Wicked Ambition

by Victoria Fox

  Ava clicked her teeth. ‘There, there,’ she crooned, ‘no need to go getting silly. Cosmo’s on his way and you’ll want to be on your best behaviour for him, won’t you? You’ve made him wait. He tried to come down sooner but you were far too sleepy, and that’s no fun for him, is it? Understand we had to sedate you: you were quite the feisty thing.’

  Cosmo…

  ‘You know he doesn’t like it when you disobey him.’ Ava waited before delivering her blow. ‘Not like the old days.’ With startling strength she pushed Turquoise back on to the mattress. Her face loomed close, surveying her victim’s horror with interest.

  ‘Do you promise to be good?’

  Turquoise did nothing. She prayed for the nightmare to end but knew in her soul it was no nightmare. This was real. The pain coursing through her body told her so.

  Gently Ava peeled back the tape. It left a gluey residue on Turquoise’s mouth that she longed to wipe but her hands were helpless. Ava did it for her.

  ‘Water,’ she gasped.

  Ava obliged, crossing to a steel panel in the corner of the room, above which a faucet was fixed. She returned to her chair and held the glass out, removing it from reach every time Turquoise went for it, smiling slightly, toying with her prey until at last she got bored.

  Turquoise drank the liquid thirstily, her hands shaking. With every gulp, life seeped back into her veins. Her brain was slow to catch up.

  Think, think, think… But that was all she could think.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she rasped.

  ‘Why do you imagine? I’m a loyal and faithful wife.’

  ‘Ava, please, for God’s sake. This is me!’ Turquoise’s lips were so dry she could barely force the words out, her oesophagus raw. ‘Look at me. Look at what you’ve done!’

  But the Ava who might once have heard her was gone. The blonde woman’s expression gave nothing away save for perverse pleasure. She was enjoying this.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Ava. ‘This is you, Turquoise—the real you. On your back, tied up, waiting for a man to have his wicked way and then throw a bit of cash in your direction. How much do you fetch these days? A girl like you must be raking in a fortune.’

  ‘How dare you,’ she whispered. ‘How dare you?’

  ‘I’ve been pretending no more than you have, darling. The star the world knows is a fiction, isn’t she? A lie. If I hadn’t known better I’d have believed it, too.’

  Turquoise’s soul dropped through her feet. She’d assumed that Ava was ignorant of her husband’s past because surely no one could abide it…unless they were as evil as him.

  ‘Cosmo told you everything.’

  ‘From the beginning.’ Ava bared her teeth. ‘People ask how we keep the strongest marriage in Hollywood alive, and there’s your answer. Honesty. I stand by my husband and he stands by me. Truth, right to the end. We’re a team, Turquoise—not that you’d know how that feels, existing alone in your frightened little bubble.’

  All this time she had found comfort in knowing she wasn’t by herself in her suffering, even if the man she’d shared it with was her most hated adversary. The idea that Cosmo had never been in that state, that he’d always had Ava’s confidence, made her weak with sorrow.

  Ava licked her lips. ‘Madam Babydoll sure seems a long time ago, doesn’t she?’

  It had been so many years since she had encountered the woman’s name. Hearing it on Ava’s lips was horribly uncanny. Cosmo really had shared it all.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Ava went on, seeming to read her mind, ‘he didn’t need to enlighten me about that. I was there, you see. Cosmo was the prize all of us Babydolls wanted.’

  It couldn’t be. It was impossible.

  ‘After you,’ mused Ava, ‘there was a gap to fill.’

  She wrestled to understand. It made no sense.

  ‘For a while, Lily Rose and I were the favoured package.’ Turquoise detected an edge of bitterness in her captor’s voice. ‘Cosmo switched to blondes, in an effort to forget what he went through with you, I suppose. That’s one thing you never grasped, Turquoise. You had it the wrong way round, thinking these men owed you when in fact it was you who owed them. You were lucky to take those jobs, don’t you see? We all were.’

  Turquoise caught a flash of a pretty Californian girl with a tan like honey.

  The way I see it, Lily Rose had purred, it’s an opportunity to get noticed.

