“You have no idea how beautiful you are, do you?”
“Shut up, Dante.”
“When will you set a date?”
I slid my hand down to his balls and squeezed. “When you agree to give me your babies.”
He took a long, laboured breath and held my cheek. “You know this face?”
“Hmm.” I felt my blush deepening, my heart racing.
“I don’t think anything in the world would please me more than to see this face on another human being.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
He took my wrists and held my hands to his cheeks, staring me straight in the eye. “But I’m not ready for all that, not yet. I need time… I need to resolve things.”
I nodded, a tear sliding from my eye. “I couldn’t love another man. I know it. I’ll wait.”
“Thank you, Ciara. Thank you.”
He held me close and I buried myself in his warm chest hair, cradled tight into him, our legs and arms entwined.
Thirteen
A COUPLE OF MONTHS LATER, Paris couldn’t have looked prettier with flower boxes along the boulevards blooming, cafés and streets packed, and a buzz in the air with festivals and concerts taking place at various points around the city. June was here and summer was on its way. I couldn’t wait: I could finally use the outdoor pool at home.
The Elstree mansion was our home but when in Paris, our second home, all my lonely memories of London were vanquished by other, better highlights. Spending weekends together, as a couple, meant that I saw everything in a new light. He taught me so much about French etiquette, about art and history. I think the thing I loved most about him was his brain.
“Ciara, are you awake? I need you to listen…”
“Baby I’m tired, you wore me out last night,” I moaned, rolling over in bed to find him not there.
My head shot up to seek him out.
It being very early on Sunday morning, we weren’t due to fly back until the evening. Last night, we’d gone to Cohésion as usual and I’d humiliated him with a bullwhip in front of dozens of people. When we got back to the apartment, he’d shown me who was really boss by holding me up above him against the wall as he tortured my clit with his tongue. My thighs still ached from it.
He sat in a chair in the corner, hands clasped together, just his boxers on. His mouth smiled, his eyes didn’t. “I’m sorry but something’s come up and we have to fly home.”
I knew he still didn’t like leaving his team to their own devices but they were trustworthy, I knew that much. I’d still not met any of them. I knew they wouldn’t dare defy Dante, because if they wanted to, they would have already.
“Can’t you sort it out over the phone?”
He shook his head, as disappointed as I was about the idea of having to cut short our stay. “That’s the problem. Sexton and I have our phones synced to the security systems at the house and he just called me to say the feed’s down on his phone… and when I looked at mine, the same. Now the problem is I can’t get through to the house, or any of the staff either. It could be nothing but it’s best we check it out–”
“Why can’t I stay here and you go sort it out? I really wanted to see that jazz concert today and anyway, I can get the tunnel back like I used to.”
Part of me feared what was going on at home because I didn’t know enough about his business to understand if something really bad had happened, but from the look in his eyes it seemed like it might have done.
“I will not leave you alone,” he said, and moved across the room to lay down in the sheets next to me.
I rolled onto him and he clutched my shoulders in his hands, his arms wrapped behind me from the middle of my back upwards. He smelt like coffee and musty bed, reminding me I needed to change the sheets.
Dropping my mouth gently to his, he parted his lips and our tongues licked delicately, memories of last night flooding back to me: after Dante had licked me to screaming point, he tied me to the bed, blind and gagged, and I’d suffered his tongue all over my body as a bonus. The man knew how to delay my pleasure until an orgasm finally brought me to my metaphorical knees.
“I’m sorry,” he said, stroking my back with his big hands.
“It’s okay.”
I slipped down and burrowed into his chest. Dante had grown heavier since we got together, no longer starved of love and life, or more likely because he was now forced to eat proper meals with me all the time. I loved seeing him enjoy himself and the thought of him regressing made me feel sick.
“Let’s get it over with, then.”
“I’m sorry Ciara. I don’t want to cut this short any more than you do.”
“It’s fine. I’ll be okay as long as you’re there.”
“Okay, baby,” he said, kissing my cheek.
We began packing our bags and when Sexton collected us in the car later, he wore the same expression I did – one of apprehension.
***
WE arrived back at the house near Elstree late morning and when we got there, everything looked perfectly normal.
We piled out of the car and while Sexton began unloading the boot of our luggage, I stood with Dante. He took a few deep breaths on the porch before telling me, “Nothing for it, is there?”
“Nope.”
He did the retinal scan and we let ourselves in.
Only inside, it looked like a war zone; everything tipped upside down.
“What the hell has happened?” I whispered, squeezing his hand in mine.
“Someone will pay for this,” he growled and as we walked inside, I detected a musty smell I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“Wait here on the porch,” he said, pointing to right where I stood. “Stay with Sexton.”
I nodded and looked behind me, to where Sexton stood just beyond the front door, still unloading the car. I wondered whether to tell Sexton it was unlikely we’d be staying the night but I just wasn’t sure, so I stayed put as instructed by Dante.
A few minutes later, Dante shouted from upstairs, “Ask Sexton to come. Right now!”
