“It’s a good job I just had sugar.”
I reached in my pocket and pulled out the thick packet.
Tearing it open, I found a clump of papers and a small note written on the first page.
Dear Ciara,
I feel like I followed in your footsteps coming here. It is beautiful, just like you.
I saw the world through your eyes for a short time and my vision cleared.
If you’re reading this, it’s because you came back when the coast was clear.
I don’t blame you, I don’t. I know what I am.
What happened to Shay, won’t happen to you. I won’t let it.
Thank you for being you.
I love you.
D x
With tears already pouring from my eyes, I pulled away the note and beneath, I found a pencil drawing of the harbour. Then another pencil drawing, this time of the stables and the house I was born in. There were drawings of boats coming in from a tour… a couple of fishermen… a sketch of the town wall… the crumbling ruins of an old castle.
“They’re beautiful,” Teddy said over my shoulder.
“How is it possible to love and hate someone so much?”
“It’s Dante. It’s heaven and hell loving him, remember?”
“I remember.”
I put the pictures down in front of us, on the coffee table. I let them rest there for a minute or two before I threw them into the fire in a sudden fit of rage.
“You don’t get to mess with me, not anymore,” I told him, even though he was nowhere to be seen. “So beautiful, yet so–”
“Ciara, stop–”
Edward tried to save what he could, but the wind-tunnel effect of the hot chimney drew the papers up and into the flames.
“No, Edward, you don’t get it.”
He looked up at me as I stood by the fireplace while he knelt by the hearth.
“What don’t I get?”
“He’s… he did it to control me, leaving this breadcrumb trail of reminders. Pernox. Here. Everywhere.”
I breathed heavily, furious with myself for letting my heart beat harder, even if just for those few seconds I thought his pictures were actually a romantic gesture.
“Don’t you see what he means?” Edward said, consternation in his expression.
“No!”
“He’s saying that he sees why you left this place, left your home and everything you knew. He knows you were in agony, and lonely, and he must have realised he was attracted to you because you’re so much like Shay. Don’t you see that?”
“How like Shay?”
Edward stood and walked to me. He held his hand at my shoulder and said, “Dante told me she was an artist, which made sense. She knew a lot about art and often liked to spend full evenings telling me about the sort of art she liked, such as Chagall, Matisse, Klimt, Rodin… particularly Rodin.” We both laughed; everyone knew about Rodin’s naughty sculptures. “He said she was from a working-class family but she had this artistic streak in her… and it must have put her at odds. I think she used Pernox to hide from the world, the same way you used him to hide from the world. Am I right?”
I looked away from him, sniggering a little. “As I’ve said many times before, you’re an annoying and very observant prick.”
“I’ve seen the way you obsess over your books. Tell me you’re not an artist too, dear Ciara?”
“I couldn’t deny it even if I tried,” I replied, and a tear rolled down my cheek. “A very long time ago now, well it seems that way anyway, I made a choice to leave this place. I wanted the bright lights of London, it’s what I always wanted. I suppose it made it easier for me to go, knowing nobody here would really miss me, but I wanted to find others like me. Sure I could’ve gone to Dublin where I’d surely have found a home, but that wasn’t far enough away from her, her who was always going up to Dublin to spend his money.”
“You left this country, all alone. A mere teenager. It took guts. Shay had guts as well, didn’t she?”
“She did, but what are you… trying to say?” I regarded him closely, hearing a hint of something in his voice.
He looked me dead in the eye. “You’ve met Dick Sinclair?”
“Yes…”
He gestured we seat ourselves once more. “He’s one person Dante would never consider a suspect in the murder of his brother, but…”
“What?”
Edward nodded fast, seeing that I was obviously getting his meaning. Shock filled my face with raging heat.
“I think Shay once stood up to his father. She told me Dick was banned from Pernox but she never specified why. Maybe Dante knows, I’m not sure… but it seems rather convenient for a person–”
“Don’t say another word.”
