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  "You look tired. You should have a bath. I could run it for you. Candles, too many bubbles. Then I could take you to bed."

  She deserved better than the life she had. She should have had every luxury at her disposal and I vowed one day that I was going to give it to her. It made me more angry than I knew what to do with that she was letting Sutherland's reputation stand.

  For what he'd put her through, he should have been dragged through the mud already. But I was going to set the record straight. He should have been locked up in jail, and I had friends there who could give him a thorough education on exactly what became of spineless men like him who thought it was okay to hit a women. He'd beg for death by the end of it, and I'd only let him have it when I thought he'd had enough.

  I watched her tip her food out onto her plate as she sat down by the window. Noodles maybe. Chow mein, pad thai? I wished I knew what she liked best, but I'd been stuck here, watching Pierce all evening and he hadn't left his study.

  "That looks nearly as rough as mine. I know a place in Chinatown you'd like. I'll take you some time. When this is over." I dug into my lasagne, forking off a chunk and waiting for the steam to settle.

  "Cheers, Elizabeth. Bon appétit. Not long now. I'm coming for you, I promise."

  Elizabeth

  I was eating dinner in the kitchen when Pierce came in.

  He stood there, wavering in the doorway with an empty whisky bottle in his hand. I could smell the alcohol on him from where I sat even before he staggered forward to set it down on the table.

  No doubt he hadn't left his study all evening, still putting the finishing touches on his grand exposé, or planning all the grand, congratulatory dinners that were going to follow all the grand, publicity dinners he was currently swimming his way through like a soused herring.

  I despised the man.

  Instinct made me keep my head down, but it wasn't enough to avoid drawing his fire.

  "What the bloody hell are you doing in here? I've told you about this a hundred bloody times!"

  I had never called him dad and he wouldn't have wanted me to. Just because he married my mother, it didn't make us family. He'd been drilling that into me for the past few years and there wasn't a day that had gone by that I didn't believe it.

  "Having my dinner, what does it look like?"

  When they got together, I was fourteen, but even then I knew something about him was off.

  By then I had a well-honed sense of the shift in atmosphere when I was in trouble over nothing at all. He'd bring it in with him like a thundercloud crossing the sun, and I'd known that if I breathed wrong, I'd be in for it. It made me long for the superpower to be able to disappear.

  He was way too smooth. Alway had been. All the compliments to Mum had always sounded fake to me, and he loved to make out like he was the most intelligent one in the room. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Mum thought he was so clever. At first everything she did was pure perfection. He idolized her and Mum wanted that to be true so badly.

  They got married in a whirl, and suddenly all the criticisms started worming it’s way in, and his temper flared into life over nothing. She told me not to go out of my way to annoy him, when all I was doing was being me. We'd learned, the pair of us, how to creep around to avoid setting him off. Only sometimes that annoyed him too, and he'd start shouting about how we all acted like he was some kind of monster.

  I don't know if they were ever happy together. Whether if things would have been smoother between them without a teenage daughter in the mix. But deep down, I never really thought the problem was me.

  I tried to stand up, knowing the time I had to get out unscathed with my dinner salvaged was vanishing by the second. Unpredictability had become predictable by then and the only safe place was out of hitting distance. I wanted to get out of the kitchen, go up to my room. But I wasn't quick enough.

  His meaty fist slammed down on my shoulder, driving me back into the wooden chair and I forced myself not to fight him.

  Right then I was too tired, too hungry to care whether I did the sensible thing and inside the gym bag on the table, I had my way out ready to use. I wanted him to push me. I wanted him to see exactly what I'd do.

  "I asked you what you think you're doing?"

  "Eating my bloody dinner you arsehole!" I glared up at him, knowing I should have kept my head down instead.

  He stepped closer, hand raised back and I tensed for the blow, but his fat, loathsome fingers connected with my plate, swiping it off the table in a clatter of broken dishes. My fork skidded away across the tiles, underneath the fridge, and I hated that I felt myself flinch as the plate shattered on the tile floor.

  I wasn't afraid of him. I was afraid of what I'd do to him if I let myself.

  When Pierce threw the family album out and every other picture of Mum in the trash, he said she was a dirty con artist, tricking him into marrying her so he'd be burdened with looking after me when she was in the ground.

  He sounded like he thought she died on purpose, just to spite him. As though it was her fault she had a brain hemorrhage after the fall.

  I would have blown the whistle on him years ago, but I couldn't bring myself to walk away from what used to be my home. It should have been mine, but Mum hadn't left a will - hadn't expected to die young. None of us had seen it coming.

  Lack of foresight meant everything had gone to Pierce, as her husband of less then a year. I hadn't been able to stand him then, and it only got worse when Mum was gone, but I couldn't just walk away.

  There was no way I was letting the monster steal all of my mother's things. I made a promise to myself on the day of her funeral one way or another, one day, I was going to get him out of here, even if I couldn't get my home back. And I promised myself, I was going to take his shiny reputation down too.

  But somewhere along the line, he started hitting me, and ruining his reputation, taking back what was mine ceased to be enough. I wanted him dead more than I wanted anything else in my life.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my egg fried rice sticking to the side of the fridge. It pissed me off that he'd wasted my food when I was achingly hungry when I had nothing else to eat in the entire house.