  Clearly it had been for Ava, as well. Ava had taken work from Madam Babydoll? She’d known Lily Rose? She’d been there? It was too much. It couldn’t be true.

  ‘Cosmo couldn’t keep his secrets for ever,’ Ava elaborated. ‘As soon as he told me about that unfortunate girl—you remember, Turquoise, the one you killed?—I knew that ours was an unbreakable bond. Other women would come and go but none would secure his trust like I had. He forgot about Lily, he cleaned up his act, he stopped using Madam Babydoll.’ She smiled. ‘We knew how to create our own entertainment. Cosmo Angelopoulos became Cosmo Angel, and I went along for the ride.’

  She glared at her assailant. ‘I’d hardly say he’d “cleaned up his act”.’

  Ava gave a private smirk. ‘Which brings us to the matter of your footage.’ Again she held the treasure up to the light. ‘It’s no shock to me, so you can forget that one straight away. In fact Cosmo and I aren’t averse to sharing this kind of thing together—another badge of a contented marriage, you might say: something to bring us closer.’

  Every word was poison.

  ‘What concerns us is what you plan to do with your home movie. I’m sure you’d agree, if it ever got out there would be hell to pay.’

  Turquoise said nothing. She didn’t need to.

  ‘Never go for the timid ones, there’s a hint. They might prove easy targets but they always lose their nerve. Your friend at the hotel was a pleasant enough young man, and very eager to please—meaning, naturally, he was eager to please us, too.’ Ava smiled, gratified. ‘The manager called the morning you checked out. Ordinarily they wouldn’t have followed it up but since a maid confirmed she’d seen you in Cosmo’s suite, well, they couldn’t ignore it. Of course we allayed their fears, corroborated your story and promised we were all friends.’

  ‘I thought we were, Ava,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘I really thought we were.’

  ‘It didn’t take a genius to figure out the rest,’ Ava went on. ‘Cosmo invited you to us on the assumption you would bring the evidence, and so you did.’ She shook her head, curious. ‘Did you really think you had the upper hand? That you could threaten us? Your plan was over before it got started…while ours hasn’t even begun.’

  Dread surged. ‘You stay away from me. You just stay the hell away from me!’

  ‘Oh, no, sweetheart.’ Ava got to her feet. ‘That’s a risk you must appreciate we’re unwilling to take.’ Her eyes danced with the thrill of blood sport before flashing a warning. ‘We have to know you won’t try this again.’

  The door opened. A bulky figure stood silhouetted in its frame.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Turquoise demanded, paralysed by fright.

  Slowly, wordlessly, Cosmo joined them. He knelt to her level, the spearhead of his wife hovering behind. Cosmo’s eyes were pools, obscure as oil and hooded by a heavy brow, the look of a man whose dove had returned to the cote. The liquid contours of his nose, so dark and Greek and brutal, sniffed out her panic. He produced a zipped-up bag.

  ‘I’ve missed our sessions,’ he told her with a smile. ‘Welcome home, Grace.’

  44

  Bunny White’s funeral took place a week after her body had been discovered. They hadn’t needed long to verify the cause of death and so arrangements were swiftly made. The coffin was ivory, gold-buckled and bound by cream ribbons, with a bouquet of pale lilies positioned on top, spelling the words PRINCESS ETERNAL.

  Kristin didn’t need to bite back tears because she had no more weeping to do. Her body had been sapped of its grief, she’d cried till she could
no longer see, and all she had been left with was an enduring numbness. She felt as dead as her poor baby sister.

  The Mercedes pulled up at the cemetery to a flashing circus of paparazzi. Even at this, the darkest hour, they were unrelenting.

  ‘Kristin, Ramona, do you have a comment? Is Fraternity to blame? Is that why Bunny ended it? How are you?’

  How are you?

  The question was offensive in its banality. A fourteen-year-old girl had died—a beautiful, kind, sweet darling with so many years ahead of her had taken her own life—and Kristin was meant to turn and say, Ah, you know, we’re bearing up. Lovely day, by the way, isn’t it? What a fucking joke. She wanted to slap the man who’d said it but already his face had been lost in the reeling crowd. Instead she stepped from the vehicle, a stooped Ramona trailing behind, and shielded her eyes from the glare as she passed through the gates.

