He walked out on to the terrace, hands gripping the wooden balcony in a death-grip.
She was intoxicated, and I didn’t notice.
Memory jarred again. She’d been sipping at the cognac with half a litre of apfelwein inside her, never having touched alcohol in her life! Heightening her intoxication. She wouldn’t even have known …
Only felt its effects …
His hands clenched again over the wooden balustrade, whitening his fingers.
I have to speak to her.
His face was stark. Grim.
Grimmer still when, the moment his untouched lunch had been cleared away, he phoned the clinic to say he was on his way down again, and that this time he would not be balked of seeing her—only to be informed, politely and regretfully by the clinic receptionist, that against all medical advice the English fraulein had discharged herself and gone.
The taxi drew up outside the block of flats and Thea climbed out. Despite the humid heat, she felt cold. Cold in her bones. Her very being. The rail journey from Switzerland seemed to have taken for ever, but it had not been long enough for her to shed the bleakness that engulfed her.
She had thought Angelos could do no worse to her—but she had been wrong. He had had one final, ultimate destruction for her …
She felt her shoulders sag, weariness of spirit crush her down. She closed her eyes a moment, then took a breath, forcing her shoulders back. How many times had she done that in her life? Ever since, as Kat, she’d faced the destiny she’d been slipping towards and made the transforming decision not to go that way. Not to become the person her mother had been, her mother’s mother. To break that crushing chain of self-destruction dragging her down. To make something of herself, whatever it cost her.
And now she must pay another price.
Pain ripped at her, and its bitterly familiar twin—shame. Shame that she had been so unforgivably stupid as to forget so rashly, so blindly, just what he was to her. Her nemesis—now as he had always been. Angelos Petrakos.
As she opened the entrance door of the block memory jumped in her mind. That evening when his bodyguard had stepped up, manoeuvring her inside, admitting his employer at well. She gave another shiver. A shudder.
Nemesis, indeed.
But she knew that then she had been fuelled by fury, rushing through her like a tide of adrenaline—determined, driven to defeat Angelos Petrakos, to show him that he could not destroy her, that she would defy his destruction!
This time bleakness lapped about her. This time it was different. She could hate Angelos all she wanted, but he was not the cause of her downfall—she herself was. She and she alone had let him do it—had been his accomplice, his conspirator. It was herself she hated now, with a drear, bleak loathing that dragged at her like weights around her body—her treacherous, betraying body.
Wearily, she stepped into the lift, feeling the heat increase in the airless compartment. Again memory stabbed at her. That crowded lift in Angelos’s hotel in London, being jostled back against him, so that her body had tensed like steel. And as she’d gained his suite she’d turned on him.
‘Don’t touch me—don’t ever touch me!’
Her face contorted. Fool! That was what had set in motion this whole nightmare. Giving him orders. She, Kat Jones, had presumed to dare to give the mighty Angelos Petrakos orders! To forbid him something—demand respect for herself!
She had doomed herself from that moment onwards. Because from that moment onwards, Angelos Petrakos had had only one malign aim, one fell purpose—to bring her down, to humble her, prove she could not defy him and get away with it. So, from that moment onwards, he had sought to demonstrate the futility of her presumption in denying what he, with calculated design, day by day lulling her, after all he’d done to her, from enmity to susceptibility, had determined on achieving—a seduction so skilful she had been pitifully, pathetically, incapable of realising was happening.
Until it had been too late, and Angelos Petrakos, his destruction of her complete, had forced her to see the truth about herself.
That she had yielded, of her own free will, to his most malign one….
As she let herself into her flat, that she had last left what seemed like a lifetime ago now, she felt the familiar ripping pain tear through her. She made herself ignore it, as she had made herself ignore it all the way on her desolate journey, made herself go through the necessary routine of turning on the air-conditioning to cool the stifling flat, set the water to heat for a shower to refresh her weary body, if not her even wearier spirit, then carry the shopping she had bought on her way home from the station, into the kitchen. She would unpack them, make herself some tea, have a shower, eat something—anything, she didn’t care, had no appetite—then afterwards, for the rest of the endless, empty evening stretching ahead of her, perhaps there was something on TV she could watch, to blot up her thoughts. Perhaps she could watch TV for the next month. The next year. The rest of her life …
The ripping pain came again, and again she stood, eyes shut, until she had fought it off. Then, bleak depression pressing down like weights upon her, she went to draw the curtains against the growing dusk. Outside, the London street below was busy—people coming and going, living their lives, so remote from hers. A car slipped silently along the roadway, sleek and dark and black, heading for the Opera House. For a moment memory plucked at her and she recalled how she’d thought the same of a similar car just before Angelos’s bodyguard had hustled her inside this block.
A lifetime ago …
She let out her breath, dragging the curtains across, then headed for her bedroom, forcing herself to stay upright instead of sinking down on the bed and seeking the pointless oblivion of sleep. Long-held discipline kicked in. Doing what she didn’t want to do because she had to do it. Within twenty minutes she’d unpacked, put away the groceries, made herself a cup of tea, and was standing under the shower, hot and stinging, its needles drumming on her shoulders. When she got out, she wrapped herself swiftly in her towelling dressing gown. She did not like to see her naked body.
It bore the invisible mark of
shame upon it, blazoned on every curve, every centimetre of bare flesh.
She tugged the belt tighter, then unclipped her hair, reaching for a brush to pull through it and release any knots and tangles. She shook her head, feeling the fall of hair tumbling down her back. It felt long and loose and lush, like a silky cloud about her head. The pain came again, jagging at her nerves, making her head bow under the blow.