naked through the stark white hallway to the wide room that opened out onto the terrace.

Jeremy was in the same recliner as before, his back to the villa so that he could look out towards the sea.

It was a power thing, she knew. He didn’t have to look to see who approached: he was secure in his own kingdom. He was the man.

The same simple wooden chair was positioned ready for her, just beyond the pool of shade being cast by a tall parasol over Jeremy. Without question she moved round to it and sat, her back arched as his eyes roamed over her body.

“You owed him, Eleanor,” he said, with no preamble. He peered at her over those small sunglasses, made brief eye contact and then tipped his head and all she saw were the two dark lenses. “Do you feel you’ve made up for your transgressions?”

She hesitated. What did he want her to say?

“I saw it all,” he said into the pause.

So Danny had been telling the truth: Jeremy had been watching them that evening... however long ago it had been.

“Did you enjoy it?”

He smiled at that. “You know how much I was always the visual one,” he said. “I like art. I appreciate beauty. I like to watch. I know now that I like to watch you. I only ever fantasized about it before, though. Does that shock you, even now?”

How had she missed so much about him? How had he hidden this all behind that smooth, restrained persona?

“I wanted to watch him fuck your face,” he went on, his tone still light. “I told him that. I could see he was scared. You see he isn’t fully healed yet, and you had, after all, broken him once before.” He tipped his head to one side, smiling. “But as I say: I like obedience.”

He indicated the low table to his side, where two ice-filled glasses sat next to a pitcher of clear, sparkling liquid. “Would you like to drink?”

The sun was hot on her shoulders and back. If she stayed out here much longer without protection she would burn.

Jeremy smiled at her from the shade of his parasol, but made no move to pour drinks. Was he waiting for her to do so? Was this some kind of test? She was over-thinking again, and she tried to clamp down on the stream of thoughts rushing through her head.

“You enjoyed it, too, didn’t you, Eleanor?”

She felt a sudden rush of... of guilt, anger, embarrassment. Had he seen something in her reaction that night? Something she’d been denying ever since?

“Tell me, which part did you enjoy the most? The humiliation? The sense of fighting back from your chains against a brutish man like Danny? The visual of him standing over you with his fist in your hair and his penis only an inch or two from your face? Or was it more the physical? The pain when he hit you. The way he pulled your hair as he held you. The feeling as his semen splashed against your skin? What was it, Eleanor? What was it that gave you that private little sluttish look in your eye you sometimes give when you’re about to come?”

Just his words... She was in denial again. Trying to be in denial.

How did he know her so well? The woman she had become, not the one he had married... How was it that he recognized that double-edged response? The pain and humiliation sitting alongside the sense of being owned and controlled... the sense that she was getting what she deserved and it was right...

Is this what it was like to discover that you're a submissive? A sense that something so wrong, something you had always denied, was how you really were?

“Come here.”

She went to him without even a thought. She moved forward immediately from her chair and kneeled at his side as he indicated. She was only vaguely aware of Keira looking on from her position in the doorway. Was El stealing her place? Was she the one to put her face in Jeremy’s lap now and have her hair stroked?

He put his hand to her cheek, his fingers in her hair. Then he turned that hand and ran his knuckles down the line of her jaw, her neck, and down across one breast.

“Are you ready to change, Eleanor?”

She had changed already. She had been changing continually through the past two years. Finding her true self amid the chaos of her life. He knew that: he could see that she was vulnerable, that she would be so easy to manipulate and possess. She understood that. She gave herself up to that.

“I like that you shave yourself smooth,” he said, and his hand worked lower, down across her belly until he could reach between her legs and cup her sex.

She bit down on her lower lip, stifling a gasp.

“It shows that you are not only open to change, but that you are actively exploring change. It tells me you like to feel vulnerable.” With that he closed his hand around her softness, trapping her labia, squeezing so hard she cried out.

“Are you ready to be broken, Eleanor? Are you willing to let me be your master?”

He eased his grip, then withdrew his hand altogether. Immediately she felt that absence of contact as somehow more physical than the pain when he had gripped her so hard. Still kneeling, she rocked back on her heels, feeling nauseous, dizzy.

Her head... how did he keep messing with her head?

She heard the snap of his fingers and looked up. His hand was raised and now Keira came across the terrace, almost scampering in her eagerness.

“Keira recognizes her master,” Jeremy said. He pointed, and she kneeled at his side, across from El. He took her face in his hand and tilted it towards El. “She’s willing to go to any lengths for me,” he went on.

He squeezed so hard that the ‘O’ of her mouth took on the shape of an inverted teardrop.

“Are you willing to do that for me, Eleanor? No, don’t worry: I’m not proposing a little more amateur surgery. I’m not sure I like it. It amused me that her mouth had become designed for one thing only – and believe me, my little pet gives exquisite head – but it is, well, it is something of a permanent feature, wouldn’t you say?”

With that, he released Keira’s face with a disdainful flick of the wrist.

“I need to know how far you would go for me, Eleanor. It’s important to me.”

She’d been willing to mutilate Danny. She’d been willing to kill. Was that enough? She watched him, those mirror-shaded eyes, and waited for him to go on.

“I need to know that you are mine,” he said. “I need to own you, my love.”

She swallowed, her throat dry. Her heart was racing. Was this where her journey was leading? Had she finally come home?

“I’m yours,” she said to him softly. “I always have been yours.”

He gestured, and Keira stood, then started to unfasten her basque. As the last of the hooks at the back came free, she clutched the stiffly ribbed material to her chest, then at another gesture from Jeremy, she lowered it. Her waist was slim, her belly flat. Her breasts were full, a slightly paler honeyed brown than the rest of her skin. The nipples were wide black pools. She was quite statuesque, something she emphasized with her posture, something proud and defiant about the way she stood, as if poise and beauty were how she expressed herself best.