I stood and walked to the fire, kneeling down to catch some warmth. Though my skin blazed on the outside, a thick chill slithered through my soul.
I held my head, trying to think it all through…
We went to Vegas and…
“I told him,” I said, taking a deep breath, “in Vegas, I told him I didn’t like Dick. For fuck sake, when we got to his fucked-up ranch, he was there finishing off inside one of his girls right in front of our eyes.”
Edward shook his head. “How much more fucked up can you get?”
“Then we watched the footage and there was nothing to identify Shay apart from a figure much likes hers. Tiny, you know? But muscled, like Lara Croft! So then we drove off and Dick had promised he would let us deal with Shay but I didn’t feel right about the whole thing. It was all so wrong and then… I don’t know… I just knew something bad was going to happen. I felt it. I told Dante I didn’t trust Dick and that Shay had been nice to me, had treated me well, and I told him it seemed ludicrous for a girl like her to be capable… to even… why would she even risk her place at Pernox when it was what she lived for?”
“Dante’s in denial. He knows the truth but he won’t admit it. I think he knows, Ciara. It’s why he wrote that note. I think he knows that you’re at risk if you’re with him. I think he can’t separate his guilt from the truth.”
“Dick’s a murderer, but why?”
“It’s obvious. Shay stood up to him at some point. Either that, or she knew something about him.”
I sat back down alongside Edward and asked, “Have you met his mother? Why didn’t she do something to protect Dante from his father?”
As I sipped my hot chocolate, he told me, “I know her well. I slept over theirs a lot when I was young. Dante’s mother might have been one of the reasons I stayed friends with him!”
I giggled. “Oh, she was a hottie then?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, confessing his sins with glee, “very glamorous, still is by all accounts. You could tell she was away with the fairies though.”
“In what way?”
He looked at me straight. “High, or drunk. Some sort of problem like that. I know she took a lot of medication for stuff like anxiety and depression and the concoction can’t have been good for her.”
“It’s funny because Dante swore blind to me that she was a wonderful mother.”
“She was,” he smiled, “so warm and loving… but you see, when people get so addicted to drink and pills and stuff, they seem normal because that’s their normal. Whenever I stayed over, there wasn’t a morning when she wasn’t still in bed until eleven. There wasn’t a time she tried to discipline Dante when he got thrown out of another school. Dick wasn’t really interested in the kids, I don’t think. He just knew Dante was a tearaway and that Collette spoiled her boys. Thing is, to be a parent, is not just about handing your kids a hug at the end of a bad day at school, or then putting a plaster on when they trip and fall. It’s more than that, it’s a balancing act, trying to prepare them for the real world. Nobody prepared Dante for the real world and the person who tried to, Daltrey… he left for university when Dante was only fifteen and after that, he got wilder and wilder. And then he knew he was getting the money. He
was so wild, every woman wanted to fuck him just to know if the rumours about him keeping it up all night were true. You should have seen him when he and Shay began spending time together. He stopped all of that, and he changed completely, because of her.”
It hurt like a dagger to the heart. I shut my eyes and tried to hold the pain in, struggling but managing to.
“I’m here for you,” he said, “to listen, to talk, whatever. But I don’t want you to have the wool pulled over your eyes anymore. He loved her, whether he will admit it or not. She changed him and… something bad happened. Something to do with Daltrey. I don’t know the full truth but what I do know is that he now recognises why he picked you and he’s gone off to LA or wherever he’s gone, because he knows, deep down, that you’re not meant to be shackled… and shackled is what you’d be if you stayed with him. Shackled and scared to voice your real thoughts and feelings… because in Dante’s world, thoughts, feelings, and words, get people killed.”
I wiped my nose, mouth and eyes on my sleeve. He passed me a tissue and I nodded.
