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There’s a secret music in words. Sometimes, the beat is so violent it’s like a heart on amphetamines and you can actually feel it leaving marks on your soul.
A black-eyed boy filled my world with noise, but two words will always be the loudest:
No regrets.
I can hear them now as I’m sitting all alone in my empty kitchen with the sound of my bodyguards’ footsteps on the gravel path outside drifting in through the open window.
No regrets.
They’re scrawled across the inside of the book that’s lying open in my lap—the one he gave to me less than four hours ago. This is the first time he’s ever written to me. How fitting that it should be the last thing we ever said to one another.
What are you trying to tell me, Frankie?
I run my finger over the inscription for the millionth time, trying to decode every note and cadence, until I’m interrupted by a sharp rap on the door. Before I have a chance to answer it, Adrik, my head of security comes barging in. He does it on purpose, I swear. It’s all part of his masterplan to make me feel like even more of a prisoner in this house.
“Dobryi den'…” His gaze drops to the book in my hands and his upper lip curls in disdain. “That stupid bookagain?”
“Good afternoon to you too, Adrik,” I say, clutching the precious pages to my chest. “What do you want?”
He stops and glares at me, with that same sour look on his face he always wears. He’s bored to death with babysitting the unwanted wife of hispakhan. He shows his displeasure by talking to me in staccato sentences, as if I don’t deserve his adverbs. “We’ve added more men to your security detail. Husband’s orders. Five newpatsan.”
My stomach lurches, but I keep my expression neutral. This is because of Frankie, I can tell. Something bighashappened. That’s why he’s back in London. There’s been a seismic shift in the ground beneath our feet, but I don’t have a name for it yet.
“Any reason why?” I enquire, innocently.
“Business. Ask your husband.”
With this, he stalks back out, leaving my head a riot of noise again.
I’m terrified, optimistic, despairing…
There’s a small flame of hope flickering low on the horizon, but it’s surrounded by tall shadows that could swallow it up at any moment.
* * *
For the restof the week, I hear those two words in everything, pounding harder and faster, like the countdown to an explosion.
Today, they’re in the rhythm of the horses’ hooves as they tear up the grass beneath O’Sullivan’s private box at Ashton Racecourse. I’ve managed to escape to the balcony to drink my third glass of champagne in relative, shadowed-constantly-by-Adrik peace.
There’s a coil of anxiety in my stomach that won’t go away. I keep seeing Frankie in the crowd. Any man with dark hair sends my pulse skyrocketing.
I can feel him coming, but from which direction?
“Placed any bets yet?”
Roisin appears next to me, clutching her own champagne flute. I haven’t seen her in years, and I’m shocked at how much weight she’s lost. She’s attempting to hide it behind her elegant navy-blue silk Dior midi dress and spiky five-inch heels, but she reminds me of a perfectly wrapped present in a department window at Christmas time, where the inside doesn’t match the shiny veneer.
Inside is where she wears her scars.
She’s trapped in her own cage, forced to share her bed every night with a capricious monster called Cian O’Sullivan, who beats her for being too submissive and then beats her for daring to fight back. Her make-up is flawless, but the thick foundation and siren-red lipstick can’t disguise the purple bruises by the side of her mouth.
Is there anyone in London he hasn’t bullied?
It feels strange to be talked at, instead of talked down to for once. I’m not allowed girlfriends, and neither is she, and if we’d met before this nightmare started, I doubt we’d have been more than an annual Christmas card exchange.
But that was before Frankie.
Before I understood the game of survival she was playing, when I mistook her cruelty for fear. She showed me her true colours in the grey days after Alex was born. She risked everything to help me. She did things I never expected her to do, and that kind of sacrifice forms a bond between women that no man can tear apart.
