“I can hear you thinking,” Ciara mumbled.
“Baby, go back to sleep,” I groaned, tugging her closer, my hands tight around her arms.
“Only if you do.”
“I can’t switch off. Too much on my mind.”
We were spooning but she turned over and cuddled up on my chest instead. Throwing her leg up over me, she cradled my leg between hers and her panties pressed against my semi.
“Dante, please sleep baby. I worry about you.”
“I’ll try.”
It must have been around five o’clock but I didn’t get back to sleep that morning. Instead I listened to her sleep and I counted the minutes and the moments, treasuring the time I still had her. Every day I woke up certain she would eventually – one day – successfully escape me. It was only a matter of time before she found out everything about me.
IT was quiet in the breakfast room as everyone sat at their own tables, picking at the feast Cook had prepared for the mere leftovers of Pernox. Cooking for seventeen when it was normally fifty-plus she cooked for, must’ve been the reason why she had a scowl on her face. Or maybe she always wore the scowl. Cook was a vicious Scotswoman nobody talked to. She lived in a granny flat behind the mansion and kept herself very to herself. Nobody knew her history. Perhaps nobody but Shay, anyway.
Ciara pushed her fruit salad and yoghurt around a bowl. “You didn’t sleep, did you?”
“No.” I pushed my porridge around, no more appetite than she.
“They’re all looking at me.”
Raising my eyebrows, I contested, “Yes, because even without any make-up or your hair brushed, you still look a million pounds.”
She shook her head. “You charmer, you.”
“Well…”
“I want to go home,” she said, right out of left field.
Staring at her, I tried to read her mind. “Where is home?”
“For us?” She quirked a brow.
“I guess.”
“Anywhere we’re together… but preferably, Paris.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm, what?”
“I don’t know when we’ll get back there now. I don’t know a sodding thing in fact.”
“Baby,” she mewled, and rose from her chair, coming round to me, plonking herself on my lap. Her arms around my shoulders, I held my hands around her back. “I love you.”
I chuckled. “I know but this really isn’t the way to go about getting in their good books.”
“We’re going to be married. If we weren’t like this, that’d be worrying, wouldn’t it?”
“Let’s go upstairs,” I whispered.
“No, I’m in need of a break Dante.”
“What?”
“I’m still bleeding, remember?”
“Oh.” I bowed my head, mumbling, “It doesn’t matter to me. I love being with you, whatever.”
She lifted my chin with a finger. “I need to heal, emotionally and physically. I am yours, remember?”
She pressed a kiss to my lips and righted everything that was wrong, for that moment anyway.
I smiled a fake smile. “Let’s go and have a proper look through Shay’s office, shall we? See what we can find.”
“Good thinking.”
We cleared our dishes away and headed there, a dozen stares following us as we moved.
Once safely stowed inside Shay’s office, with the door firmly shut, Ciara opened the blinds and we looked around the room against the cold light of day.
“I didn’t know she smoked,” she said, after finding a packet of cigarettes and a lighter in a desk drawer.
“She didn’t, not as far as I know.”
“Unless these belong to a lover?” Ciara shrugged, continuing to search around the desk.
I pulled open some of the black metal filing cabinets and found only the usual, plus a large bottle of opened Scotch in the bottom of one drawer.
“She didn’t drink Scotch either as far as I know.”
“So, who smokes and drinks Scotch that we know of?” she murmured absentmindedly, still poring over books and papers, letters and various notes written down on post-its.
“Teddy,” I murmured, “always smoked menthol, always drank Scotch.”
Chucking the packet of cigarettes over to me, I saw peeking out from the SMOKING KILLS label was the fact that they were indeed menthol. “He’s been in here. Not just in here–”
“Spending time in here.”
“When I first visited Pernox, even I wasn’t allowed up in this building. They definitely got close, then.”
“You weren’t allowed into your own premises?”
“It was in the contract. I wasn’t to interfere in business, a bit like the queen remaining politically neutral I suppose.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Kind of was, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah!”
“I really never got involved in much of anything.” She peered at me, suspicious. Hastily, I added, “Except recruitment of course.”
“So, why did you help with recruitment?”
“Occasionally there would be a mass exodus.” That was true but still, Shay usually found ways of replenishing her stock. “It happened once a year, maybe every eighteen months. Bored and unhappy, they’d be looking for ways to stir things up I guess. Getting more women usually took me into clubs around London… sometimes to little dens like the one I found you in.”
Lies, lies, lies… I had been looking for… something. Answers. Another Shay… maybe…
I feared Ciara wouldn’t bear it if she knew, but what was between Shay and me was complex, and I…
I still wasn’t sure if I’d gone looking for another Shay…
I didn’t know anything for sure anymore, like who to trust or even what day of the week it was sometimes.
“Do some of the girls arrive here without any training?”
“Yes, but they soon settle in.”
“I assume she trained them?”