I turned and saw Sexton behind me, looking around the hallway with a disgusted look on his face.
“Did you hear that?”
“Get in the car and lock it, Ciara,” Sexton said.
“Why?”
The middle-aged man looked unwilling to negotiate. “Now.”
“Okay.”
I waited in the car… and waited. When they didn’t come out, I feared for them too. I could hardly stand not knowing what had happened.
I approached the house stealthily, the front door left open by Sexton. When I went inside, I followed the musty smell to the kitchen where a load of food had been left out and was starting to go mouldy.
Dante gave Ayda the weekend off whenever we were in Paris, so I could only imagine the staff had ventured from the office and into the house to feed themselves – and for some reason, they’d never finished their meals.
I continued to ignore Dante’s pleas to stay where I was and followed him upstairs to assess the damage. Reaching the first floor where our bedroom was, I found him pacing the room, muttering under his breath.
The bed was ripped apart, the pillows and sheets and mattress slashed open.
“What’s happened? Why is it–”
He raised his hands in the air, barking, “I TOLD YOU TO WAIT!”
“Who’s done this?” I shouted, demanding he answer me.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
For the first time in the six years I’d known him, he seemed unsure, and he seemed scared. I ran from the room to the corridor and upstairs, where the attic was. The door which had been locked to me every day I’d lived there with Dante was now swinging off its hinges. The entrance to where his staff had worked… open.
Something wasn’t right.
“Ciara, wait–”
It was too late, I saw what he’d no doubt already seen too.
It was a larg
e room, skylights in a long row. Slate accents, mixed with beige. Lots of metal desks. A kitchenette was situated at one end of the vast room plus male and female toilets next to that, and then there was the elevator positioned at the far, far end of the room. Whiteboards and huge TV screens. Wires and cables everywhere. No life, though.
My mind gradually absorbed what was really the sight to see as light shone down on a dozen bodies shot and covered in blood. They’d been lined up in a row and killed, one by one. It wasn’t hard, even for a layman like me, to see that someone had come into this house, rounded everyone up and made threats – then they’d used an automatic weapon designed to kill without any margin for error.
The stench invaded my nostrils so strongly that I threw up without being able to stop myself and it fell on my feet, on my boots. Dante took my shoulders and whispered, “We have to go. I don’t know what’s happened, but we have to go.”
He steered me down the stairs, away from the massacre. Shaking and in shock, I whispered, “I’ve been around the dead before. But that–”
The stench was like nothing else on earth… it was pure death, and I realised that was the smell we’d been met by as soon as we walked into the house. Like common black mould multiplied by a hundred.
“How long have they been there?” I asked, thinking back. We’d flown out to Paris late on Thursday night for an extra long weekend. They could have lain there since early Friday morning for all we knew.
It was now a house of death… and decay.
“Go to the car, Ciara. Get ready to leave right away.”
He pushed me out of the house and I walked numbly into Sexton’s arms. He held me close and his smell reminded me of my granddad, a smell of safety and sanctuary. I burst into tears and he whispered, “I know Ciara, I know. Let’s get you in the car…”
He began tucking me in on the backseat, doing up my belt for me. All the luggage had been put back in the boot.
“Sexton, I’ll empty the safe and then we’re done here. Open the gates… get ready to leave,” Dante shouted from somewhere inside the house, “immediately.”
Sexton started the engine and did a three-point turn, pointing the car back at the exit. He held the remote control for the gate in his hand, pressing the buttons with shaking fingers until they eventually began to open. I wondered how he could spend even a moment more in that house.
Dante came running back to the car and climbed in, shouting, “GO! GO!”
Sexton slid the car down the hill and out of the driveway and we snaked back onto the main road without hindrance, not a car in sight.
We got a few seconds down the road when an almighty screech rang out behind us. Jumping from fright, I covered my ears and turned to see the house shoot up in flames, high up into the sky.
He pulled me close, murmuring, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
All our things… all our time there. I couldn’t handle it. How could he just destroy something, so easily?
Dante reeked of the wretched house and I smelt it on his jumper. My stomach began retching again so he opened a window and undid my belt.
“Slow the car, Sexton!”
We stopped in a slightly wooded lay-by off the main road and I hurled out of the car window before Dante opened the door wide so I could step out for some proper fresh air. Sexton rounded the vehicle to where Dante and I stood, Dante’s hand on my shoulder as I bent over to vomit more and more sick.
“What the hell’s happened?” Sexton asked, his voice tinged with disbelief.
“There’d recently been some threats made. I should’ve looked into it… but I was too busy enjoying life with Ciara.”
“Had to be an inside job, though. Who could crack our security? Seriously.”
I looked up and saw guilt, all over Dante’s face. He’d tried to take a piece of happiness for himself and leaving his staff to fend for themselves over the past couple of months’ of weekends had obviously cost them their lives – some fiend having spotted a gap in the time we spent there.
“Someone must have mucked up. Nobody knew they were working in the attic, nobody but you and me,” Dante surmised, looking at Sexton.
