‘I want you.’
He hesitated for only a moment, and then his hands were busy. She covered his scars in kisses, and heard his belt buckle drag along the stone. He had unzipped his pants as well, and they slid to his knees.
Just a little more…a little bit more…
He leaned over her, naked from the waist. She wrapped her legs around him, and pulled him in, feeling a thrilling revulsion electrify her every nerve. She could feel him straining against her pelvis. She locked her knees behind his back, feeling with her thighs, her shins, her toes, feeling him and his clothing with sensual dexterity.
‘I want you,’ she whispered.
He pulled at her jeans, sliding them down from her waist.
More…just a little more…
He got to his knees and yanked her pants off. She licked his broad hand and he rubbed it between her legs. In seconds he penetrated her roughly, and she moaned unconsciously from a mix of revulsion and disturbing womanly pleasure and pain. She clung to him as he thrust into her again. She wrapped her arms around him, her fingers running over his back, his thighs, his legs, her own bare feet. Her toes moved too, and found the metal ring she sought, half exposed in his pants pocket. He thrust again, and let out a grunting exhalation. His pleasure was building fast. She didn’t have long. She raised the key ring with her foot until she could grab it with one hand and insert the key in the cuff. ‘Yes,’ she moaned. It turned. The lock turned. He was losing himself in her, his mouth on her neck, on her chest, his thrusting increasing. She was there below him, receiving him, but not there, not receiving him, receiving her own plans, her own
survival. Now her ankle was free, and she was running her fingers down his pants leg, her hips in the air, him leaning into her.
Click.
There.
With a sudden jerk she pulled away from him, throwing herself backwards. He was a confused bull, lunging at her and the air between them, his penis wet and angry, pointing. He had been so shocked that she had been able to slip past the edge of the mattress, just out of his immediate reach. She rolled backwards through a fast and awkward somersault, and arrived, momentarily dizzy, with her heels against a wall of shelves and wine bottles. He recovered himself quickly, however, and with a strange look in his eye moved towards her with his arms outreached in a gesture of pain, desire and confusion.
He reached the end of his chain.
Mak had her back to one of the floor-to-ceiling racks of bottles. She rose to her feet, and pulled her jeans back up and adjusted her T-shirt to cover herself. She pushed the greasy hair back from her drying eyes. Face stony, and with her mind focused to a sharp crystal, she reached behind her for one of the bottles at her back. She swung it off the shelf and smashed the top of it on the ground at her feet, sending splinters of glass skittering across the stone. Her captor flinched and prepared himself for an attack, expecting her to slash at him with the sharp edges of the bottle, but that was not her plan. The bottle broken open, she dumped its contents at his feet, soaking his pants, his shoes. Moving quickly now, animated with her purpose, she took another bottle from the shelf, smashed the top off and threw the alcohol at him.
Instinctively, he tried to dodge the airborne wave of stinging cognac, and it landed down one side, the rest splattering on the mattress behind him. She repeated this game, dousing the mattress, dousing him, smashing bottle after bottle while he went mad with his confinement, his chained ankle beginning to bleed.
‘Bitch!’ her former captor screamed, blind with rage. He had not even pulled up his pants, and the sight of him aroused, dishevelled, dangerous—yet helpless—struck Mak in that moment as darkly comic.
Her clothing was already hopelessly filthy, and now she pulled her T-shirt off completely, standing unashamedly in front of him in her bra, half-naked but no longer touchable. She doused the fabric in a third bottle of fine cognac, emptying it, and thinking for the briefest moment how strange it would have seemed to the purchaser of these bottles that his fine, carefully cellared cognac should be used to soak a woman’s T-shirt. When she was done, one end of it was as wet as if she had dumped it in a bath. The fumes stung her eyes.
Fire, motherfucker. Fire.
The match was just where she had managed to toss it, when she’d knocked the box from his hand, beside one leg of shelving, beyond the reach of the chain that had held her, and now held him. Sick with triumph and sorrow, she trembled slightly as she took the tiny match in her hand. It was dry.
Thank God it’s dry.