“You can just tell who will and won’t take to this work. The ones we recruit are normally the ones that watch and learn, it’s easy to find them.”
“Oh, you mean like me?”
“You never learned; you still defy me everyday!”
“It’s my job, remember?”
“Hmm. Yes. Anyway, let’s see what else there is here,” I suggested, running my fingers over books on Shay’s shelves. She had a small library but it was equipped with all the essentials on accounting, the encyclopaedia A-Z, a dozen copies of the OED, a thesaurus, a collection of classical, leather-bound novels from Dickens, Hardy, Austen… and the rest.
“You know,” she voiced her thoughts, “if you haven’t been around here much over the past ten years, anything could have been happening in your absence. Anything.”
“Yes, it could… but I did have everything under heavy surveillance down in the dungeon. Whatever happened up in the house between all the girls was of no concern to me.”
“But it is a concern, surely?”
“A minor concern. You’re my number one concern now.”
She turned, stared at me, arms folded. “If I were number one, we’d be on a plane out of here already.”
I folded my arms and stared back at her. “Okay, so you’re up there with finding out who killed my staff. Its importance is almost on a par with you, okay? And until I can solve this issue, I cannot dedicate myself to you.”
“Fine.”
We continued searching through things and I realised something. “I should check her bedroom.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No, keep looking here. If anything stands out, let me know.”
“No probs.”
SHAY’S bedroom was a mess; clearly she left in a hurry. The bed still covered in clothes, she’d obviously rifled through her drawers, taking only what was necessary as she packed quickly.
“Need some help?” Georgiana asked, standing behind me in the doorway. She mu
st’ve followed me upstairs because I’d only just arrived.
“I’m fine.”
“If you’re sure?”
I turned and with my hands in my pockets, pursed my lips, trying to get the measure of Georgiana.
“Is there something I can help you with?”
“There might be,” she admitted.
“Okay…”
Sauntering into the room, she swiped a bundle of clothes off the bed to sit down on a spot not occupied.
“Good times on this bed,” she mumbled.
“She wasn’t difficult to be with, then?”
“Oh she was, but worth it.”
“What about Teddy?”
Her head snapped up and she looked into my eyes as I stood by a dresser, my arm resting casually on top of the furniture.
“Come on, he spent more time here than he should, right?”
She let out a deep breath. “Yes.”
“You want to get it off your chest, don’t you? You may as well, now she’s dead.”
“Yes. I suppose.”
“What happened?”
She crossed her legs and folded her arms, drumming up the courage, hardly looking me in the eye as she told me the truth.
“Before you and Cleo were on the scene, he was on the scene every night. Not just his nights, but you know… every night.”
“How did this impact on her time with you?”
“Well, he works during the day.”
“I get it.” I shuddered to think of Shay screwing him at night, and Georgiana during the day. This picture I was getting of her was exactly the woman I remembered… so she hadn’t changed at all…
“Did he sleep over? Not just…”
“Sometimes all night, but mostly he’d leave really late, sometimes four or five in the morning.”
“What about his wife?”
“No idea. Perhaps she’s in the dark, perhaps she knows and doesn’t care.”
“So, what did Shay say about Teddy?”
“She told me he was fun, but he wasn’t you.”
Shaking my head, I took a deep breath. “I don’t know why she would say that. I never treated her well.”
“That’s why she liked you.”
“Yeah, because she was the ultimate masochist–”
“I should know.”
“She got you to spank her?”
“Not just that.”
“What else?” I demanded.
“Hot wax, cutting, burning, caning… everything. She loved everything. Too much… sometimes.” Georgiana looked away, wearing the same look of guilt I once had. Shay enjoyed the pain, every moment of it, but she enjoyed that she could also turn around and accuse someone else of having inflicted the pain against her will. She was fucked up, had to be.
“I remember. She wanted everything too much.” I was thankful I hadn’t been the only one to give her pain. It wasn’t just because of me she wanted someone to hurt her.
She’d fucked me up with her games, that was for sure – never opening up to me about anything, leaving everything up to guesses.
Georgiana was a smart girl, clearly. Well bred. A typically attractive pursuit for Shay who was bisexual. However, it seemed that for Georgiana, being with Shay had been more about being with the in-crowd.
“So, how did you know about Teddy?” she asked me.
“Found his cigarettes in her desk. I wouldn’t have known otherwise… well, unless you’d told me.”
“Yeah, she always stank of his menthols. Still, not as bad as woodbines I suppose.”
“No.”
She scratched her hair and tried to hide her eyes again. “I like you Dante so I’m going to tell you something for free.”
“Oh, aren’t I privileged?”
She rose to her feet and with her back to me, walked over to a full-length mirror. Staring at herself in it, she seemed to admire her own figure before she confessed, “Shay used to cry out in her sleep. She’d call your brother’s name. Sometimes, she’d endure a waking nightmare. Eyes open, she’d still be asleep. I had no idea who the Daltrey she referred to was but she repeated his name, over and over, and she would tell him she was sorry, she shouldn’t have said anything–”
“Enough,” I begged, a hand up to ask her to stop.
