Lord and Master Trilogy

by Jagger, Kait

  ‘Please,’ she said with distaste. ‘My master is Swedish. He doesn’t threaten young children.’ She reached down to the keyboard, fast-forwarding the footage. ‘No, this is what he wants you to see.’ Grainy footage of two men standing at the back door to the property, breaking a window. And of another at the security panel, entering a code, skipping off down the hall. Then the three of them in an opulent kitchen complete with chandeliers and a La Cambusa refrigerator, helping themselves to cold cuts, making sandwiches. A tall, bearded one turned to the camera, hefted a magnum of Krug in a toast. Luna clicked on the image, freezing it.

  ‘Squatters,’ she pronounced solemnly. ‘An ever-present threat in London.’

  Luna sat down in the chair next to Putinov and consulted her watch. ‘The Cirque performance finishes in just under an hour. Not much time for you to make alternative sleeping arrangements for your children tonight.’ She paused for effect. ‘Ah, I see what you’re thinking, but I’m afraid your Essex monstrosity has also been infested by squatters – you can’t send them there. No,’ she said. ‘No, I’m afraid England is not for you, Viktor. Not Belgravia, not Essex, not Eton or that football club in Southampton you’re thinking of buying. And not Arborage. Never Arborage.’

  Putinov sat forward in his chair, his pallid face looming toward hers. ‘Does your master honestly believe these pathetic gestures will frighten me? I have strangled better men than him with my bare—’

  ‘He does not,’ Luna interjected sharply. And gestured toward the laptop. ‘Click on the link just below that one – tell me what you see.’ He stared blankly at the laptop screen and her lips curved in fleeting admiration for Stefan’s observational skills. Extending her hand, she clicked the link for him. ‘Those are the offices of your oil company in Moscow and there, just outside, is the police unit that is about to raid them. Will they find the evidence of tax fraud and avoidance they are looking for? Will they, Viktor?’

  She felt it, rather than saw it: the Russian’s surprise – astonishment, even – at what he was seeing. Felt, too, the simmering, seething anger within him reach boiling point. Acting purely on instinct, she added fuel to the fire, waving her hand in the same dismissive, derisory gesture her mentor, Augusta Wellstone, used to such devastating effect. A wave that said, The evidence is THERE, of course, we both know that.

  ‘So many of your contemporaries have fallen foul of the tax authorities,’ she observed calmly, ‘having lost the goodwill of your president.’ She counted off on her fingers, ‘Pugachev. Khodorkovsky. Berezovsky. Exiled. Jailed. Dead.’ Nodding toward the image on the screen, she murmured, ‘The prospects for a failed Russian oligarch are… limited, no?’

  He surprised her then, moving at lightning speed to grab her wrist in a punishing grip, pulling her toward him. Matthias and Mika lunged out of their chairs and Putinov cursed at them in Russian, reaching with his free hand toward her throat.

  ‘Stop!’ Luna commanded, making him waver long enough for her to lower her head to his and warn, ‘There is a man across the water with a long-range rifle trained on you. I suggest you put both your hands on the table, to prove to him that this is just a little misunderstanding.’

  Viktor did as he was told. Down below, a voice shouted up. Diamond Ear, Luna suspected, checking to see if the boss was okay. Matthias muttered something in Russian to Putinov, who glared in return but then shouted something to his men. An order to stand down. In the fraught silence that followed, Matthias looked to Luna, his stern countenance radiating a single message along the lines of that was the kind of craziness I warned you about.

  Feeling vaguely nauseous at the seemingly never-ending violence that trailed in the Russian’s wake, Luna straightened and returned to the opposite end of the table, legs shaking as she sunk back into her seat. The pain in her shoulder was getting to her, so she reached out and took a generous swallow of her wine. She could afford to do that now; the end game was in sight.

  ‘The police will either find evidence of fraud,’ she said, ‘or not. The choice is yours. But I would urge you to think of your children. And of Siberia. There are prisons there still, I believe.’

