Justina’s chin trembled, she gripped the trolley tighter, and prepared to strike for the steak knife. This time, she would grab it. No doubt. No hesitation. If he made a move, she’d stab him in the throat and run out the back way. She avoided looking directly at the drawer and waited.
A car horn broke the near silence. In the street outside, a man shouted something, and another, further away, laughed. Beyond the windows, traffic continued to rumble.
Clouds returned to block the sun, the shadow faded, and warmth bled from the room.
Lovejoy sighed and shook his head once again.
“Nah, don’t worry, darling,” he said. “Only kidding. I don’t need to force myself on a bitch even if she is a bit of a MILF. Just making a point that there’s no one to save you. And don’t bother calling the cops. They’ll do nothing. You see, I can find fifteen friends and the barman who’ll swear that Tuggy and me are in the pub, see. Right now, we’re knocking back the Belgian beers and telling bad jokes. The till receipts will show me using my credit card and everything. Got it all covered, see. In short, we’re protected and you aren’t.”
Lovejoy straightened his tie and smoothed back his blond hair before grabbing the handle of his briefcase and lifting it from the table. More pieces of glass fell to the carpet. He laughed again.
“You have until the end of next month to sign those papers. That’s midday October the thirty-first. Hallowe’en. Got it?”
He stopped talking, probably waiting for an answer, but she didn’t give him one.
“Five weeks ought to be plenty of time for you to clear this place of your garbage and fuck off out of it.”
Lovejoy pointed at the contract.
“Don’t forget what I said. Sign and deliver those papers by midday, Hallowe’en, or we’ll be back with a dirty great ‘trick’ for you and your spawn. Now,” he continued after a short pause, “we’re going out the way we came in. And remember. If we hear you’ve gone blabbing to the filth—and we will, believe me—all bets are off. You, your hubby, and Tuggy’s little ‘treats’, Kora and Rena, are fair game. Right?”
He stared at Justina and held the look until she nodded. Only then, did they leave.
The moment they’d gone, Justina rushed to lock and bolt the front door, and collapsed into a chair. She buried her face in the crushed dishcloth and sobbed.
During the whole terrifying episode, the monster, Tugboat, hadn’t uttered a sound, and that was perhaps the scariest part of the whole nightmarish incident.
Justina didn’t know how long she sat crying, but a rattling on the door made her jump. She spun towards the sound, preparing to run, but found her beautiful smiling girls tapping gently on the glass.
“Rena, Kora!” she cried again. “My darlings.”
She jumped up, tore open the door, and swept the girls into her arms, squeezing tight. She absorbed their smell, their warmth, their love.
“Too tight, Mama,” Kora said, squirming. “You’re hurting me.”
“Sorry moraki mou,” Justina said, easing the pressure but not letting go completely. “It’s just that I missed you so much.”
Rena ducked out of Justina’s grasp and darted inside. “Mama, did you have an accident?”
“I … tripped. Stay away from the table until I pick up the broken glass. It’s dangerous. You’ll cut yourself.”
Rena shuffled closer, her eyes narrowed, staring hard.
“Mama,” she said, “your eyes are puffy. Have you been chopping onions?”
“Yes, my darling,” Justina said, unable to stifle a laugh. The relief at seeing and hearing her babies was overwhelming. “That’s exactly what I’ve been doing.”
Justina picked up Kora, locked the door, and carried her past the damage.
“Rena, come away from there. I told you it’s dangerous!”
“Sorry, mama.”
“Now, upstairs and get changed while I clear the mess. I expect you’re hungry?”
“Starving, mama,” Kora said.
Rena nodded and slid the satchel from her shoulder. “Yes please, mama. School dinner was horrible.”
Justina ruffled Rena’s hair. “Help your sister change out of her uniform and, just this once, you can watch television before doing your homework, okay?”
She shooed them up the stairs to the flat before rushing back to the kitchen in time to meet Ore, who’d parked the car around the back as usual, off the busy street.