Then Jeremy twirled a finger in the air and she turned.

There was writing across her back, big letters. At first El thought they were tattoos, but then she saw that the darkened skin was raised into welts. Not tattoos: branding. These letters had been burned into her back. As Keira came to stand still, El was able to read the writing:

GIVEN

to JD

“It’s our contract,” said Jeremy. “Her commitment to me. She gave herself to me, Eleanor. One hundred per cent. She is mine.”

9

Darkness. More muggy heat.

Lying on the bed, unable to sleep but never feeling fully awake.

Her life was like this now. Brief periods of lucidity emerging from long spells of drugged stupor.

She’d seen Jeremy today. She knew that. Out on the terrace, the sun burning her bare skin.

I need to know that you are mine.

How could he question that, after all she had done in his name?

She had always been his.

§

She’d come here for revenge.

That all seemed so distant now. Another person. Another her.

She’d been on a journey, from the woman she had been to the one she was now. She’d learned that she could be bad. All the way back in prison, she’d leanred that: from the very first time she had fought back against Anja.

Now, she realized one more thing: she could be Jeremy’s, but more – she could be like Jeremy.

In many ways, they were the perfect couple. Each capable of violence... anything to achieve their desired ends. Dark lovers, destined for each other.

That muggy heat!

She lay there with no covers, tossing and turning, her head full with dark fantasies and even darker dreams.

She was his, but also, he was hers. This was what her life had led up to.

The perfect couple.

§

Rob came to her some time the next morning, while she still lay in bed.

He came to rescue her, the poor deluded fool.

She heard the door and thought it must be Keira with some breakfast, but when she looked he was standing there, hesitating. Was he taken aback by her nakedness? Surely not: he’d seen her naked before.

She put a hand to her face, and remembered Danny’s beating. She must be bruised: that was why Rob stood there, his eyes working over her face like that.

She swung her legs to the side and sat, hands folded in her naked lap.

“Has he given me to you, too?” she asked, in what she hoped was an obedient tone.

He said nothing, still staring.

Finally, he moved further into the room, stopped before her, dropped to his knees and took her hands in his.

“El,” he said. “Jesus, El. What have they done?”

“I deserved it,” said El. “I earned it.”

He shook his head.

“I’m sorry, El. So damned sorry.”

Her hands were tiny in his. She looked into his silvery blue eyes and wondered why he should be sorry.

“I never wanted any of this,” he said, rocking back on his heels, then standing, turning, walking away to the wall and turning like a caged animal. “I never knew just how bad it all was until it was too late. Too many favors given, favors owed. Too much inside information up here.” He slapped at the side of his head. “It was always so easy just to turn a blind eye, pretend that none of this was happening. Pretend I was living the dream.”

He stood in the balcony doorway now, a silhouette against the bright morning light. “But I can’t be a part of it any more. I’m not a criminal. I’m not fucking evil. I’m getting out, El, and I’m going to get you out of here, too. You’ll be free, El.”

She looked at him. She didn’t even know what that meant. Free.

Free from Jeremy? Free to make her own choices?

She shook her head. “I want to stay,” she said, simply. “I want to be with my husband.”

He moved back into the room and kneeled before her again. The look on his face... she couldn’t read it. Surprise? Anger? Shock?

“El,” he said. “You have to get out of here. You’ve seen what he’s like – what he’s really like. He’ll destroy you, and then he’ll get bored and find someone else to destroy.”

“He loves me.”

Rob shook his head. “You’re drugged,” he said. “You’re broken – that’s what he does to people. Can’t you see? I know about your past, El. I know you were in jail. Can’t you see that when you’re in this state it’s so much easier to do what you’re told, to believe that you deserve to be owned and controlled? You’re still imprisoned in your head, El. But you don’t have to keep finding ways to be caged in. You can be free, El. I can get you out of here.”

It was too much to take in. His earnestness, his passion, his words.

She shook her head. He didn’t get it, did he? He just didn’t get it.

“What did you come here for, El?” he asked now. “You came here because you’re a fighter. You didn’t come here for this. It’s the drugs that are making you like this. Believe me: you just need to get out of here and get your head straight and then you’ll see.”

So much confusion in her head. She couldn’t think straight. She opened her mouth to speak–

There was a sound from beyond Rob and then the door opened.

Rob twisted, still kneeling before her, clutching her hands.

And in the doorway Jeremy stood there, smiling.

“Rob,” he said. “So good of you to come by. I’d been wondering why you’d been so quiet of late, but then Danny here alerted me to your presence. CCTV is such a useful thing, don’t you think? Cameras and microphones in every room. You just never know when you’re going to need them.”

§

Jeremy moved into the room, followed by Danny. A third man, the one Jeremy had referred to as Bruno, remained in the doorway blocking any possible escape.

Rob rose to a standing position, moving almost in slow motion. They all were... or was that just El’s perception, screwed over by the drugs?

“Your little speech was very sweet,” said Jeremy, still smiling. “But entirely misplaced, as you learned. My wife does not require your assistance. She is free to make her own choices, and she has chosen not to be free.”

Rob had positioned himself protectively in front of El. She had to lean sideways to see around him.

“You’ve made your choices, too, haven’t you, Rob? For instance, it would appear that you have chosen no longer to be obedient to me. It would appear that you have chosen to attempt to steal my property.”

“She’s not your–”

“And so now it is time for a choice of mine,” Jeremy went on, cutting through Rob’s protestations. “I choose to punish you, Rob. I choose to punish you most severely.”