  Inside the grounds, a more appropriate air prevailed. Hushed tones greeted them with careful, practised tact. The priest shook Ramona’s limp hand and delivered a platitude that sounded like, ‘She’s at rest now, with God,’ which prompted in her mother a wet blub of woe but Kristin to feel lonelier than ever, because Bunny hadn’t been religious—none of them were—and the pretence of reaching for invented faith in their hour of need was bleak.

  ‘Get it over with quickly,’ Ramona sobbed. ‘I’m not long out of the house, Father.’

  ‘Of course,’ he vowed solemnly.

  Kristin regarded her mother sideways. Ramona cut the perfect mournful figure in a sleek black dress and heels, just a dazzle of diamonds at her ears and throat. Since Bunny’s demise she had holed herself up in her bedroom, swooning in the limelight of her angst, and though Kristin resisted the thought she couldn’t help but wonder if a tiny, infinitesimal part of their mother—no, not theirs any more, just hers—was revelling in it.

  Bunny’s suicide was being publicised for all the wrong reasons. In the aftermath of the Scotty/Fenton explosion, reports had flown in from across the globe of teenage girls threatening to kill themselves, making online death pacts and winding up in the ER with stomachs full of painkillers, and Kristin had no doubt that the boy-band scandal might well have tipped her sister over the edge. Yet the fact remained that Bunny had already been at the edge, and the person responsible for that was standing next to her with a silk handkerchief pressed rather elegantly to her nose. Ramona. The pressures of the Mini Miss title, those expectations Bunny could never have hoped to meet, had laid her vulnerable to influences beyond her control. That was what the media didn’t seem able to grasp: they were quick to pin such tragedies on the controversial bent—the better, tighter, more marketable story—without examining the currents that ran silently beneath.

  What will people think? Ramona had asked, once the initial bout of crying had subsided. Even then, even after Bunny was lost, the family’s image was paramount. There was something almost admirable about it, Kristin thought: so resourceful, so ready to recover—precisely how Ramona had achieved, through her girls, all she had.

  ‘You poor thing,’ came the consolations, sad-faced Hollywood players she had met once or twice and Bunny maybe never; Mini Miss competitors and their parents; PR girls on Bunny’s creative team who hung back and checked their iPads when they thought no one was looking. ‘She was so young…We can’t understand it…A dreadful shame…’

  The hole in the ground looked way too small, the coffin too slight and the whole thing so…so wrong! So unfair! Kristin wanted to scream her suffering to the sky but knew it would be absorbed unanswered. Oh, Bunny, she wailed in wardly. Why didn’t you talk to me?

  ‘We’re assembled here today to pay dutiful respect to our most loved and treasured Beatrice White, taken from us too soon.’ Kristin kept her head bowed, stoic and still, because the minute she let the priest’s words mean anything at all she’d be overtaken with anguish. ‘Our departed loved one will always be present in those lives that she touched…’

  Across the gathering she spotted Joey Lombardi—a courageous move given the press were baying ruthlessly for Fraternity blood—whose eyes were rimmed with grey and whose normally fresh face was tinged with sickly pallor. What was occurring in the ranks of that outrage was something Kristin had not yet brought herself to consider, but she knew the guys would be in torment. She felt a glow at his presence and his kindness in consenting to come.

  ‘Beatrice has become a part of each of you here; she will live on eternally in your memories.’ At this, Ramona stifled a sob. Kristin rested a hand on her mother’s back and felt the brittle quiver beneath. ‘Blessed be God, our supreme comforter…’

  The worst part was the lowering of the coffin. Ramona openly bawled as the ribbons were loosened and Bunny—dear sweet Bunny—was taken from them for ever and put in the cold, dirty ground. All those overblown TV dramas where a grieving relative threw herself on top of the coffin in a yowling fury suddenly didn’t seem so ridiculous.

  No! This isn’t right! There’s been some mistake, this isn’t it; this can’t be it! But it was it. That was all. Bunny was dead. She would never see her sister again.

  Joey caught up with her when the service was done.

  ‘Oh, Kristin,’ he murmured, hugging her tight. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

  Sympathy made it worse. She pulled back so she could see his face. ‘How’s Scotty?’ she asked, longing to think of anything but this. ‘How’s everything?’

