I’ve survived Angelos Petrakos before, and I will do it again!
For a long, timeless moment she went on standing there, hands clenched, face like stone, as emotion burned in her. Then, as if with a slow exhalation of breath, she let it go. With a strange, preternatural calmness in her breast she went to put away her library books and resume her interrupted evening. Tomorrow, everything would change, but this last night she would spend as she had planned—a quiet supper, a Mozart CD, and a good book to read.
Enough to gather her strength for the ordeal ahead. The ordeal she would survive. The ordeal she must survive.
But for all her resolution, telling Giles when he returned to London the next morning that she could not marry him was a slow agony. The pain in his eyes crucified her. But she had to inflict it. There was no other way. She could not—could not—tell him the truth. Yet to stop him wanting to honour his offer of marriage, as she knew he would, she had to hurt him with another lie—and such a monstrous one. Of all the people in the world, it was the one she loathed with all her being whom she now had to lie about! The lie mocked her with whips—and so did Giles’ response.
‘You’re still in love with him, aren’t you?’ said Giles.
Thea couldn’t speak, could only nod. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘So terribly, terribly sorry. I lied to you in that restaurant, denying I knew him, because I desperately wanted it all to be over between him and me. But … he came to me last night and—’ She couldn’t go on. The vileness of the lie she had to tell was too great for that.
‘I’m just so sorry,’ she whispered again.
He patted her hand. A jerky movement. His face was not showing much. He never let emotions show. Not deep ones. But she knew he felt them. He was a good, kind man. A decent, honourable man. A man she would have striven with every fibre of her being to be a good wife to.
And now—
It was over. The dream she had dreamt was over before it began. Despair racked her. And anger and shame, and a regret for what could never now be so powerful that it crushed her.
‘I can only wish you every happiness,’ said Giles.
She gazed at him with stricken eyes. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again. ‘And I hope and pray with all my heart that you find a woman more worthy of you.’
He would never know just what she meant by that. But she would know, and the knowledge incised deep into her. Only the certain knowledge of her own misery could assuage the pain she was inflicting.
Sadly, guiltily, she kissed his cheek and left him.
Back in her flat, depression hit her like a huge wave. She let it break over her, knowing there was nothing she could do—nothing. The future she had thought to have was gone. It could never return. Giles was gone—driven back up to Yorkshire to tell his parents she had called it off. She kept busy, cleaning her flat like one possessed. She had no appointments that day, which was just as well, as she could face no one—not even her booker.
She was signed with a different agency from the one where she had started her career as Kat Jones. This one had branches all over the world—all over the U.K. Even in Manchester.
That was where she had gone when Angelos Petrakos had destroyed her the first time around. She had gone there with Katya, both of them making a new life for themselves. They’d worked as cleaners—menial work to pay the rent, to eat, to survive. More than that had been beyond her. All she’d been able to bring herself to do was just keep going—nothing more than that. Then Katya had met a fellow Pole, Marek, to whom Katya was not just scar tissue, and who had said only one thing when Kat had told him how Mike had met his end—’He got lucky.’
Kat had seen the murderous look in Marek’s eyes and known that Katya was safe now. She’d been happy for Katya—but when she’d gone she’d sat alone in their bedsit and stared at the walls.
They had started to move in on her. Slowly, inexorably, crushing the air out of the room, the breath out of her lungs, the life out of her veins. Shabby walls in a grimy flat on a grim street in a rundown part of the city where she spent her days as an office char, cleaning up other people’s dirt.
Well, what do you expect? Two generations of losers, and you’re the third. You tried to get out—and you lost. Accept it. You’re not going anywhere any more. You’re in the pit—so make yourself at home. It’s where you belong, Kat Jones.
Then, out of the depths, the thought had come.
But I don’t have to be Kat Jones …
She’d sat very still as the thought had formed in her head. Formed and shaped and grown.
I can be someone else. I can be anyone I choose. Anyone.
But it wasn’t just a name she’d needed. If all she’d taken was a new name Kat Jones would still have been underneath. She’d needed to be a new person. Someone a million miles away from Kat Jones—raised in care, daughter and granddaughter of prostitutes, alcoholics and junkies. In her mind’s eye she’d seen the sleek, glossy models who had been chosen by Angelos Petrakos. Not like her—with her Estuary English and her abrasive style and her pig-ignorance. But well-bred, well-spoken, well-behaved, well-educated.
Classy.
There had been a strange light in her eye. A burning light.
It was one that had lit her way through the years ahead.
Could that light still burn now, even through the dark, dark shadow of Angelos Petrakos? She knew there was only one answer she must give.
Yes. Yes. She could survive what he was doing to her—overcome it! She wasn’t the raw, ignorant, penniless wannabe she’d been five years ago. She was Thea Dauntry, who owned a flat in Covent Garden, who had savings in the bank and a solid, well-paid career, who knew how to behave in the affluent, comfortable places of the world. Her rough London accent was smooth now, and cultured—as cultured as her mind had become through self-education, finally catching up on the years she had neglected at school.