It was dry and perfect. That tiny red tip—no larger than the pinky nail on a newborn baby—held the key to her captor’s destruction. She caught the look of understanding in his eyes when she held it up. He panicked and leaped towards her, the chain going taut and pulling his right leg out from under him, sending him sprawling at her
feet. He pulled his leg to his chest—once, twice—and she saw a puff of dust come up from the corner. He was going to try to pull the chain from the wall.
Mak ran the match across the rough stone floor.
It lit.
Kill or be killed.
She touched the flaming tip to the edge of her cognacsoaked T-shirt, and watched the flame spread across it, almost invisibly at first.
His eyes were on the shirt now and the growing flame that was running up the fabric towards her hand. He knew instinctively that it would find him, and that he only had a second to prepare for it. He scrambled backwards on his knees like a huge dog. She threw the shirt with a swoop of her arm and it landed with a wet slap across his face. He flicked it away, but he was covered, a flame ran blue across the material, across him, and when it hit his hair, it too lit in an almost invisible flame, which soon rose with deadly magnificence. Mak doubted that she had ever seen anything so magnificent, so powerful, so heroic as that growing cognac flame as it danced, and its host danced with it, hopping, squirming, clawing at his face and his burning clothes and not yet letting out a sound.
Eat fire, fucker.
Makedde walked to the wall, took the old wooden shelving in both hands and in one—two—three pulls, wrenched it from its position. The shelf teetered forward and fell in slow motion, crashing across the floor in a chaos of shattering glass, liquor and splintering wood, the edge of the shelving hitting her burning captor hard in the ankle as he struggled to get clear of it. She saw him holding his face and rolling on broken glass next to the mattress, which now rose in
flame. He was trying to put his clothes out. His hair was still burning. She felt strangely disconnected from the scene, disconnected from everything but her bright clarity, her survival.
Eat fire, fucker. Eat fire.
Numb, shaking madly and with sweat beading on her skin from the building heat of the cellar which had so long held her in deathly cold, Mak turned and made her way up the staircase, scarcely seeing the steps, her feet knowing just where to fall. The edges of the staircase were catching now, slowly, with a line of low flame that ran up the treads in a zigzag. She was untouched by it as she leaped from stair to stair. She was apart from it. And behind her, a deep animal moaning began. The man’s skin was melting under flame. His hair was burning away. The chain rattled as he struggled and rolled, trying to put himself out. She did not turn to look.
It is you, or me
. She reached the top of the stairs, and found that the door to the cellar was still ajar and opened at the slightest push. It swung open on its hinges. There was a shiny new padlock resting on one side, the key sitting in the lock.
How much of my life did he take? How much of my life did he spend?
There was a cracking sound. It was the wooden stairs, already breaking with heat and flame. Smoke was billowing out with a horrible smell—wood and dust and flesh burning. He was burning alive down there. Burning and chained. His flesh would be burning off his bones.
She did not look.
Makedde closed the cellar door behind her, locking the smoke in, and muffling the sounds of the crackling flame, the searing death below. She snapped the padlock shut, and with
dusty bare feet walked across the uneven floorboards of an old farmhouse and out into a winter evening in the countryside of Burgundy, cold, moist grass pushing up between the toes that had held the key to her escape.
Makedde Vanderwall stood barefoot and dishevelled on the gravel driveway of the remote farmhouse, emptied by a deep exhaustion. It was only the queer adrenaline of survival that continued to animate her with unnatural energy, propelling her until she was safe from immediate danger. But when would that be? Where? Through stinging eyes she saw shades of green stretching in all directions, the sky glowing an overcast white. Wood fences intersected the fields like stitches.
Stitches and scars. Stitches and scars.
Mak recognised nothing of her surrounds. On a hilltop in the far distance she could see glimpses of an ornate church of some kind, and what looked like a small village. Here and there were cottages dotting the expanse of fields. If Paris was nearby, it was hiding very, very well.
As you stand here, he is burning and suffocating in that cellar. He’d had so many scars. You touched them. You kissed them.
She would be haunted by those moments, and yet she was alive. Behind her, the farmhouse was smoking.