At that, Danny stepped forward and reached for Rob. Even then Rob’s first move was to protect El, stepping sideways to block Danny off in case he made a move for her instead.

Danny swung a hand lazily and grabbed Rob’s upper arm. Rob jerked away, but the grip was strong.

El watched as Danny raised his other arm behind him then swung, his fist balled. Everything still seemed so slow! The fist swung low and then rose in a sharp upper cut, landing in Rob’s solar plexus and making him double up instantly. Head down at waist level, coughing and gasping for air, Rob seemed frozen, unable to move as Danny’s knee came up into his face.

His head jerked upwards at the impact, and then his body slumped, his knees folding as he went down in a heap on the ground.

Danny turned casually and raised a hand, gesturing for Bruno to come in and help him drag Rob out of the room.

Seconds laster, it was just El and Jeremy in the room.

“How touching,” said Jeremy, and then he, too, turned and left.

10

El drifted, sometimes lucid and others sleeping or in some semi-conscious state between the two.

She lay on the bed until the heat of the room got too much.

She went to the bathroom and drank from the tap. The water was cool, and it managed to stir her a little from her lethargy.

She went out to the balcony and sat on the tiled floor for a while, along at the far end where there was a little shade and the tiles were cool.

When Keira brought food she left it inside and El ignored it, drinking water from the bathroom again to quell the raw emptiness in her belly.

You’re drugged. You’re broken – that’s what he does to people... It’s the drugs that are making you like this.

Rob’s words rattled around inside her skull, as did the dull thud as Danny’s knee came up into his face.

She drank more water, then cupped her hands and sluiced some over her face.

She set the shower running, the temperature barely lukewarm, cool enough to bring her skin out in goosebumps as it played over her body. She tipped her head and let the water wash down over her, her hair hanging long and wet behind her.

You don’t have to keep finding ways to be caged in.

Caged in by her fear, by her drive for revenge. Caged in by a Jeremy she barely even recognized; made to obey, to give herself up to him.

Was this where her journey had brought her?

Still wet, she went out onto the balcony and sat in the shade again.

You can be free, El.

Free... whatever that meant.

§

How was it so easy to forget that magnetism? There was something about Jeremy that made her so desperate to please him. There always had been.

Even now, as Bruno led her down the stairs into the basement and Jeremy looked up at her, that smile on his face. Just the sight of him set her heart thudding. She even held herself differently as she walked, conscious of the curve of her spine, of her breasts jiggling as she moved, of her long legs and that smoothness he had commented on before.

Then she glanced across and saw that the bench in the middle of the room was now occupied. Rob lay there, his wrists and ankles enclosed in heavy metal cuffs that were attached to the bench. His face was a bloodied mess, his white t-shirt now smeared with blood.

“My dear,” said Jeremy, as she came to stand before him. “We have an audience. I hope you don’t mind.”

Rob’s eyes had fixed on her as she came down the stairs and now followed her every move. She had to look away. He looked so broken.

Maybe she could persuade Jeremy to spare him?

Jeremy took two steps towards her and put his hand to her cheek. That touch! She pressed her face against his hand, closed her eyes so that there was just that touch, just the two of them.

When she opened her eyes again she saw Rob’s silvery-blue eyes fixed on her.

She reached up and put her hand on Jeremy’s, holding it in place.

He moved closer and she felt the fabric of his loose cotton shirt brush against her breasts. Her nipples hardened instantly in response.

There was only Jeremy. Right now, nothing else mattered.

He drew his hand away and ran it lightly down her neck and down to cup a breast, find a nipple and pinch it so hard she gasped.

Down across her belly to that smoothness, fingers sliding through the folds of her sex and then – oh my God! – one finger angling up and into her.

“It’s time, my love,” he said softly, his mouth close to her ear so that she could feel his hot breath when he spoke. “Time for you to commit yourself. Time for you to accept my contract.”

He pulled his hand away then, and stepped back.

The absence of his touch was like the floor being snatched from beneath her. How did he have such power over her?

He started to walk, circling her so that she had to turn to still see him.

That was when she saw a doorway she hadn’t noticed before, an archway set into the stonework with a door standing open. It led on to a side-room where she could see a glow, the figure of Keira in there, tending to something. The glow was from a fire-pit, she saw now, and she knew that the metal rod protruding must be the shaft of a branding iron.

She looked at Jeremy. That smile never seemed to leave his face. “Are you mine?” he asked.

She swallowed, then stepped towards him, put her hand to his face, stretched up and pressed her lips softly against his.

§

Stepping into his embrace, she pressed against him, her breasts squashed against his hard ribs.

His arms wound round her, one hand between her shoulder blades, the other sliding down to the small of her back and then on down to the swell of her ass. He pulled her hard against him, and she felt his erection, a solid lump pressing into her belly.

She pushed against him, rolling her hips to work that hardness, shifting so that a thigh pressed between her legs.

“I’m yours,” she said. “Have me. Fuck me. Break me.”

In her peripheral vision, she saw that Rob had turned his head away now, unable to watch.

She reached down and found that hardness, squeezed it and then started to grind the heel of her hand against it.

“Hurt me. I want you to see just how much I’m willing to give.”

He pulled away and she staggered, almost falling.

He did that circling thing again, his eyes exploring her hungrily.

She stood, aware of the way her posture accentuated the curve of her back and pushed her breasts out. She shifted her legs slightly apart, drawing his eyes to her smooth sex.

Now – oh so slowly... – she ran a hand down her body, fingers clawed so that her nails left red scratches down the inside of one breast and onto her flat belly. Turning her hand, she trailed it farther down, found that smoothness, pressed.

“Hurt me.”

He gestured at the archway with a nod of the head, and she walked slowly towards it, letting his eyes follow the swing of her hips, her ass.

