‘At least your journey won’t be wasted. I’ve no idea whether you still want this, but I know I don’t.’ Her voice was cold—as cold as she could make it.
Her painting equipment was in the lean-to, and resting on a chair was the object she was going to fetch. He might as well take it now—it would save her having to courier it at some point, whenever the time came when she could no longer hole up here in the middle of nowhere. She’d wrapped it up already. She didn’t want to look at it. She’d finished it—the ability to do so had come to her, and she knew why it had, and hated herself—and it—for that very reason. But then, and only then, had it released her from its loathesome power….
She gathered the parcel up and turned, ready to take it out to him. But he had followed her. He wasn’t looking at her, however. Not even at the object she was holding. He was looking to the canvas on her easel.
She stilled.
His face was immobile. Silently she held out the wrapped painting in her hands to him. It was his portrait. The one she’d not been able to do. Now she had.
But not on its own. The portrait—quite deliberately and intentionally—was one of a pair.
Its companion was still on the easel. As finished as it would ever be.
His eyes were fixed on it, and in them Alexa saw a shadow flicker deep, deep within. Something moved in her, something even deeper inside her than the shadow in his eyes. Something even darker.
‘That one I’m keeping,’ she said. Her voice had no emotion in it. The emotion was all in the paint on the canvas.
In the twisted, demonic image of his face. The face of a man she had once loved.
But now only hated.
‘It’s to remind me of you,’ she said.
For a second, an instant, his eyes went to her. But there was nothing in them. Nothing she could discern. The mask over them was complete.
He took the wrapped portrait—the other one, the one that bore the face that Guy de Rochemont showed to the world. To the women in his bed.
Then, slowly, he inclined his head to her. ‘I won’t trouble you again, Alexa.’
There was nothing in his voice just as there was nothing in his eyes.
He turned and left. Walking out. Out of her life.
Leaving only the dark portrait to keep her company.
Slowly, haltingly, she went back into the sitting room. The fire was still blazing fiercely in the log-burner, and she could feel the warmth after the chill of the lean to.
But she was shivering all the same.
Guy drove. The long motorway back to London stretched before him, and the powerful car ate up the miles. On either side of the motorway the drear wintry landscape stretched, monotonous and rainswept. Grey and bleak.
Just like his life.
It stretched out ahead of him—swallowing him up.
He had seen hope—hope almost within reach, within his grasp and he’d stretched out his hands to take it.
Seize it.
Instead—
Instead it had been like a shot through the skull. Instant, total destruction. The work of a second. All it had taken for his eyes to light on, to focus on that square of canvas resting on the easel.
A mirror—a mirror held up to him.
In the few brief moments when his eyes had rested on it he had known—searingly, punishingly—that Alexa was gone. Out of his life.
She would never come back into it.