  Putinov said nothing. Studying his face in the ensuing seconds, Luna was fascinated to see his expression of fury transition back to one of cold calculation, as though he were considering his position, weighing his options. ‘He is a businessman, at the end of the day,’ Matthias had quoted Stefan as saying when they’d sat together in the salon preparing for tonight’s summit. ‘Even a man such as he will know when to cut his losses.’ She prayed Stefan was right. She prayed…

  The Russian looked down at the laptop screen a final time, then at Luna. And gave a slight nod. Of concession. Capitulation.

  ‘Excellent,’ Luna said. With that, she turned to Matthias and communicated wordlessly with him. In return, he bowed slightly to her and walked back into the house. ‘My colleague has paperwork for you to sign,’ she explained to Putinov. ‘A formality, setting out the terms of our agreement, authorising the sale of your properties in Belgravia and Essex, etcetera. Once that’s done he will make contact with his associates in Moscow to ensure that the police find nothing untoward in their investigations.’ She paused, then gestured to his glass. ‘Please, finish your wine. It would be a shame to let it go to waste.’

  She poured Mika a glass and they sat and drank, the three of them. Another improbable moment in a night full of surreal events. Luna looked toward the marble angel standing on the edge of the terrace, her face stern and serene in the moonlight, wings half-extended as if she might at any minute alight into the night sky.

  At length, she said, ‘My master wishes you to know that if you renege on this agreement, or if any further harm comes to him, his family, or his property, his vengeance will know no end. My master wishes you to know that it will outlast even his death, that it will continue until you are left with nothing save the four walls of your prison cell in Siberia.’

  ‘When I choose to give my word, I honour it,’ Putinov grunted. ‘I will not renege.’ Then, with a tinge of, what? Resignation? Admiration? ‘I underestimated your master.’

  Luna inclined her head once, sipped her wine, and listened to the men in the boat below speaking to each other in Russian. ‘There is another thing,’ she said, and reached for the silk frogs at her neck, beginning to undo them. She continued till her bandaged shoulder was entirely revealed, then slid her fingernails under the adhesive tape at the edge of the bandage, ripping it loose with a grimace. The scar underneath was livid, angry red, ringed with bruising and crisscrossed with stitches running from just below her collarbone down toward her underarm.

  ‘I assume,’ she said, ‘that you despatched your two acolytes to Stockholm earlier this week to send a message to the Marquess. To break into his family home, give him a little scare. I assume that you did not instruct them to inflict bodily injuries on us.’

  Putinov shook his head. ‘I did not.’

  ‘The reason the Marquess isn’t here tonight is because he is in hospital. Your men almost killed him.’

  Another shake of his head. ‘This was not on my orders.’

  Luna nodded, and sat back in her chair, refastening her dress. ‘I assume, also, that the fire they started on the estate was intended as another gesture of intimidation, not with the aim of causing physical harm. I ask this because there was a child—’ she drew herself up in her chair, eyes glowing white and hibernal, ‘—a child in the Dower House when they set it on fire, and it is only by the grace of God that she was rescued unharmed. If one was inclined to leniency, one could say that it was sloppiness, or perhaps overzealousness on your men’s part. And if one was not…’ She trailed off, allowing her words to linger in the air between them.

  She felt the terrace’s other statue, whose curved wing half-concealed her face from passing boats, looking down on her from her perch, and imagined that she was smiling slyly. ‘What does on
e do,’ Luna enquired in a low voice, ‘with the servant who presumes to be master?’

  Putinov’s heavy-lidded eyes met hers across the table and she continued, ‘I remember you telling me a story once, about a puppy your father brought home. Half-dog, half-wolf, yes? She bit you, and he chained her to the house without food or water for ten days, until she learned to obey. What your father would have done, I wonder, had she bitten you again.’

  He contemplated her words in silence for a moment, then said, ‘I shall consider this.’ He drained his glass and she expected him to rise and take his leave. But instead he wiped his mouth along the arm of his suit and smiled at her.

  ‘There is another thing,’ he said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Dressed in a pinstripe suit, his longish, silver-grey hair flowing over his collar, Elijah Noakes sat at his mahogany desk, considering the papers before him. Outside, the sun was trying to break through a cloudy, temperamental London sky. The man sitting in the leather chair before him patted a shaking hand along the sparse covering of red hair on his scalp, a rivulet of sweat running down his temple.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ he said.