The side-room was much smaller than the main part of the basement, and the fierce, dry heat from the metal fire-pit was intense.

The branding iron was nestled into a bed of fiercely-glowing coals, its long metal shaft protruding, with a rubber grip at the end to protect the user from the heat.

She looked at Keira, meeting the girl’s eyes briefly, a moment of connection and then it was gone.

Keira had been through this already. She had proven her obedience.

Now it was El’s turn.

Keira reached for the handle of the iron and shuffled it in the coals, as if to emphasize El’s thoughts.

El swallowed, and turned to face Jeremy as he walked around her to stand with Keira and then turned to face her again.

She reached down again, and started to rub herself. “I’ll do anything,” she said.

His eyes were drawn downwards and that smile grew broader.

He was so close... he could just reach out and touch her, too. Or he could reach out and take the branding iron from its resting place.

She started to rub harder, the sensation sending stabs of pleasure through her belly.

“Hurt me,” she sighed, eyes locked on his.

She stepped towards him. So close now.

Still rubbing.

Another step.

Another.

§

When disturbed, the black widow spider may bite people or animals, but those most at risk from this spider’s bite are insects – and male black widow spiders, who may be killed and eaten after mating...

§

El lunged... at him, past him.

The heat from the pit was so intense this close!

She took hold of the branding iron’s rubber handle and yanked it upwards. Hot coals scattered, and Keira squealed and tumbled away.

El caught herself and turned and Jeremy was right there, almost on top of her.

She swung an elbow and caught him somewhere soft, then managed to take a step away from him, another. She turned, holding the branding iron out in front of her like a sword.

Jeremy stood there, poised either to attack or flee, his look jumping bewteen the white-hot brand and El’s eyes.

He was still smiling. That smile that never left his face.

“So what’s it going to be?” he said. “You think you can get away from here? You think you can get past Bruno?”

She glanced past him, and Bruno was standing in the archway, blocking the way.

She swung the branding iron at Jeremy, a threat rather than an attack.

He swayed backwards, and laughed.

“You’re mine,” he said. “You’re mine and you’re going to put that thing down.”

His tone was so gentle, so persuasive.

“You’re going to put it down and then we’ll–”

He dived towards her, catching her off guard.

She’d never have thought he could move so fast!

She stepped back and to the side and her heel hit something. She staggered, fighting for her balance but she just couldn’t quite hold it and she started to fall back.

It was over. All lost.

Her ass hit the ground first, sending a jarring pain up her spine. Then her elbow, and the heel of the branding iron hit the ground at her side.

And then...

He was coming through on top of her, falling on her, his face suddenly so close, his eyes widening and his mouth flipping open.

She looked down at the space between them and Jeremy’s fall had been halted by the shaft of the branding iron, the handle lodged on the ground and the other end – the white-hot burning brand – in his belly.

His scream was so high-pitched it was almost beyond hearing.

He seemed to hang there in mid-air for long seconds, but it could only have been an instant.

He clutched at the shaft, but away from the rubber grip it was too hot: his hands burned and he snatched them away.

El still had hold of the rubber grip and with all her strength she drove it upwards. The stench of burning meat was nauseating, a rich, almost sweet, barbecue smell.

There was a sudden giving sensation, then, and the logical part of her mind told her that the brand had burned through his skin and into the muscles of his abdomen and that sensation was what it felt like when hot metal suddenly burned deeper actually into his belly.

He slumped back onto his knees, and El was able to wriggle free.

The branding iron was supporting itself now, burned deep into Jeremy’s abdomen and the shaft sticking out.

He looked at her, as if in disbelief, and then his expression went blank.

11

She didn’t have time to gather herself. Didn’t have time for the shock to register.

She looked up from Jeremy’s blank face and there was Bruno, striding across the room. He stopped by Jeremy, caught his shoulder as he started to crumple to the floor, and then looked at El.

She had only one option.

She stepped forward, reached for the branding iron’s grip and heaved it with all her strength.

It wasn’t going to budge. It just shifted slightly in Jeremy’s innards.

Bruno started to straighten and she heaved again.

The iron came free, and swung back behind her with the momentum of her effort to extricate it.

Without pause, she swung it forward again, heaving it like a sledgehammer around and down, hard, onto Bruno’s skull.

It struck with a heavy jolt that jarred through the handle and up her arms.

He collapsed to the floor beside Jeremy, and El stood there, still clutching the branding iron.

When she smelled more burning she realized the brand was burning through Bruno’s shirt where it rested against him.

She pulled it clear and rested it on the floor, leaning on it like a walking stick.

Now she could pause. Breathe.

Now she could take in what had happened.

Jeremy: dead. There could be no doubt of that.

The man.

Gone.

§

A noise at her shoulder brought her to her senses.

Keira.

El turned and forced a weak smile. “It’s over,” she said. “It’s all over.”

Keira’s eyes narrowed and then she threw herself at El.

“Really?”

El pulled back and swung, her fist balled, slamming into that always-open sex-doll ‘O’ of a mouth.

Keira fell, groaning.

El went to her, took her by the wrists and hauled her across the floor and out of the side-room. Dumping her against one wall of the main basement area, she found one of the iron loops set into the wall. A chain hung from it, attached to a pair of cuffs. She snapped one around Keira’s wrist.

Bruno was much heavier than Keira, but somehow El found the strength to drag him through and secure him with the other cuff.

Then she went across to the bench.

Rob was staring at her, watching her every move.

She came to stand before him.

“You remember that offer you made me?” she said. “The one where you were going to get me the Hell out of here?”

Silent, he nodded.

“If I can get you unlocked from there, do you think you could make that happen?”