“I just became trapped, by him, by love… or lust, whatever it was. Maybe even wanting love, trying to create love. But I was also captured by my own malingering, stagnant thoughts while trapped in his house. Before I met Dante, I was learning all the time, I was making friends. I was making my way and I was experiencing life, something I knew I had to do in order to become the writer I wanted to be. I knew to be a writer, I had to go out and explore various ways of life… and then all of a sudden, my life stopped with him. But it was just that I was young and he was gorgeous. I saw an easy way out of the rat race, and I took it, when I shouldn’t have. He impeded my progress as a person, stopping me from becoming who I’m meant to be.”
“Where did you and Dante meet?” Edward regarded me quizzically.
“I worked… in a domme den. He found me there. I was playing a schoolgirl.”
“Did he tell you why he was there?”
I wiped my cheek again. “He said he was looking for girls for Pernox.”
Edward shook his head. “No. He never recruited. He never went near Pernox business. It was her job to run the place, nobody else’s. Dante was merely out looking for another Shay, one he could maybe control this time. He was in love with her, don’t you see? We all were. She was the proverbial damaged angel, so desperately in need of love. The sort of woman who’d suck you dry of it, if you let her, which most men are desperate to do… to give up themselves, let themselves go. The perfect woman is the one who lets you let it all out.”
“Well then, I don’t need love,” I said, almost angrily, “not if that’s what it entails. I’d rather remain my own entity, thank you very much. I’ve had enough of sacrificing myself to last a lifetime.”
“Everyone needs love, Ciara,” he said in such a gentle voice, my whole world stopped, and it all slowed down. The fire was no longer roaring and the blood rushing through my ears no longer throbbed, but settled into a steady rhythm.
I turned away from Edward and walked to the window, my hands resting on the dinnerware cabinet stood beneath the windowsill. “He thinks that by leaving me, he’s saving me?”
“Yes.”
“He would have found me. Eventually. But he made the conscious choice to go?”
“In a way, you went first though–”
“I know that!” I admitted, crying. “And look at me, snivelling! A wreck! In front of someone I hardly even know! You know, some nights I lay and snivel all night, then in the morning I put on my make-up to cover up the sadness. I cover it up and repeat, the same, every day.”
“It doesn’t have to be like this, Ciara.”
“But I want to save him!” I screamed.
Shaking intensely, I broke down, arms around my head.
“Please come and sit down,” he said, sounding worried I might hurt myself.
“No I won’t fucking sit down,” I barked, “you know, Dante is synonymous with cowardice. He’s been running away, all his life. If I hadn’t met him, I would have worked my way up, started getting paid more, bought myself a place eventually. I would have been okay. I would have had friends. Maybe, I’d have worn wacky clothes because I didn’t care what he thought. I would’ve met a man who adored me for who I am and not what I do for him.”
Edward stepped up behind me, grabbed my upper arms in both hands and whispered in my ear, “You already have found him. I adore you. Even if we have to be friends, I’ll adore you forever, from near or far. I knew it the night we met. I can hardly keep my hands off you.”
“God, don’t cheapen yourself, don’t lower yourself like this, just because I’m in pain and you want to help me feel better–”
“I wish we’d met first; that you had never met him. He’s my friend and I care about him, but he must never have realised what was right under his nose, all that time…”
I shut my eyes, trying to anchor myself to the spot. I could turn and fall into his arms, or I could take control. Didn’t Edward know that everything I was, I owed to Dante. He’d shaped me.
“There’s something you don’t know about me.”
“I don’t care, whatever it is, I don’t care,” he said, still whispering against my neck, making me aroused, his breath against my skin.
“At one time, I didn’t think of myself as kinky,” I said, swallowing my nerves, “I… felt disgusted, because it seemed disgusting, because I was doing it all with a man I didn’t think loved me. But then I got to thinking about the club we went to in Paris and sometimes, the most bizarre things would happen and I’d sit and watch it all. It didn’t completely disgust me, it intrigued me, whereas most vanilla people would run screaming for the hills at such scenes, but I always sort of wanted to watch, you know?”