  ‘I think you’ll find that I can,’ replied Mr Noakes, looking down his aquiline nose at Florian Wellstone, the man who would be Marquess, now a ruined, unkempt wreck dressed in stained moleskin trousers and a plaid Charles Tyrwhitt shirt that had seen better days. ‘As I was saying,’ Mr Noakes went on, ‘you will board a flight for Sydney later today, where you will be met by an agent. You will surrender your passport to him, and he will provide you with transportation to the property in Queensland, a fifteen-hundred-acre sheep farm—’

  ‘A sheep farm!’ Florian ejaculated in horror.

  ‘You will continue to receive a monthly allowance from the Lionsbridge estate on the condition that you remain on that farm for the rest of your natural life, and meet certain other provisos,’ the lawyer read out from papers on his desk. ‘No further contact with the press, of course, but also strict avoidance of any women under the age of twenty-one, regular drug tests, polygraphs—’

  ‘Lie-detector tesssts?’ Florian said incredulously. ‘What posssible reason could you have for wanting them?’

  Mr Noakes looked up from his papers, and removed his glasses. ‘In order to ensure that my client’s expectations are met. To be clear, your monthly stipend is entirely contingent on your compliance with each and every one of these conditions, Mr Wellstone.’

  ‘Ssso I’m to be transported, like a nineteenth-century pickpocket?’ Florian sputtered indignantly. ‘You can’t do this,’ he repeated, throwing a beseeching look at Mika, who was leaning casually against the door to the office, arms cross over his chest. Mika grinned cheerfully in response. He can!

  And then at last, Florian Wellstone turned toward the winged armchair positioned just under a large sash window overlooking Lincoln’s Inn Fields. ‘Please,’ he begged. ‘Sssurely I’ve paid enough for my indiscretions. Augusta sssaw to that.’

  The occupant of the chair remained silent and Florian babbled on, ‘I sssee now that the newspaper interviews were a mistake, and I give you my sssolemn oath that I will never talk to the press again. But this… this is cruel and inhuman punishment.’

  The figure sitting beneath the window shifted very slightly, as if conserving movement. Then said, ‘If it were up to me, I would have you castrated and dumped outside Viktor Putinov’s dacha in Usovo. Fortunately for you, cooler heads have prevailed. The only reason I’m prepared to offer you a deal at all is because I’m afraid the Marquess will kill you if he ever sets eyes on you again. And I can’t have him going to jail for murder.’

  A shaft of sunlight filtered through the window and Luna Gregory tilted her head toward it. ‘You should take this offer, Fox,’ she said implacably. ‘You won’t get a better one.’

  Shortly thereafter, just over twenty-four hours since they’d left the hospital in Kungsholmen, Luna and Mika boarded a flight from Heathrow to Stockholm. Somewhere over the North Sea, the icy current of freon that had sustained her all the way from Stefan’s bedside, to the canals of Venice, to the law offices of Derwent & Co., began to sputter and die. Two down, she mused tiredly, one left to go. The last would have to wait. Her tank was empty, she had nothing left in reserve.

  Luna rested her head on the window beside her seat, and closed her eyes.

  *

  He knew. Of course Stefan knew.

  He said nothing when she and Mika returned to his hospital room that afternoon, his red-rimmed eyes burning holes into Luna as she stumblingly explained where she’d been for the past day, what she’d been doing. On and on she talked, punch drunk and giddy with exhaustion, till she finally ran out of words, wilting under his silent scrutiny.

  ‘It went well,’ she concluded lamely, feeling worn thin to the point of tearing. ‘It went as you planned it.’

  ‘As I planned it,’ he repeated in a scathing, gravelly rasp. ‘Yet you swore to me in this very room yesterday that you would not act on this plan.’

  ‘I couldn’t—’ Luna’s voice broke and she jabbed her finger toward the room’s glass window. ‘That man was here in the hospital, looking for you!’

  ‘All the more reason not to act in haste. But instead—’

  ‘I had to protect you!’ she cried.