§

Cautiously, they went up into the main part of the villa.

Danny was still unaccounted for. He might not be here at all, off on some errand for Jeremy, but they couldn’t take the risk.

He made it easy for them.

When they emerged into the main lobby area at the top of the stairs he was standing there, a pistol hanging casually from one hand.

He raised the gun briefly, still not pointing at them – a simple gesture to make sure they acknowledged the balance of power.

He shook his head. “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m not going to use it unless I have to. Not because I don’t want to. It’s a simple choice, though. I was monitoring the CCTV. I saw everything. I know all this is over. If I kill you it just complicates things for me. I’m not stupid – despite what you’ve always thought. Me? I’m out of here, you know what I mean? I’m taking one of the cars and I’m out of here and I don’t give a fuck what you do. Okay? Are we good?”

El glanced at Rob, then back at Danny.

All this time with revenge on her mind, but now all she wanted was get as far away from here as possible.

She took a step towards Danny and spat. A trail of spittle shot through the air and left its shiny trail down his shirt.

He tensed, half-raised the gun, held himself. She could see the muscles in his arm flexing, the twitch in his jaw as he ground his teeth, the narrowing of his eyes. He was so close to losing it, but he managed to hold himself back.

She met those blue and green eyes and gave a brief nod.

“We’re good now,” she said. “We’re done.”

Epilogue

El stepped out of the doorway of the small cabin, onto the veranda. The air was full of the high-pitched drone of cicadas, and the occasional raucous cries of cockatoos. Peering up through the scattering of pine trees, she saw a sky that was deep blue, flawless.

A track ran past the front of the veranda, leading to more cabins like hers. Children raced past on bicycles and scooters, and the family with the big camper van over the way had a barbecue smoking already. She tried not to make the obvious connection, still so gut-wrenchingly vivid even now.

She stepped down onto the track, and walked a short distance to where wooden steps cut down through the trees to the beach.

Two and a half years ago, she’d had it all. A husband, a successful career, a house far too big for the two of them. She’d dressed in Helmut Lang and Muubaa and barely given a thought to how thin was the civilized veneer that kept her from the real jungle of life.

Now... all she had were the few possessions in the holiday cabin and the battered old Fiat she had been driving around New South Wales for the past six weeks. It was a life stripped bare, and it was so much the richer for that.

She stepped down onto the beach and white sand instantly spilled into her flip-flops – or ‘thongs’ as the lady in the shop had insisted on calling them when El bought them a while back.

She paused and surveyed the small knots of people on the beach, and then her eyes lighted on a tousled blond head bobbing up and down in the waves.

She smiled.

He was out swimming with the manta rays again.

§

When she and Rob had emerged from La Casa Blanca into the afternoon sunlight, they’d paused and Rob stood facing her, holding both her hands so she had to pay attention.

“Listen,” he said. “I meant what I said. You need to get out of here and get your head straight. I don’t know how long that’ll take, but I want to help you. Nothing more than that. No strings. I just want to make sure you’re okay. Will you let me do that?”

That was when she recalled words spoken to her by Inge, the cook down at La Taberna.

Leave now, while you can. There is a whole world out there. You are young and beautiful and intelligent. You have so much ahead of you. So go.

They’d taken one of the two remaining cars and driven down into town to gather a few things, and then they’d left altogether, driving up the coast and into France, where they stayed for a few days before booking flights to Sydney.

“Places I know,” Rob had told her. “Places I lived before... well, before I started to make some bad choices.”

‘No strings’ had lasted for a while. It lasted all the way to Australia, but then in another cabin by a beach a couple of hundred miles north of here ‘no strings’ had suddenly become tangled.

She’d gone to him in the night. She’d been unable to sleep. The cicadas, the scuttling of possums in the roof cavity, the heat. The thoughts in her head, the growing realization that ‘no strings’ just wasn’t working for her.

He’d been awake, too. As she approached his bed he pulled back the thin sheet so she could climb in.

Bare skin against her felt so good. The mix of incredibly smooth and the coarse rasp of body hair. The hardness of his muscles. The way he started to respond, flaccidity filling out, becoming firm, nuzzling up against her so that they had to move briefly apart in order for his shaft to lie up against her belly, fully hard.

Just holding herself there, tucked into his arms, not moving.

So much skin-to-skin contact.

Pressing harder, then. Feeling the base of his shaft against her smooth mound, sliding that fleshy hood that covered her clit, his balls sagging down to press against her thigh.

Reaching down to wrap fingers around his shaft. Steering it downwards. Raising a leg slightly so she could position him against her wet opening. Feeling the slight twitch in his shaft as they held themselves there, resisting the growing urge to start moving.

The sudden give as the bulbous head of his dick pressed against her opening and then pushed inside. The sense of being filled as he slid ever deeper.

No strings.

In that moment ‘no strings’ had simultaneously become both simpler and so much more complicated.

§

She stood on the beach, waiting until he spotted her.

The breeze was gentle on her bare shoulders, and now she reached up to tease the bobble out of her hair so she could shake her long copper locks free.

She tipped her head back and realized she was smiling.

A big, wide, stupid smile.

She was free.

For the first time in years, she was truly free.

Afters

Writing under other names, PJ Adams is a successful novelist, with several novels published by major publishing houses and optioned for movies. As PJ Adams, she writes in the genre closest to her heart, erotic romance – love stories with that added heat, including the international bestsellers Winner Takes All and The Object of His Desire. Working as Polly J Adams, she writes best-selling erotica, relationship stories crammed full of explicit sex. Among Polly's most popular stories are the Girls’ Club series, and Wings of Desire, the story of a young woman's relationship with the wealthy owner of a New England sex club.