Before he had the chance to step fully into the kitchen, she flew into his arms and poured out her heart.
For the longest time, they clung to each other.
Ore listened, stroking her hair and whispering soothing words. Eventually, she recovered enough to let him clear the damage and make supper for the girls.
With Ore in charge, she ran upstairs and stood under the shower until it ran cold, scrubbing her skin raw to remove the stench of Lovejoy. She cried for a full hour.
Later, after they closed the restaurant—six covers all evening, barely enough to pay the night’s electricity bill—she and Ore sat in their living room. The girls were fast asleep, blissfully unaware.
They read the new contract together. She found the legal wording difficult to follow, but Ore snorted at the document’s promised to pay them the full ‘independently-assessed full market value’ for the building’s leasehold and the goodwill of the business. To Justina, the total purchase price—laid out in words and figures at the bottom of the final page—looked impressive.
“It’s not enough,” Ore said, holding her close and gently kissing her bruised and swollen cheek. “After paying off the mortgage, we’d barely have enough to clear our other debts. There’d be nothing left over for the deposit on a new home. And worse than that, we’d both need to find jobs straight away.”
Despair wrapped around her, choking her, making it difficult to breathe.
“Ore, what are we going to do?”
He threw the contract on the coffee table and turned to face her, holding her hands and kissing her wrists where the marks from Lovejoy’s grip still showed red and sore.
“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to find a way out, but …” Ore squirmed in his seat, creating a gap between them. “Before he died, Papa and I had a blazing row. He was planning to sell a share in the Bistro, but I hated the idea. The Bistro is the girl’s inheritance, their future. Papa thought the money would tide us over until after the development company finished renovating the block.”
“Is that why Papa was on that flight to Amsterdam?”
Ore lowered his head. “Yes. He knew a man in The Hague, a rich man who owed him a favour. Darling, Papa died thinking I hated him.”
Ore wept and, even though she thought herself all cried out for the day, tears filled Justina’s eyes, too. They held each other.
“Papa knew you loved him, Ore. He knew.”
They kissed and, for a time, things were better.
Eventually, Ore leaned back on the sofa, his arm draped around her shoulders. Justina rested her head against him, listening to the slow, steady beat of his heart. The soft rise and fall of his chest lulled her, helping to calm her involuntary emotional and physical twitches.
“After Papa’s funeral,” he said at length, his soft words vibrating through his ribcage, “I found the contact details of the man in The Hague, but … it is too late. He didn’t want to help me. He said the debt he owed Papa died with him. Darling, I don’t know what to do.”
She had no idea either and they sat in silence for hours.
Chapter 2
Thursday 22nd October — Mid-morning
The Villa, Aquitaine, France
The late autumn sun bounced off the water and sliced into Ryan Kaine’s eyes, but the gentle breeze made the day pleasant. A cloudless azure sky, miles of fine silver sand, and the blue-grey Atlantic painted a picture-postcard beauty that would change by the day and with the seasons and never grow old. The villa and the Aquitaine Coast made a great base of operations. Comfor
table, isolated, easy to defend, and with multiple means of ingress and egress.
In short, ideal.
The Bay of Biscay, calm in the autumnal stillness, stretched out to the gently curving horizon. The silence was interrupted only by the breeze, the gentle breakers wearing the sand into a finer powder, and the discordant cries of Audouin’s gulls as they bickered over seaborne scraps. No ships or boats marred the sea’s gently rolling majesty.
The view was stunning enough, but the smells wafting up from the sun-baked land, the salt-water ozone carried on the offshore breeze, completed it for him. The air held the tang of salt and marram grass, a fragrance no perfumer could capture in a bottle.
Kaine was in his element. For the first time in over twenty years, he could relax—almost. The location made him as content as was ever going to be possible given the heavy load his conscience carried and would carry for the rest of his life.