  ‘—instead you not only put yourself at risk, you dragged every last one of the Salonen brothers with you. And Augusta. You brought a Russian murderer to her very doorstep, Luna. That was never part of my plan.’

  Suddenly it was as though a heavy hand was pressing down on Luna’s head, forcing her neck to bend. She had nothing, nothing left in her reserves with which to fight him. She covered her face with her hands, a great sob rising in her throat, forcing its way out.

  Mika looked from her to Stefan, then broke his silence, unleashing a torrent of profanity in Swedish, trading insults with Stefan for the next several minutes while Luna wept beside the bed. It was Mika who ended it, coming to place his arm around her, pulling her away. ‘Come, Luna, Stefan needs his rest,’ he said caustically. ‘Let me take you home.’

  She wept inconsolably during the taxi ride back to Södermalm, head buried in Mika’s shoulder, chest heaving. She was so far gone that she scarcely noticed they’d come not to Sören’s house but to Mika’s loft apartment until he sat her down on his bed. He pulled off her jumper and tended to her wound, cleaning it and replacing her bandage, then dressed her in a pair of his sweatpants and a t-shirt. Rooting through her bag, he found the prescription painkillers given to her by the hospital and made her take one.

  He went into the bathroom and Luna began to shake, clasping her arms around herself. She was cold, so cold it felt like she’d never be warm again. When Mika emerged from the bathroom, he took one look at her shaking form and uttered an oath, pressing her down onto the bed, arranging her on her side and covering her with the quilt. Then climbed in bed behind her.

  As he slipped his arm around her waist, tucking his legs against hers, Luna murmured questioningly, ‘Mika?’

  ‘Shut up,’ he said, and curved himself to her back. ‘Shut up, Luna.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Luna knocked on the door of Sören’s house and waited, twisting her fingers in the hem of her cardigan. It had been ten days since her fateful conversation with Stefan in his hospital room. Ten days of complete silence from him, though she knew from daily calls with his father that he had left the hospital, that his injuries were healing, that he was eating and sleeping…

  She, meanwhile, had moved in with Dagmar the day after she shared Mika’s bed. There was no way she could continue living with him, though she’d seen him every day since. And staying with her former boss had worked out fine. Dagmar was rarely there anyway, and when she was Luna was often asleep. Only for the last few nights had she been able to summon enough energy to sit up with Dagmar in com
panionable silence, her on her laptop, trying her best to retake the reins of Arborage in absentia, and Dagmar quietly knitting. The light-blue chunky-knit cotton cardie Luna was wearing now over her tunic was the product of those nights.

  Luna had decided to be economical with the truth when informing her managers of the attack on her and Stefan, saying only that they’d been lucky and were both recovering. And she was even less forthcoming with Kay, Jem and Nancy; she hadn’t the strength to deal with their questions now.

  The door opened and Christian greeted her warmly, drawing her into a hug before holding her away from himself, studying her critically. ‘You are well?’ he asked, sounding and looking doubtful.

  ‘I’m fine, very good,’ she replied with an over-bright smile. ‘Is he…?’

  ‘He’s in the andrum.’ Christian motioned upstairs with a tilt of his chin. ‘I was just on my way out, so I will leave you two.’ Then, before she could stop him, he reached for his satchel and departed.

  She told herself, climbing the stairs to the upstairs study, that this was Stefan, the man she knew better than anyone else on earth. Strange, then, that her palms were clammy, her heart palpitating. She had to stop halfway up the staircase to compose herself, gripping the handrail, breathing in and out.

  What awaited her did nothing to ease her apprehension. On a chaise under a window overlooking the Riddarfjärden, Stefan lay dressed in a grey cotton waffle top and matching leggings. He looked… thin. Drawn. His head was turned toward the view and Luna cleared her throat to get his attention, heart pounding anew when he turned and looked at her impassively. Like he’d been expecting her, but had no appetite for what was to come between them.

  She took a step closer to him. ‘I came to say that I’m flying home tomorrow, and I want you to go with me,’ she said. ‘I can’t do my job properly from here—’ A twitch in Stefan’s cheek as if to say, This is why you’re here, to talk to me about work? Luna rushed on, ‘And I want us to put this behind us, move on with the rest of our lives.’