You can find out more about Polly and her writing on her website, on http://www.facebook.com/pollyjadamswriter and on Twitter as @PollyJAdams.

Join the PJ Adams mailing list for all the latest news and offers.

www.pollyjadams.com/about.php

More from PJ Adams

Winner Takes All

When a guy in a tux walks into a bar in the middle of nowhere, dripping wet from the storm, and pulls out a sodden roll of hundred dollar bills, you just know he's going to be trouble.

Denny McGowan has lost his girl, his best friend and millions of dollars. All he has are the clothes on his back, the money in his pocket, an easy, wise-cracking charm that could melt the hardest of hearts... and two gangsters on his tail and out for revenge.

Cassandra Dane is down on her luck, and on the run from a father fresh out of jail. She's probably the last girl you'd expect to hook up with someone as hot and exciting as Denny - and she knows it. But things are not always what they seem and sometimes you're just on the tail-end of a string of bad luck and worse decisions.

When a one-night stand looks like becoming something more than that, Cassie must decide whether she can trust a complete stranger like Denny and work out what he's really after. As matters of the heart become matters of life and death, Cassie has some tough choices to make.

And foremost among these: just how many chances do you give a guy like Denny McGowan?

Winner Takes All: the explosive bad boy romance from bestselling erotic romance author PJ Adams.

More information and purchasing links for Winner Takes All are available from the author's website.

Excerpt

“Hey, Bub. You going to drink that beer or shall I wrap it so you can take it home?” Same old line, same old grunt of a response. Old Bub would be there till ten, down the rest of his Bud in a single swallow, and then head out into the night.

Cassie glanced across towards the window table. The young couple didn’t need anything yet. Back to her nails, hooker red and chipped. That kind of summed up how she felt right then. Cheap and worn. She liked it here at Pappy’s, but was she really going to be back in March to open up again? Was this her life now that she’d lasted more than a solitary season?

She took a cloth and gave the bar a spray and a wipe, even though it already had enough shine that she could do her face in it.

All this cleaning, it was wrecking her hands. The skin was dry. It made her feel old when she wasn’t even 25 until January. She hated this time of year, hated this sinking feeling, the Fall blues. She needed change. She needed something new.

She needed this not to be it.

Just then, with perfect timing, the door burst open, slamming against the wall as the gale took it. Standing there, framed in the doorway, was the guy Cassie would come to know as Denny McGowan.

In that tailored tux he looked like he should be someplace else entirely, but yet... it looked like he had walked here. On a night like this! His patent leather shoes were scuffed and dirty, there was mud around the cuffs of his pants; his shirt was untucked, his undone bow tie hanging loose. His jacket hung heavy with the rain, and his black hair was plastered to his skull. Maybe there had been an accident, or his car had broken down back on the highway.

Then, with a cheeky grin that cracked his face and put a sparkle in his eyes, he reached into his pocket, produced a fat roll of hundred dollar bills, and casually thumbed one free of the sodden mass of paper.

“So tell me, what does a guy have to do to get a drink around here?” he asked in an accent somewhere between Boston and genuine Irish, and then he stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind him and shutting the wild storm out.

(continues...)

More information and purchasing links for Winner Takes All are available from the author's website.

Let's Make This Thing Happen

"Tonight on stage, Ray Sandler was all those old fantasies come back to life. Emily Rivers soaked up his every move and she felt alive again for the first time in what felt like years. She never thought he would actually notice her, though."

Emily is a successful woman in the tail end of a failing marriage. Ray is the reformed wild boy of rock, back on stage again for the first time in years. As a teenager Emily had Ray's posters all over her bedroom wall so when she gets backstage tickets it's as if her dreams have come true. Actually meeting him is an unexpected highlight of the evening, but that's as far as it could ever go. They come from such different worlds: what could an international star ever see in a grounded, curvy woman like Emily? And how long could they ever keep such a relationship private when everyone from jealous fans to intrusive reporters wants a piece of Ray?

As things turn out to be even more complicated than she had first believed, and when tragedy and angry exes threaten to pull them apart and their secret affair threatens to go spectacularly public, can Emily do anything or has it all gone way beyond her control?

And when one of the sweetest things a man has ever done for Emily turns out to be a lie, will she ever be able to trust him again?

A story of secret romance in the world of the super-rich: an international celebrity and his unlikely BBW love. Steamy and passionate and full of the twists and turns familiar to readers of PJ Adams' work, including the bestsellers Winner Takes All and Black Widow.

"It's our song, Emily. It's your song. It's for you. Everything's for you, now."

More information and purchasing links for Let's Make This Thing Happen are available from the author's website.

Excerpt

Tonight on stage, Ray Sandler was all those teenage fantasies come back to life. Sure, those missing ten years had added some silver to his temples, and he was carrying a few extra pounds, but he was looking good. Emily Rivers soaked up his every move and she felt alive again, for the first time in what felt like years.

She never thought he would actually notice her, though.

How many times as a teenager had she stared up at those posters on her bedroom wall, gazing into his eyes and imagining that, even just once, he would glance in her direction? Their eyes would lock, he would falter in the middle of a line and then pick up again, always the professional. Even if that look was all she ever shared with him Emily's life would never be the same again.

The Roxette was a small venue. Standing room for maybe two or three hundred, and then a balcony level for a few dozen more by the bar. This was the kind of place where you'd see a band before they made it big and years later you'd tell the story of how you had been one of the select few who had seen them, back in their early days at the Roxette.

Emily stood to the left of the stage, with only one row of bodies between her and Ray. So close she could almost reach out and touch him!