“I understand completely.”
“The real problem was that I didn’t really believe he wanted me enough. For him to spend six years… not having me. It made me self-conscious. So at first, I wanted to know that he loved me and I told myself that in dominating me he was loving me, so I wanted that. I wanted him to take me like that, if he was going to take me at all, because then I’d know for sure that the way he was being with me meant that he loved me. But then sometimes while I lay tied up, I realised it wasn’t for me. I’d lay, knowing I could easily get free, so it wasn’t like I felt trapped or anything… but I realised I didn’t want to be controlled. I don’t want to have someone making things happen for me, I want to make them happen for myself.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding, a glint in his eye, “it’s who you are.”
“It’s who I am,” I repeated, “not a submissive, and not content to be told what to do. I’m strong and forthright really but I lost her, for a while. Lost her to struggling to make ends meet, then hoping I could change him. The thrill of pursuing that kept me with him, kept me hoping, that I could change a man like him.”
“Nobody can change anybody,” he said, sure of himself, “only he can do that. Only he can work on himself.”
“You say that, Edward,” I said, “and part of you is right, but think back to what you just said a few moments ago…”
His eyes filled with pity. “She changed him.”
“But I didn’t. She got there first and I was a mere substitute. I know that now.” I shuddered, finally able to admit it. It was like knowing someone for years, and being their best friend, but then suddenly realising there had always been one thing about them that you didn’t know – and now it had become a real deal breaker, and everything you thought you’d built wasn’t solid at all. It was foundation-less. You once seemed to have so much in common with them but then something crops up and there is just this one thing you find yourselves split so decidedly on – and it means you can’t be in each other’s lives anymore. I’d realised that Shay gave him the control he needed… a control I could never tenably concede again, not now I’d had a taste of freedom.
Our differences just made me feel sad, because I’d never known him at all. I though
t I had, even though I’d known there were gaps in the history, but actually I didn’t know even half of him. He wasn’t an enigma, he was merely a very messed-up individual.
“So, what about Pernox?” he asked, looking solemn. “Can you run it in the long-term, knowing it was hers? That it should be her there? Not you.”
“I don’t believe she was a murderer, I don’t,” I said, “and I liked Shay. He misrepresented her to me but I liked her, what little I got to know about her anyway. She was an impressive person. If I could do half the job there that she did, I think even then I’d still make her proud. She’d know I did it for her.”
“I think you can transform Pernox. You can do anything. You can be anybody.”
A few moments passed during which I didn’t really know what else to say. I’d broken open my heart tonight and spilt my blood in front of Edward. Evidently, he didn’t know what else to say either.
“I’m going to bed,” I said, sounding so distant, so unlike myself, “hopefully there will be two rooms up there.”
“Okay. I’ll be up later,” he said, sounding distracted by his own thoughts.
I found a room upstairs and breathed a sigh of relief to find two single beds. Granted one had a Power Rangers duvet cover and the other a Transformers cover, but in the dark he wouldn’t know any different.
After cleaning my teeth and dressing in thick flannel pyjamas, I climbed into bed and tried to erase the things Edward had said earlier.
A jumble of emotions, I teetered on the edge of commanding him to come to bed, or telling him to go home.
Eventually he came upstairs, stumbling through the darkness.
“Is it okay to leave the fire burning?”
“Is it dying?”
“Yes.”
“It’s okay. The Irish always clean their chimneys. Afraid of dragons, you see.”
“Okay.”
Even in the darkness, I admired the silvery outlines of his body silhouetted against the moonlight as he undressed and pulled a pair of thermal bottoms over his lower half. I saw the huge mass of dark-brown hair covering his lower stomach, pubic bone and chest, and I wanted to feel him against me. His ample loins, set against his body hair, were absolute perfection, so lovely I could hardly believe he was in the same room as me. He was… truly…
The Fix (Nightlong Series Book 2) Page 31