  "I was having my dinner!" I growled, screeching my chair back as I got to my feet. "That's all I was doing you fat, ugly troll!"

  He'd never liked lip from me. Sometimes, though, it was a struggle not to give it to him. Some days I didn't care if it made it worse. Maybe I was just looking for an excuse. If he pushed me far enough, I could say it was self defence when I ended him.

  Pierce was red-faced and snarling.

  "Not yours, is it? You filthy little leach. Nothing in this bloody house is yours!"

  I had to bite my tongue. It bloody well was mine. Everything should have been.

  All those reviewers would have a field day if they knew the lorded Pierce Sutherland made his eighteen year old step daughter work bar shifts to pay rent in her dead mother's house, and didn't let her eat any of the food in the cupboards or the fridge.

  He was paying for my schooling, he said. So I owed him.

  My fists balled by my sides. I couldn't take it any longer.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I'd advanced on him, my hand reaching out for his shoulder to spin him around. I was small, but he was unathletic, and I had more strength despite his size. The gun was right there on the table. I didn't even have to get it out of the bag. He'd go down like a sack of potatoes if I hit him hard enough and God I wanted to smash his smug face in.

  "I paid for that food."

  "About bloody time you paid for something."

  Pierce sneered at me. And something in me snapped.

  My arm ratcheted back, winding up to punch him, but his eyes leveled on mine, suddenly sober and I realized he had the bread knife in his hand.

  "Try it, girl. I dare you."

  Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a red dot hovering, but I blinked
and it was gone.

  And then the top pane of glass in the multi-paneled sash of the semi-basement room we were in cracked sharply. The whisky bottle on the table exploded in on itself, shards of glass splintering across the stripped pine top, and the both of us spun sharply around to face it.

  I looked to the window, but there was nothing to see, other than a crude hole with jagged edges in the very top corner, cracking the square pane so the shards were held in place only by the putty at the edges.

  Pierce blundered over, leering up towards the street.

  "Bloody kids throwing stones." He stormed off up the stairs, and I heard his heavy footsteps as he charged out into the street, the front door thrown wide, bellowing out into the night. Something in me knew before he got up there that it had nothing to do with stones.

  There was nothing in the pile of broken glass on the table.

  I looked over my shoulder, back towards the Welsh dresser which was full of all the kinds of things I wasn't supposed to touch. There was a neat little pile of sugar forming directly below the rapidly empty bag of Tate and Lyle. I had a feeling Pierce wasn't going to find any kids out on the street.

  A prickle of tension ran up the back of my neck and I crossed the kitchen to pick up the bag, already knowing what I was going to find when I tipped the rest of the sugar out. There, embedded in a lump of rapidly cooling molten sugar that almost looked like melted glass, was a round from a gun.

  My heart rate quickened, and I went back over to the window, peering out of it. Above the low wall that circled the house, through the iron railings, I could only just glimpse the windows of the middle floor of the mansion block opposite us. The sash was open at the bottom about a foot. Just enough for someone to point a gun through and take aim.

  I swallowed hard.

  Who was the bullet meant for, and did they really miss? I didn't think so. It would have taken skill, and an insanely powerful scope to aim for the sugar bag. I hadn't imagined that red dot. If whoever was holding that gun had wanted to kill either of us, they could have done it right there and then.

  One thing I knew for sure - someone was watching every single thing that went on in this house. That wasn't going to do me any favours when I finally brought all Pierce had been brewing down on top of him.

  I couldn't kill the man with a bloody sniper watching. Not when I didn't know whether they were there for protection, or to do one of us harm. That was a chilling concept. But I couldn't afford to let my imagination run away, I had to find out for myself.

  After I swept up the remains of my dinner, and the pile of sugar on the floor, I took the empty paper bag and the bullet with me upstairs.

  CHAPTER 3

  Elizabeth

  Our house was tall and skinny, going up all four floors, right through from the basement to the attic where my room was, up in the eaves. Dad had done well in business, before he died, but he and Mum had bought this place back when a million pounds still sounded like a lot of money for a house.

  These days there were studio apartments around the corner going for more than they paid for the whole thing.

  Anything with more than one bedroom was at least four times the price. The opposite building was a mansion that stood empty most of the time, then full of Russians and sheikhs and princes from Saudi and the UAE that Pierce was so determined to pin down with his stupid little book.

  Personally, I thought it was all one big vendetta against Mrs Koskova two doors over, and her little dog who always leaped and snarled at him whenever they passed in the street, because the dog was clearly a good judge of character. It gave me more pleasure than it should have to see him flinch away from it. Mrs Koskova was very grand and liked to pretend she didn’t notice that it kept leaving little steaming presents in the front garden. Pierce narrowed his eyes and muttered darkly about bloody Russians and Cold Wars all over again whenever he saw her.

  Around here, there were regulations about the door colors and how frequently to paint the iron railings that had been replaced over the years at great expense. It was the kind of thing Pierce lived for, and no doubt he wanted neighbors who shared the same values. Mrs Koskova's Christmas wreath was the biggest on the street, and it was all metallic silver and Swarovszki crystals. Not in keeping at all.