He had a backing band, but they were very much in the shadows as he stood there at the mike, that battered old Gibson semi-acoustic slung low, legs spread and knees bent a little as if he was forever poised to dive off the stage. Black jeans, black shirt open a couple of buttons; hair cropped close and blue-black under the stage lights, apart from where the silver showed through at the sides.

He opened with 'Poison Berries', an obscure track off the first Angry Cans album, from before they made it big. It was one for the true fans and the perfect track for the venue, somehow wistful and demanding at the same time. A young man's song played by someone who now had the skill and depth to make it something else entirely.

Oblivious to the bass, electric piano and drums somewhere towards the back of the stage, Emily watched Ray's hands on that guitar. Some great musicians look like they're working hard and you really appreciate all the effort they've put in. Others appear to have lazy hands. Hands that drift over a keyboard, hands that stroke the neck of a guitar.

Ray was definitely in the latter category, working that guitar almost effortlessly.

And when he sang, he just leaned into the mike as if someone had moved it almost beyond his reach, and his tone was like honey with a smoker's rasp. He'd never had that extra depth to his voice before. Maybe it was just hearing him live that brought it out, or maybe it was the years and hard living he'd been through to get here.

"Why does it taste so sweet?" he sang. "When all that you give me is poison?"

There was anger in his delivery; that old fiery magic, but with a new passion that sent chills racing through her body.

She'd expected to feel more self-conscious, here on her own like this because her old friend Marcia had pulled out at the last minute. Instead, she felt just a little bit dirty. Deliciously dirty: standing there with the perfect view of Ray, drinking it all in and feeling like a teenage girl again. You'd never have got this kind of view of him back in the day. Side on, she could follow the line of his leg, revel in that swivel of the hips. He really hadn't put on too many pounds in his time away, and he'd clearly been staying fit.

Just then, the opening song came to a close. Ray tossed his head back and – briefly – held the pose, and it was exactly how she remembered him from one of those posters.

Was it wrong for a woman in her late twenties to want to squee like a kid?

The next track was something new. That's why they were here, after all: an intimate, unpublicized gig so he could try out new material, after years away from the limelight. It started with a single, sustained note on the guitar, crystal clear, a little flat and then bending the string until it was perfect and you didn't even realize that he was holding the same note with his voice, too, as the tones merged. Then the band kicked in and it was back to his trademark choppy guitar style. Something about first times... peeling back the layers until everything's like new. A comeback song if ever there was one. The melody glided above that choppy, bluesy backing. This was going to be a real grower, Emily thought, and then he was looking right at her and...

He didn't falter for a moment. It was nothing like that teen fantasy she'd played over and over in her bedroom back when the Angry Cans were just making it big.

His eyes were on her, connecting, and then almost immediately moving on.

She tossed her head back and laughed. She'd had her moment. She'd made eye contact with Ray Sandler! She could die a happy woman.

Then when she looked again, his eyes found her once more.

"Peel me back," he sang directly to Emily.

She faltered, lost track of what she'd been thinking.

"Make me raw."

Her legs were like jelly. Who'd have thought she'd be such a girl tonight?

"Find my heart, and make me soar."

A brief raising of the eyebrows – a reinforcement of that fleeting connection – and then he swung away, and those effortless hands danced up the neck of his guitar as he broke into a solo, full of string-bending and long, mellow sustain.

Her heart pounded in her chest like an animal desperate to escape.

If only her teen self could see her now!

As she watched him, he latched onto someone else in the crowd and sang to her, the bitch. Expert stage technique: sing to a select few and everyone feels as if you're singing directly to them.

Before she knew it, the track came to a close and she started to whoop and holler.

Ray had lost none of the magic, and tonight was proving to be the perfect antidote to the way Emily had been feeling recently. She really needed to get herself out more, have some fun.

She closed her eyes, and in her head she was back in that moment when his eyes had met hers and he really was singing to her, alone. It had been a nice little fantasy while it lasted, and one she would treasure. And whatever she did, she was most certainly not going to stand here through the rest of the show just waiting for him to make eye contact again...

(continues...)

More information and purchasing links for Let's Make This Thing Happen are available from the author's website.

The Object of His Desire

When Trudy goes to her estranged brother's wedding, the last thing she expects is one of those moments: a handsome stranger, their eyes meeting across a crowded room... a tempting, but dangerous stranger. Determined to find out more, she discovers that dark secrets bind him to her brother; she also learns that he's the kind of man who gets what he wants, and what he wants right now is Trudy.

Introducing her to the world of the super-wealthy, he showers her with designer clothes, shoes, and diamonds, whisking her off to dinner dates by private jet... what more could a girl want?

But as she finds out more about him, Trudy begins to wonder if she can ever love a man she can never fully trust. A man involved in murder and blackmail, who may just be using her as an alibi. Should she run or let herself fall for him? And will he give her a choice?

A passionate erotic romance, where scandals buried away in the past lead to murderous intrigue in the present, in the intensely steamy world of the super-wealthy and powerful.

More information and purchasing links for The Object of His Desire are available from the author's website.

Excerpt

Even now, I’m unsure whether it was a genuine Jane Austen moment or the worst of clichés: eyes meeting across a crowded room, for heaven’s sake.

What can I say?

I was nervous, in a crowd of mostly strangers and distant acquaintances.

I was feeling flustered after a difficult journey and finally arriving at this little chapel in the middle of nowhere later than I’d intended – I hate not being in control.

I was unsettled by the rush of mixed emotions in my head. I was about to see my big brother again after far too long; despite following him across the Atlantic to England we’d drifted ever farther apart over the last couple of years.

I was thrown by the realization that his best man was Charlie, the ex who could still wrap me around his posh little English finger after all this time.

Under these circumstances a girl can surely be forgiven a lapse into cliché. No?