She turned and looked directly into my eyes. “She didn’t do it without cost. Whatever wrong she did, it cost her. I know that.”
“The only cost was his life.”
“And her conscience. Plus whatever she did, I think ultimately, it cost her life too. Some things have a way of catching up to you, right?”
Full of bluster, I declared, “She knew what she was doing, don’t think for a second she didn’t. She always knew Teddy had the hots for her and she used me to play us off against one another. That’s all she did… she came between two mates, and then… said something awful to my brother… god knows what they spoke about, but she would be damned before she told me the truth. Damned.”
“Love has no logic, like Teddy now has a reason to shoot you dead and feel good about it. If I were you, I’d strap up and run. He won’t take her death lying down.”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“No?” she challenged me, arms folded tight.
“No.”
“You knew she was vulnerable, didn’t you? Anyone with half a brain could see she’d been battered about by someone in the past.”
“Conjecture,” I bit back, “she never told me anything about her past. She told me a load of rot, a load of lies, facts never matching up… nothing truthful, ever.”
Georgiana’s lip trembled and she asserted, “What else would explain it?”
I stood firm and decided, “Some people are born one way or the other. Some like pain, some abhor it. Some like to give pain, some couldn’t bear to hurt a fly. It’s human nature in its variance. We’re not all built the same. Nobody knows why she was ultra masochistic but I’ve half a mind that she was always that way and sought out people who gave her all the pain she wanted and more.”
“The way she loved you was unhealthy.”
“It wasn’t love,” I growled, “and I told her so. Don’t you think I tried to steer her away… make her see it wasn’t me she really wanted… but a mystery. She only wanted what she couldn’t have.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks but she kept on coming at me with her accusations. “You didn’t try hard enough, obviously. Even until the end, I bet she clung onto hope–”
“Hope I couldn’t even dash with another woman in my life, a woman I intend to marry and I even… I even told her so.”
“Even then?”
Shaking my head, I muttered to the floor, “She was sick, end of. Obsessive, murderous… compulsive. Disloyal. Treacherous. She killed my brother… I know she did. Who else would have? I never wanted to believe her capable, but there we go. Now I’m seeing the fog lift, maybe it really was her after all, taking out the competition for my time and affection. Obsession clouding her, she did what she thought was necessary. Tell me I’m wrong.”
My opinion of Shay had diminished rapidly since finding Teddy’s cigarettes in her office. She knew he was married… and she said she never wanted him…
She’d lowered herself even further than I imagined her capable of.
“Before your brother died, why did you go back there with her, time and time again? Tell me that. Tell me!” she begged, wiping her eyes, shaking on her feet. “You went back to her again and again, and she accepted that was how it was. You went away… then came back… and gave her the pain she craved like a drug. Maybe after Daltrey, she accepted the wait would be a little longer that time round, but she always expected you’d go back! Her poor little heart.”
I rushed across the room and grabbed her by the wrists, shouting, “Little girl, I’ve killed men so I know what it takes. Do you understand? I know what it takes and what it costs. It’s not something you do willy-nilly. I understand the mindset of a killer but every kill I made was t
o make this a better world. So, how could anyone kill a promising surgeon and sleep at night? How? I tell you, I do not understand why someone decided the world was better off without Daltrey in it. It’s been a worse world for me ever since but for some reason, I don’t think it strange for someone like her to kill a good man. And you know why? Because she was obsessive and greedy and jealous. She saw competition for me and she got rid of it. She did it all without thinking. What she thought she felt for me wasn’t love… it was hate. She hated herself. She hated life. She hid herself away here to avoid it and Pernox gave her the freedom to play her games–”
“You’re a cruel man, Sinclair,” she cried, wiping her eyes.
She was right, but it was the world which had made me cruel. The world and the evil people in it. Hanging on to your own innocence while facing evil was impossible.
“Did you ever see her once look in a mirror?” I growled.
“No,” she whimpered.
“She was born hating herself, she died hating herself. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how we come into this world, rich or poor, we are who we are and she was sick. End of.”
I pulled back, having scared Georgiana into submission. She rubbed at her wrists and told me, “You’re stronger than you look.”
“I’m the strongest and even I couldn’t penetrate her walls of defence. I left her over and over again because I could never get through, she wouldn’t let me in. She wanted the mystique to last forever. I wanted something real, something beyond this fantasyland. Instead, she killed my brother when things got tough. He wanted to shut this place down… and she couldn’t take it.”
“I didn’t know–”
“Well, now you do. She was warped, Georgiana. You need to forget her and move on. Thinking about who she was, and what she did, it’ll only make you ill too. It’s time to move on.”
The Fix (Nightlong Series Book 2) Page 12