Leave this place.
Leave everything, Mak.
There were no fire trucks, no cop cars, no neighbours rushing to her aid. She could not tell how far away the next neighbour lived. She was alone. She wanted to keep moving until she was far from the place of her confinement. She thought of Bogey waiting for her in the hotel room in Paris. She wanted to be there. She wanted to collapse into his arms, and not move or speak for a tremendously long time. She needed transportation. Right in front of her in the driveway there was a car. It was rusted and old. The tyres were flat. It might not even have petrol in the tank.
Hopeless.
It looked as if it hadn’t been used for years. She could run to the nearest neighbour’s house. Perhaps call the police.
No.
She remembered how little the police had done for Tobias Murphy, for her slain friend Catherine Gerber. Never mind her father’s convictions, never mind how she’d been raised to believe in justice and truth. Never mind Andy Flynn. Never mind the Cavanaghs. No, she’d had enough of the police and their
justice
. She’d had enough of playing by the rules while others flaunted their immunity.
Leave this place.
Leave everything, Mak.
The farmhouse appeared to have a garage attached on one side. She ran to it, and tried the tilting door. It didn’t budge. She moved around the side and found a smaller door. It was unlocked.
He must have driven here. He must have a car.
She threw the door open, and with a sense of a prayer coming true, she found herself looking at a black Mercedes, just sitting there, waiting for her to jump inside. At the sight of it, she nearly cried with relief.
Oh, yes. Finally. Yes.
She opened the car door and searched around the driver’s seat before realising that the keys were actually in the ignition, clearly ready for her captor to make a quick getaway if he needed to.
But he was not going anywhere. She was.
In the back seat there was a briefcase. Perhaps it held the man’s identification. The case was locked.
There was a crash of glass as the windows of the farmhouse blew out. The fire was gaining strength. She had to leave, and fast. There was no time to retrieve her phone, her wallet.
Go, go…
With a renewed sense of urgency, Mak leaped into the driver’s seat and turned the ignition. She groped around the dash for a remote to open the garage door, and not finding it, pulled open the glove box. Instead of a remote controller, a Glock pistol fell out onto the passenger seat next to her. She blinked at it. There was a wallet in the glove box, and a passport—no,
four
. There were four passports in the glove box of the car. She had no time for this. She had to get away before the garage went up in flames.
Mak leaped out of the car and found a chain pulley alongside the garage door. Using all her strength she pulled until the door lifted outwards. Light streamed into the dark space. Relief. She was nearly there. She could speed off and leave this horrid place behind…
And then Makedde saw something that made her freeze in her tracks.
Out of the corner of her eye, a familiar sight. Something that didn’t belong here. Something she didn’t want to see in
this garage, in this farmhouse, in this horrible place. It was the tips of a pair of shoes. Pointy shoes. Black pointy shoes.
She choked.
No.
Silently, tears began to fall from her eyes. She did not even notice them. She did not wipe them away.
Black shoes were poking out from a bundle wrapped in plastic. Familiar shoes.
Wrong. This is wrong. This can’t be.
Her instincts registered the horror before her brain did. She clambered towards the shoes, and kneeling, began to unwrap the plastic sheath. It was the shape of a body.
No.
No!
She tore at the plastic, desperate. Pulling away the layers of her grim find, she began to make out the features of the dead body inside.
Black hair. Glasses. Leather jacket.
Bogey.
Bogey, Bogey, Bogey, Bogey, Bogey…
She had known the instant she saw those shoes that it was Bogey, and that he had somehow tried to save her, that he was dead now, because of her, and it would be the final nail in her coffin. In that moment she knew with certainty that she could never return to a normal life. Not with what she had seen, what she had experienced. Makedde loved this man, she had found new love with him and he had shown her new possibilities, new emotions, the chance of a new life. It was precisely because he loved her that he was now there in front of her with his throat cut open. His eyes were open, unseeing, sunk back into his pallid face. His beautiful lips were dotted with smears of blood. He had been dead for at least a day in
that garage, or days, while she had been chained up in the cellar just below him, wishing so badly to be near him.