  I loved it.

  I'd rather have glitzy crystal icicles than some snobby sheen of civilization while everyone pulled the curtains closed and turn up the volume on Classic FM when Pierce bellowed loud enough to make the walls shake. They didn't ask questions about why I never went home straight after school, absented myself on the weekends, and why I didn't wear short sleeves in the summer.

  One of the things I remember my father telling me was that during the war, a lot of the railings around London were cut off and melted down to help during the munitions crisis, but here in Chelsea, there was little evidence of that having any long term effect on the aesthetic of the old buildings.

  The mansion building opposite had been bought some time the year before, and whoever owned it was turning it into quite the impressive set of apartments. There had been builders swarming all over it for months on end.

  Outside the entrance, just inside the railings, one of the site workers was having a cigarette as I went past on my way to the bus stop. His dusty black hoodie, plaster-covered jeans and steel capped boots marked him as the builder that he was, but there was something different. He wasn't some twenty-something laborer. He held himself with the poise of an older man comfortable in his skin rather than one of the over-muscled poser-types my gym was littered with. His face was weathered, a little rugged even underneath the stubble. But there was something else. Something polished and smooth that I couldn't place.

  Before I could stop myself, I'd turned my head for a better look. And he was looking right at me.

  Maybe it was just the way his cool blue eyes connected with mine with such intensity that stole my breath. The shock of him catching me looking, knowing he was looking back had my heart pounding. I felt my cheeks flush hot as his lips twitched into the ghost of a smile.

  My eyes drifted to the cigarette pinched between his thumb and first finger, watching him blow smoke carefully away from his face.

  My jaw hinged open before I could stop it and I tilted my head, transfixed by the size of them. Hand span was supposed to mean something relating to the size of a man's cock. My eyes glanced down to the bulge of his crotch before I could stop myself.

  Christ, what was I thinking?

  Flustered, I looked away sharply, walking faster, expecting a wolf-whistle to trail on after me. But nothing came.

  From the bus stop, I risked another look back along the street.

  He'd moved up against the railings, an ancient, indestructible Nokia 3310 held to his ear. Anyone else would have thought he was making a call. But I could see his lips weren't moving and his eyes were on me too intently for him to be focused on anything else, and they never left me.

  His shoulders were rounded, almost hunched, as though he was trying to shrink himself down. Oddly, it had worked until I looked right at him. It shouldn't have. Even beneath that hoodie I could see he was all muscle, his chest impossibly broad and his waist tapered to a perfect V. His boots were huge, and he was hulkingly tall when he straightened up.

  The act melted away as he cricked his neck from side to side, stance powerful and wide. He put his phone back into his pocket, stubbed the cigarette out on the ground. He glanced purposefully towards my house and looked back to me.

  I felt a jolt go through me. He knew exactly where I lived. Did he have something to do with the bullet in the kitchen?

  Had he been watching me?

  The thought was madness. All week I was out during the day and he should have been gone in the evenings. I was hardly in on weekends, by design. Keeping out of Pierce's way was what my day-to-day revolved around.

  Did this guy think he knew something about that?

  Something made me tilt my chin up in response, made my
feet slip wider, securing my stance, but it wasn't fear I felt, and it wasn't aggression coming off him. He was looking at me like he knew me, like he saw exactly who I was, and it was exhilarating and terrifying all at once. Under his gaze I was conscious of every part of my body.

  And God, I wanted things from him I never let myself want. I didn't have time for boys, didn't want the sleazy men who thought maybe they could get me at the hotel, but he definitely wasn't a boy and I got the sense he'd break more than fingers if anyone tried to touch me the way those businessmen did.

  I should have looked away. I should have stopped staring. Should have walked on, but my feet were rooted to the spot.

  The sudden slippery wetness dampening my knickers told me that I didn't want to fight him and I was halfway appalled that my body was so ready for a total stranger to take me. But I couldn't deny it. I'd have spread my legs for him in an instant. I could practically feel myself ovulate on sight.

  I had never seen anyone I'd been so instantly attracted to. It was like we were two halves of the same whole, and the force pulling us together was stronger than an electromagnetic wave.

  Whoever he was, that man was no builder. He moved with too much purpose. Like some kind of big cat stalking its prey. If I was it, I was totally done for. But what the hell did he want with me?

  I swallowed hard. No doubt, he was trouble. He had it written all over him. I should have been petrified, but I wasn't.

  The hiss of the bus doors opening right in front of me nearly gave me a heart attack, and I stepped back, trying not to let it show on my face how rattled I was. Mentally I shook myself as I got on board, swiping my Oyster Card, giving the driver a tight smile as the reader beeped to deduct my fare.

  What the hell was wrong with me?

  I never fancied anyone. Didn't let myself. But that man made me want to do things I'd never even let myself think about before. His eyes were dangerous, but I didn't care. Some stupid part of me was suddenly thinking about what it would be like to have a family of my own again, to be with someone who'd never let anyone in this world hurt me.