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‘I can wait. When she brings you down, I’ll be here to pick up the pieces.’
But Margot is not watching him as he guides me out of the door, or the feather as it burns. Her black eyes are fixed on me. The coolness has gone. In its place is poison.
And as we leave there’s a sucking sound behind us. Margot starts screaming.
‘They were fucking in that goddamn boat, Gustav! Your brother fucked her!’
Her voice screeches down the stairwell. Somehow we’ve crashed out of the apartment and Gustav is pulling me past the lift. The gates are gaping open, and we’re flying down. Cracked, peeling doors open to investigate the disturbance as we pass each hallway. I don’t see the faces of Margot’s furious neighbours. I only catch their anxious murmurs, a child’s piping question, mostly male splutters of indignation.
But we’re not stopping. Not until we’re at ground level, spinning through the door and out on to the street.
Gustav lets go of my arm and falls against the wall, resting his hands on his knees as he bends to catch his breath. I step away from him, terrified that his ex-wife’s poison has worked.
Dickson is nowhere to be seen. I run a few steps, first one way, then the other. The rainstorm has cleared this end of the street. Even though the rain has eased off now, and there’s plenty of life passing along the main drag, down here it’s so deserted you’d think a crime-scene cordon had been put up to block the traffic. And it’s not only the lack of cars that makes it so quiet. There are no people.
I come to stand in front of Gustav. I daren’t touch him. I try to zip up my jacket, but my hands are shaking too much. My legs are bare beneath the little lace dress, and I realise I am absolutely freezing.
Still he’s bent over. His glossy black hair is a curtain separating us. His shoulders are hunched up round his ears, and I can see that his fingers are digging hard into his thighs.
I stretch out my hand, not sure where to place it. The hopeful glance of the diamond on my finger nudges at my dulled senses.
‘Gustav? Honey? Talk to me.’
He shakes his head, lifts one hand to silence me.
When we first met and started working together that authoritarian gesture was not to be argued with. He was the master. I was – if not the servant, definitely the underling. He had pulled me out of nowhere and made me into a star. So I liked the dominance. It defined our roles and our rules. Conversely, it also showed me how to break those rules when I wanted him to notice me – and it was when he really noticed me that the gas under us was lit.
As we grew closer and I got the measure of him, recognised that he needed me in his life as much as I needed him, I could occasionally mock his authority, or turn it to my advantage. He’d be using the silver chain to anchor me, but I would be the one wanting it and wriggling with impatience, waiting for him to come into me as hard and fast as possible. I’d be squealing with pretend resistance, but really I’d be wet for him as he pushed me on to my hands and knees.
Icy fingers trail down the back of my neck. That’s what he did to Margot. Took her up the arse, right in front of the fire, the night they bought that squalid little apartment.
As if he can read my mind, Gustav’s head swings up and his black eyes fix on me. They are the only part of his white face showing any signs of life, and I can read the questions, accusations and the pleading that move across his features like clouds before a strong wind.
His ears will be ringing with Margot’s parting words. So before I have to start grovelling, again, deny everything, again, I try to obliterate what she’s said with the first thing that comes to me.
‘I won’t be quiet, Gustav. I have to know. Do you still want her?’
Gustav straightens, keeping his eyes on the ground. But just as he opens his mouth to say something, just as relief sweeps through me that he will at least hear me out, believe what I say over Margot’s lies, we hear the lift gates inside the apartment building clatter closed.
‘She’s coming after us!’ I squeal, backing away and staring wildly up towards the lights on the main street, down to the darkened end of this one. ‘Where the hell is Dickson? Oh, God, she knows everything. She knows where we live!’
Gustav grabs me, but instead of breaking into a run he yanks me down the dark alleyway edging the building. He slams me against the cold, damp wall beside a huge dumpster and I yelp as I land in a cold puddle.
‘She’ll find us, Gustav! We’ll never be free of her!’
Gustav clamps his hand over my mouth. Voices spill out of the main door where we’ve just been standing. Margot’s smoky drawl, the voice I’ve quickly learned is the one she uses when she’s certain she’s in control, has risen to a hysterical, childish pitch and is spewing a stream of what sound like German curses. Someone, a man, is trying to interrupt her.
‘She’s got someone with her!’ I mouth into his hand. Hot tears prick at my eyes and start to fall. ‘Do you think that’s Pierre? After all that crap she’s told us, maybe he’s been with her all along?’
Gustav cocks his head for a moment. The voices mingle in a hubbub of yelling, then go silent. Gustav’s hand is covering my nose as well as my mouth, and I can’t breathe.
He shakes his head.
After several minutes we hear the scrape and tap of Margot’s shoes, but instead of coming this way her footsteps are muffled by the front door of the building once more clanking shut.
We’re safe here. For now. She would never sully herself or her expensive shoes by searching for us in a filthy, dank alleyway full of trash. But this isn’t the end of the story. Not by a long chalk.
Margot is out to finish us.
I struggle under Gustav’s hand, but he presses it harder over my mouth, banging my head back against the wall, and now his black eyes are glaring as if he wants to bore a hole right through me. With his free hand he pulls mine away from where I’m bashing at his chest. He thrusts my hand down his stomach, down over the front of his jeans until my fingers clamp over him.
He’s hard as rock. He’s so hard that I can feel the heat throbbing right through the denim.
The shock is like a punch in the guts.
Margot has done this to him. Not me. The dangerous allure that once attracted him to that woman was oozing out of her just now. Everything about her, those red stockings, the wet red lips, the laser eyes, the knowledge that she was naked beneath that leather skirt, those gloating, filthy reminiscences she was so desperate to share, has brought it all back. Christ, if I can’t look at her without seeing the two of them going at it, what memories must be boiling inside Gustav?
I nip viciously into his palm to get him off me, but he doesn’t budge. His eyes glitter with the grim determination he employed to overpower me in the early days. He continues to press my hand over the big thick bulge inside his pants. I can feel a sob choking me, but also the sharp twist of desire deep inside me as I touch him.
All at once he moves his hands away from my mouth, leaves my fingers on his crotch and shoves one knee between my legs so that they are forced apart. My legs are shaking as I stagger slightly, but he’s not going to help me. He’s going to have me. He pushes his hands under my little lace dress and sinks his fingers into the soft flesh of my buttocks, lifting me quickly so I don’t have time to feel the cold. I scrabble to keep hold of him by wrapping my legs round his hips and now I’m slicking open for him, moistening against the denim jeans despite the dizzying mix of fear and fury as my dress floats up round my waist.
Gustav pins me against the cold, flinty wall as he starts to unbutton his fly. His breath is hot