“Are you ready?” Lara called from the office.
He reached a hand to his left side and allowed his fingers to trace the raised twenty centimetre scar running along his rib cage. The most recent addition to his unwanted collection of body art, it was a legacy of the knife wound he’d suffered the morning after he’d shot down Flight BE1555. The gash had been serious enough to make him seek out the nearest medical treatment. Luckily for him but, as it happened, unluckily for Lara, his internet search had pointed him to her vet’s surgery, which had then suffered a similar fate to the plane.
A ‘clean-up’ crew, sent by the people ultimately responsible for the plane’s destruction, had followed him. Armed for battle and with helicopter support, they’d attacked without warning, without mercy. Despite his injury, Kaine retaliated kind and delivered to the men the same death and destruction they had planned for him and Lara. She’d been on the run with him ever since.
Completely his fault.
Damn.
He’d destroyed her contented life and painted a bloody great big target on her back, but she never complained. She’d been nothing but supportive and helpful. Wonderful woman. Beautiful, too. The patience of Job, and she needed it after all he’d put her through.
She’d stitched together a rough and bloodied stranger without complaint and without a thought for herself. Saved his life, too. No doubt about it. He’d be in her debt forever but, in the weeks since their first traumatic meeting, things had changed. He’d started to feel more than gratitude—much more.
The growing emotions were wrong, inappropriate, forged in battle, fostered by a sense of responsibility to her and his innate loneliness. He could never act on his feelings. It would be unfair on her.
“Everything set up properly this time?” he asked, playing for enough time to roll himself out of his comfy chair and put on his game face.
“Yes, and it has been for the past five minutes.”
“Is Sabrina online?”
“Yes, and has been—”
“Yeah, yeah. For the past five minutes?” he interrupted.
“No. She’s been taking me through the system for the past hour. Now, get your backside in here, right now!”
And there it was, her patience threshold breached. Not Job then. Not saintly, but still beautiful. Angelic. Yep, that would do it. An angel.
Kaine grunted as he rolled off the recliner and onto his feet. He hadn’t been resting all that long, and the aches and pains from the early morning workout had eased, but he’d have preferred more recovery time. His first training session of the day—a two mile swim, keeping close to the shore, within sight and easy access of the villa, followed by thirty minutes spent throwing weights and punching bags—was the bare minimum, maintenance only, but it took it out of him. Recuperating took longer than it used to—the cost of growing older. Still, it was better than the alternative.
Sabrina was doing them a huge favour and it would have been wrong to keep her waiting any longer. Reluctantly, he turned his back to the sea and padded barefoot across hardwood deck and into the cool shade of his whitewashed home.
He’d bought the single storey Mediterranean-style villa in ’09 for cash—strike that—he’d picked it up for peanuts at the depth of the recession. The original owner, a snot-nosed London fund manager, needed a quick sale to help pay his legal fees and keep him out of prison, and wasn’t keen to leave a paper trail. As a result, Kaine acquired the part-built property—four-bedrooms, open plan kitchen-diner, subterranean cave, the wine cellar, set on three acres of dunes overlooking the sea—as a retirement home. He’d since spent a fortune upgrading it into a self-contained, off-the-grid fortress, complete with its own triple-redundant renewable energy source—tidal, solar, and wind—and a bespoke satellite service.
For security, he’d used non-local artisans for separate parts of the project. As a result, no single firm, or single individual, had a comprehensive knowledge of the completed structure.
Although not averse to the odd glass or two of wine, Kaine didn’t require a dedicated wine cellar, but did need a home for his secure communications hub and a state-of-the-art surveillance system. To that end, he’d called on the services of a couple of military engineer friends to help him convert the cave into an office that could double as a panic room. They also spent a week deploying a security net of motion sensors and surveillance cameras—both standard and infra-red—to cover the whole property.