  ‘Bad.’ He made no bones about it. ‘Scotty’s place is overrun. He can’t go anywhere, he can’t do anything—Christ knows what it means for the rest of us. I still can’t believe it.’

  ‘I couldn’t, either.’

  He nodded sadly. ‘Well, that whole thing makes more sense now. We just didn’t get it when you guys broke up. You seemed so solid.’

  ‘And Fenton?’

  ‘He’s being taken through the courts.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They don’t know yet when the affair began—it could’ve been when Scotty first emerged and that would make it criminal.’

  ‘Oh, God…’

  ‘Was it you?’ Joey asked softly. ‘Scotty says you’re the only one who knew, and Fenton wouldn’t have risked it leaking to the press…’

  ‘No.’ Vehemently Kristin shook her head. ‘Never. Look at what it’s meant…not just for them but for Bunny.’ She choked on the name. ‘This destroyed her. I knew it would.’

  They were ushered out of the graveyard, where the press resumed in force.

  ‘Kristin!’ the reporters yelled, shoving microphones and recorders in her face. ‘Who do you blame? Do you blame Scotty Valentine?’

  Joey followed her into the car and slammed the door. Behind the tinted windows Kristin finally let the tears flow, burying her head in her hands.

  ‘I don’t blame Scotty,’ she said at last, her voice wracked. ‘I blame Jax Jackson. He’s the one who let it go. I made him swear not to tell a soul and he spilled his guts to the whole fucking world. I hate him. It’s his fault.’

  Scotty Valentine hauled the sheets over his head and moaned. Regrettably the tranquillisers he was popping were only capable of knocking him out for a finite period of time, and when he awoke the world was still there, demanding to be faced, and nothing had changed.

  ‘Someone kill me,’ he gurgled from the den of his bed, wondering if it was possible to will yourself to death; if you tried hard enough and wanted it that much maybe you’d just stop breathing and your heart would stop beating and then it would be finished.

  What kind of life was this? He couldn’t even step outside his front door without being set upon. Photographers camped out at the gates of his Beverly Hills estate and shouted his name day and night with no reprieve. The phone rang off the hook. The bell went constantly. He was too afraid to check the web, deciding if he did that the backlash would be so great and so overwhelming that his head would literally implode.

  Splattering his brains across the wall was one way of doing it.

&n
bsp; Weakly, he mewled. How had it come to this?

  Cautiously Scotty climbed out of bed and stood naked at the window, feeding a finger into the wooden blind to part the slats. It was enough to send the pit of lions crouched below into a feeding frenzy, their cameras bursting and sparking as his name was clamoured from the whirlwind. Scotty gasped, retreating fearfully. The blinds clipped shut but the drone went on: a single glimpse was enough to keep them going for hours.

  His cell rang and without thinking he snatched it up.

  ‘Scott? It’s Luke. Thank God, we’ve been trying to get hold of you for days.’

  He hung up. The shame was unbearable. Since the revelations he had spoken once, briefly, to Joey, and that was all he could stand. He couldn’t face it. He was a coward.

  A second later it rang again.

  ‘Don’t you think you owe us an explanation?’ This time the voice was harder.

  Scotty sank on to the bed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Everyone hates me.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Luke said impatiently, ‘nobody hates you.’

  ‘Liar!’ he howled.

  There was a long pause. ‘We’re confused, man, OK? I mean, shit. Shit! Fenton?’

  ‘I don’t need this,’ Scotty wailed, panicking, ‘not off you—or anyone else!’

  ‘Quit being a dick, Scott, for Crissakes. It’s not just about you, is it? What about the rest of us? We’re up shit creek, too, you know. Sorry,’ Luke mumbled, ‘bad choice of words.’

  Scotty blubbed.

  ‘Come on, dude, enough feeling sorry for yourself already.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he simpered.

  ‘We’ve been worried about you for months—getting sick, missing dates, turning up late to everything. Fenton, too, it’s like he just…gave in. At least now we get why you’ve been acting so messed up.’ A pause. ‘Why didn’t you tell us? We’d have understood.’