§

I’d driven for nearly four hours to reach this remote little Norfolk chapel. It had taken far too long to escape the tangle of London traffic, and even longer driving through the winding East Anglian lanes trying to find the place.

Deep breath, Trudy. I was here. I’d made it on time.

I stood outside the chapel and straightened my three-quarter length Anoushka G dress. Deep cornflower blue, with scooped neck-line and a lily fascinator pinned to my long auburn hair, even I’d admit that I felt good in my wedding outfit.

I realized I was falling back on coping strategies I’d developed in my teens: a constant interior monologue of commentary and pep talks.

You look good, Trude.

That dress will make up for all sorts, and you can get away with those sucky-in Magic Knickers you bought in desperation, because you just know you’re the only one who’s ever going to see them.

Nice shoes, by the way.

Whatever it takes.

I recognized a few of the faces of the guests milling around in the churchyard. They were Cambridge buddies of Ethan’s. When I’d first come over from New Haven, I’d hung out with him in his college halls for a few weeks before landing my temporary job at Ellison and Coles, a wonderfully quaint traditional publisher with offices just off Covent Garden, right in the heart of London.

As we waited to enter the chapel, people smiled at me and nodded, but they were all in their own little groups and no one seemed particularly interested in me. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t in any mood for small talk, just yet. Instead, I checked my cell phone, only to find that there was no signal. I opened my mail just the same, and glanced through emails I’d already downloaded.

“You’ve got signal? Or are you just bluffing so you look busy even though you’re here on your own and nobody’s talking to you?”

I didn’t look round. I didn’t have to.

“Bastard,” I said softly.

“But a good-looking bastard, right? You always did say that I scrubbed up rather well.”

I turned. Honey-blond hair, sharp blue eyes, and the way the tuxedo and neatly pressed pants hung on his lean body... I took a deep breath and tried not to find him attractive.

Charlie didn’t look a day older than when I’d last seen him over a year before, ducking a flying ash tray as he backed out of the Islington apartment we’d shared back then.

“Last time I saw you–”

“You were a lousy shot. I only ducked to make you feel better about your aim. See? Even then I was looking out for you, babe.”

“I only missed because I didn’t want blood on the carpet. It was deliberate.”

“You preferred that dent in the door?” The ash tray had made a nasty gouge in the wood-panel door on impact. I’d never got round to fixing it: my little memento of the year with Charlie.

“Okay, so I misjudged that one. I should have hit you with it.”

“You look good, Trude.”

“Too damned right I do. You think I’d come to my brother’s wedding and look like shit?”

I was smiling by then. Our arguments went like that: they either got more and more intense or we’d end up laughing and wondering what we’d been fighting about.

“It’s been a long time, Trude.”

I leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. He smelt of Issey Miyake and cigarettes.

“Shouldn’t you be inside with Ethan? I assume he’s turned up?”

“Fresh air break,” said Charlie, tapping the cigarette-box-shaped bulge in the breast pocket of his tuxedo. “You know how it is.”

“Haven’t you given that stuff up yet?”

“Everyone’s got their vices, Trudy. Even you.”

I raised one eyebrow and fixed him with a hard stare until he was forced to look away. If the occasional vodka and tonic too many and a tendency to over-stretch my credit cards on Karen Millen and Jimmy Choo were vices, then yes, Charlie had a point, but he was pushing it.

I looked around again. The chapel was set in a stand of pine trees, a short distance from a sprawling country house, all tall windows and mock classical columns. The landscape was so flat here: fields stretching away to another line of dark pine trees, and the sea beyond. I don’t think I’d ever seen a landscape so haunting, so weighted down with sadness.

“I need a drink,” I muttered. I don’t know why I was so tense. There was no bad feeling between me and Ethan; we just hadn’t seen each other for a while. A bit of awkwardness, that was all.

“Later, Trude. Later.”

“So how did my brother end up getting married in a place like this? Does all this belong to her family? Is that it?”

One further element of embarrassment was that I’d never actually met Ethan’s fiancée, Eleanor.

I didn’t know much about her at all. Very English, was how Ethan had described her on the phone, way back when they’d just started to realize they were getting serious. An English rose, Trudy. Can you believe that? Me, with my very own English rose?

I thought he was a bit scared then, feeling out of his depth with this girl and her landed family and their English ways.

“Family with money,” said Charlie. “It’s all about who you know. Connections.”

That was when it happened. My Jane Austen moment. My cliché.

My attention was snagged by movement in the chapel doorway and I turned, thinking Ethan must be emerging and now was the time for me to go and hug him and sweep away the distance that had grown between us.

Instead, it was a guy I’d never seen before.

He was in a tux, this newcomer. He was about six foot, and his shoulders were square, almost as if he was wearing a quarterback’s shoulder pads. He was either an athlete or he spent far too much time looking after himself in the gym.

So: first impression was okay, but nothing to write home about.

And then... that Jane Austen moment.

He peered around, as if lost, and then his eyes fell upon me. It was almost as if he recognized me, as if he’d been waiting all his life for me... but then realized he was mistaken, he didn’t know me at all – exactly that kind of double take.

He looked away, and then glanced back.

His eyes were dark, but when they settled on you it was as if you’d been fixed by a hawk. A raptor, eyeing his prey.

I shook myself, made myself look away. I couldn’t believe I was actually blushing.

Eyes meeting across a crowded gathering.

It was a cliché. I was flustered by my late arrival and by the tense undercurrents of the occasion.

That’s all it was.

Nothing more.

And yes, perhaps I protest too much.

(continues...)

More information and purchasing links for The Object of His Desire are available from the author's website.

© PJ Adams 2014

Published by James Grieve Press

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Cover images © Eric Milos and Konrad Bak