Finally, before furnishing the place in a clean minimalist style, Kaine added a hidden exit to the panic room. Only he, and now Lara, knew of the back door’s existence. Kaine wasn’t about to allow anyone to trap him or Lara inside a concrete cell, no matter how apparently secure.
What some might have described as paranoia, he’d seen as a healthy concern for his long-term personal safety. How right he’d been, and now he had Lara to protect, his extensive preparations proved justified.
As an added security measure, since making the villa their base of operations, Kaine, with Lara’s help, had calibrated the system to react to any human approach from land, sea, and air. They streamed the surveillance feeds through the comms hub in the office and each had access to the system via waterproof, military grade smart watches. As long as they had satellite access and wore the watches, both he and Lara could monitor the villa and its surroundings at any time, and from just about anywhere in the world.
Despite all the electronic wizardry, Kaine never forgot the human factor and regularly patrolled the area, often taking Lara with him as both cover—a loving couple out for a stroll—and to hone her surveillance skills. There were no real substitutes for human eyes and ears, and for human intuition.
To complete the whole defensive arrangement, Kaine spent an hour each afternoon coaching Lara in what she once jokingly referred to as ‘The Way of the Warrior’. She did, however, take the training seriously and, being bright and physically strong from her work with farm animals, she made an ideal apprentice. In the few short weeks since their arrival at the villa, she’d developed a good grasp of military fieldcraft and had taken seven minutes off her fifteen hundred metre swim time. Kaine had rarely coached a more willing and able trainee and had definitely never coached one as damned good looking.
He secretly loved the time he spent with her and looked forward to each session, but he knew it couldn’t last. One day, they would clear his name and confirm no one wanted to use her to get to him. On that day, Lara would be free to return to her quiet, normal life, and they’d never see each other again. Until then, she could never be alone and vulnerable. If ever he had to leave, there were people available at a moment’s notice—men he trusted to guard her in his absence.
He hoped neither day—his leaving on a new mission and her returning to her old life—would ever come, but knew, deep down, they must.
Chapter 3
Thursday 22nd October — Mid-morning
The Villa, Aquitaine, France
After the warmth of the wooden deck, the textured tiles of the lounge floor chilled Kaine’s feet. He returned to the threshold and st
epped into his trainers before descending the stairs and entering an office that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the control room of a mini submarine.
The left side of the converted cave was decked out as a compact living area with a small galley, sofa-bed, and the necessary amenities. Half a dozen flat screens hung on the right hand wall in front of a desk long enough to hold two full-sized computer stations. Lara sat at the one further away and swivelled her chair to face him.
“About time, mister,” she snapped, although her welcoming smile and twinkling eyes robbed the words of any hostility. “I’d quite like to lie in the sun and relax, too, you know.”
He dipped his head and glowered at her over the rim of an imaginary pair of sunglasses.
“That’s Captain, to you, Doctor Orchard. What do you have for me?”
She pointed him to the office chair beside her, and waved her hand at the larger of the two live screens, where Sabrina Faroukh’s youthful face smiled back at him. She’d changed her hair colour since they’d last met. The new auburn highlights suited her natural olive skin. She wore dangly earrings, a silver stud through her nose, and heavier makeup than usual. The ensemble gave her a neo-punk appearance.
Kaine suspected a darker motive for her new persona, but wouldn’t dream of asking for details upfront. She had her own life to lead and he’d already stolen enough of her time.
Kaine took his seat, intending to keep a professional distance, but Lara encroached on his space, not that he minded.
“Morning, Sabrina. Hate the new look.”
“As do I, Capitaine Kaine,” she said.
Her Parisian accent was as soft and appealing as ever, but her use of his rank and surname confirmed that his comment had irked her a little. As well as the time she’d spent on the project, he owed her a great personal debt. He’d offered to pay for her expertise, but she seemed to tae it as an insult and he hadn’t broached the subject since.
“So, everything working according to the design specs?”
Ryan Kaine Page 2
