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All that was left of her feelings for Grace shrivelled up and died. This wasn’t a one-off, triggered by her earlier revelation of Mayor Goldfinch’s infidelity. This was a regular event. Grace was a user.
‘But you’re not well. Let me help you—please!’
‘I’m perfectly well! Get out of my way so I can operate.’
Grace focused her attention once more on drawing blue lines on Pia’s bare breasts.
Jade took advantage of her bowed head and, knowing Security would soon be with them, moved again—close enough to reach out and…
With one fluid movement she lifted the pen from Grace’s hands. The shock in the older woman’s eyes and the reaction of her fingers were made all the duller by whatever drug was pumping through her veins.
Then the doors burst open—but it was not the security guards she’d been expecting. The first person into the room stopped dead, his six-foot-four frame coming to a halt just inside the doors, his face like thunder. His granite-hard eyes rapidly took in the room, flicking over the two woman standing next to the trolley and widening with shock and recognition when they encountered the gowned occupant beneath them.
‘Loukas—’ Jade said, totally bewildered as she attempted to find words to explain what was happening even while still holding onto the pen she’d taken from Grace’s hands, as if she’d been the one wielding it.
‘What the hell are you doing to my sister?’
CHAPTER TEN
JADE’S world collapsed around her in the following few days. The clinic was closed and Grace was whisked away by the authorities, with moves already underway to have her deregistered.
And Jade was next in line. She spent hours answering seemingly endless and repetitive questions from the police, ‘assisting them with their enquiries’, as they so diplomatically put it.
What did she know of Grace’s drug use? Who was her supplier? Who had financial responsibility for the clinic and the foundation bank accounts?
She answered as best she could, her spirits in a slump, her voice a monotone. And the more they asked, the more she realised how stupid she’d been, how hopelessly naïve, how easily she’d missed the signals about what was going on around her—like Grace’s constant interest in the accounts and her late hours working into the night.
Because she hadn’t wanted to see them—hadn’t let herself see them.
Because her stupid ill-placed loyalty had blinded her.
How she made it through the battery of one round of questioning after another she didn’t know. Maybe it was because she was numb, so deeply in shock over what had happened that it felt as if nothing could ever touch her again. And that was good. She didn’t want to feel.
Because then she couldn’t feel pain.
At last the police decided that she had helped them as much as she could and that there was no reason to hold her any longer. She was free to go.
Escorted by an officer, she was waiting for the lift that would come and return her to the outside world when the doors of one of the other interview rooms opposite opened. She almost looked away—until she saw who spilled out, and then she gasped.
Flanked by two officers, Grace walked, head held high, even though her arms were handcuffed behind her. But, despite the angle of her chin, she looked suddenly old, with dark circles under her eyes and her skilfully raised cheekbones suspending hollowed flesh beneath.
Across the waiting area their eyes met. Grace’s glinted coldly in the glow from the artificial office lighting above.
Jade involuntarily took a step forward, her lips turning up instinctively, before she realised where she was and why they were both there. Her smile slid away again. But she wanted to say something—just to let her know that if Grace needed her…
‘Grace—’ she began.
The officer alongside her put his hand on her arm to keep her where she was, but she’d already stopped at the ice-cold glare from Grace’s eyes.
‘You bitch!’ Grace said, her voice so sharp it cut the air between them like a scalpel. ‘You did this to me! I made you what you are, and this is how you repay me? I should have let you rot in that Outback town of yours. I should have burned that birthmark black!’