Sexton rubbed his beard. “What about… a takeaway driver. One of the cleaners… somebody. It had to be somebody. That woman Gillian… did she know? She used this house enough times.”
“My people were all unknowns. All of them. The office completely soundproof. None of them had friends or family or anyone. No ties. Nothing. How would anyone know who they really were or where they were working? Gillian is too harebrained to figure out our security codes and never would she imagine I had a team working there. She’d have thought it was my telescope collection behind the door or something.”
“I don’t know,” Sexton said, as I continued to try to spit out the smell of that disgusting house.
Dante tried to hold me but I pushed him away. “The smell’s all over you.”
“Oh I’m sorry,” he said urgently, “I’m sorry about all of this.”
I stood tall once more and looked behind us at the house which he’d obviously blown up in flames on purpose.
“Won’t the police be in touch now?” I asked him.
“No, the property was registered under a false name… and I just stole off with the security system motherboard. I need to backtrack and find out who invaded my house… and why. The rest is smoke… they’ll never trace it back to me.”
We all climbed into the car and breathing felt difficult as we drove away. I found myself full of questions.
“Where are we going?”
“We’ll go to the Four Seasons. I need time to think,” he said, showing courage under pressure, his face and body composed. Not like me!
“How can you just–” I stared at his profile, wondering what to say. “Those people… our house. It’s lucky we have my MacBook with us and my notebooks. Didn’t you have anything you cared about in that house?”
Turning to me, he looked deadly serious when he said, “The only thing I really care about is sitting right here, with me. Besides, all my private things are someplace else.”
“Someplace else,” I repeated, like having all these homes dotted about, and blowing one of them up was perfectly normal.
I wanted to rewind the day and put myself back in Paris, back in bed, maybe even back to when it was just us playing silly games instead of all this difficult love stuff.
“Call ahead, Sexton.”
“Will do.”
Sexton rolled the privacy wall up but it wasn’t hard to hear what he was saying on the loud bluetooth telephone.
“When was the last time Gillian used the facilities?”
“Before you and I got properly together. Don’t you read the gossip columns, sweetheart?”
“No, why?”
“Apparently I have a mysterious new lady friend.”
“What?”
“I took out an injunction so you’re never pictured, but that doesn’t stop them from printing sentences with the words alleged, possible or assumed.”
“I despise your world,” I blurted, “it’s so fucking stupid!”
“Yes, I know,” he said coolly, like this sort of stuff was what he was used to dealing with.
I thought back to what Ayda said about his grief and wondered if his complete indifference was what was really wrong with him.
“Isn’t she angry?”
“A little. Her parents have wanted to know when we’re setting a date for years. They’ll no doubt be mightily disappointed when it turns out she’s only interested in the muscle-bound gardener who won’t bring any money into the pot whatsoever.”
“Fucking stupid,” I gritted out.
The privacy screen rolled down and Sexton announced, “We’re in.”
“Good, we’ll go in the back way. You can deal with the luggage.”
“Fine.” Sexton rolled the screen back up, perhaps sensing we needed a moment.
The skyline of London showed itself on the
horizon as we left the countryside and drove back to the city. I wanted to be anywhere else than back in London, which didn’t feel safe, or welcoming – not anymore.
“The attic didn’t have…” I paused, my mind working, my memory kicking into gear, “…all the computers… it was just bodies up there. Didn’t they use computers?”
“Someone has stolen my business from me, Ciara,” Dante said calmly. “Stealing is one thing, but killing my staff… people I handpicked, people I liked and spent hours of my time with, that’s another thing. Someone has to pay for this.”
“Who would do this? Who’s been sending threats?”
“I don’t know… I don’t know.”
“You do know. You know something. You just won’t tell me, as per usual. Quite frankly, I am tired of this.”
He slammed his fist against the car interior and cracked one of the wooden veneers. “Ciara, you knew what I did… you knew from the start!”
“What start? Six years ago was the start and I’ve only known about your job for a couple of months. Are you forgetting that your job is exactly what kept you from me all that time?”
“It wasn’t just that… but yes, I was afraid something like this would happen. I was terrified in fact.”
He held his head in his hands and rather than say anymore, I decided to keep quiet for the rest of the journey – even though he’d basically just put a dozen people’s deaths on my conscience. This felt like it was all my fault… for trying to set him free. I’d ruined the status quo and he was right… this was on me.
AT the hotel, we checked in via the VIP channels so we wouldn’t be seen in reception and before long we found ourselves in the sanctuary of our suite.
A few minutes passed in silence before there was a knock on the door and Dante looked through the spy hole to see it was Sexton.
Our driver brought in our luggage from a trolley and left the trolley outside while he came into the room, shutting the door behind him. He brought out a gun from inside his pocket and handed it to Dante.
“I’ll hang around tonight. Don’t worry, it’s quiet. No functions or anything. Shouldn’t be difficult to spot a nefarious rogue if such a person does pass through the lobby.”
The Contract (Nightlong #1) Page 15