‘You see, I have only to tell him how you have warmed my bed these last days for his infatuation to be over in an instant. Your power over him extinguished.’
The air in her lungs was like lead. His words were like blows. Her features contorted.
‘Are you saying...?’ She could hardly force the words from her through the pain, through the shock that had exploded inside her, ‘Are you saying that you seduced me in order to...to separate me from Philip?’ There was disbelief in her voice. Disbelief on so many levels.
‘You have it precisely,’ he said heavily, with sardonic emphasis. ‘Oh, surely you did not believe I would not take action to protect my cousin from women of your kind?’
She swallowed. It was like a razor in her throat. ‘My kind...?’
‘Look at yourself, Sabine. A woman of the world—isn’t that the phrase? Using her talents—’ deliberately he mocked the word she’d used herself when she’d first learnt who he was ‘—to make her way in the world. And if those talents—’ the mockery intensified ‘—include catching men with your charms, then good luck to you.’ His voice hardened like the blade of a knife. ‘Unless you set your sights on a vulnerable stripling like my cousin—then I will wish you only to perdition! And ensure you go there.’
His voice changed again.
‘So, do you understand the situation now? From now on content yourself with the life you have—singing cheap, tawdry songs in a cheap, tawdry club.’
His eyes blazed like coals from the pit as he gave his final vicious condemnation of her.
‘A two-cent chanteuse with more body than voice. That is all that you are good for. Nothing else!’
One last skewering of his contemptuous gaze, one last twist of his deriding mouth, and he was turning on his heel, walking out. She could hear his footsteps—heavy, damning—falling away.
Her mouth fell open, the rush of air into her lungs choking her. Emotion convulsed her. And then, as if fuse had been lit, she jerked to her feet. She charged out of the dressing room, but he was already stepping through the door that separated the front of house from backstage. She whirled about, driven forward on the emotion boiling up inside her. A moment later she was in the wings at the side of the stage, seizing Max by the arm, propelling him forward.
Anger such as she had never felt before in her life, erupted in her. She thrust Max towards the piano beside the centre spot where her microphone was. She hurled it into the wings, then turned back to Max.
‘Play “Der Hölle Rache”.’
Max stared at her as if she were mad. ‘What?’
‘Play it! Or I am on the next plane to London!’
She could see Bastiaan, threading his way across the dining room, moving towards the exit. The room was busy, but there was only one person she was going to sing for. Only one—and he could burn in hell!
Max’s gaze followed hers and his expression changed. She saw his hands shape themselves over the opening chord, and with a last snatch of sanity took the breath she needed for herself. And then, as Max’s hands crashed down on the keyboard, she stepped forward into the pool of light. Centre stage.
And launched into furious, excoriating, maximum tessitura, her full-powered coloratura soprano voice exploding into the space in front of her to find its target.
* * *
Bastiaan could see the exit—a dozen tables or so away. He had to get out of here, get into his car and drive...drive far and fast. Very fast.
He’d done it. He’d done what he’d had to do—what he’d set out to do from that afternoon in Athens when his aunt had come to see him, to beg him to save her precious young son from the toils of a dangerous femme fatale. And save him he had.
Saved more than just his cousin.
I have saved myself.
No!
He would not think that—would not accept it. Would only make for the exit.
He reached the door. Made to push it open angrily with the flat of his hand.
And then, from behind him, came a crash of chords that stopped him.
He froze.
‘Der Hölle Rache.’ The most fiendishly difficult soprano aria by Mozart. Fiendish for its cripplingly punishing high notes, for the merciless fury of its delivery. An aria whose music and lyrics boiled with coruscating rage as Die Zauberflöte’s ‘Queen of the Night’ poured out seething venom against her bitter enemy.