r a short shocked moment she just stared at him blankly. Then—of course he didn’t know! She completely denied the claim. He couldn’t know. Nobody knew except for Molly—and she’d only ever known a tiny fraction of it!
Of course Sandro couldn’t know—could he? ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she murmured shakily.
If anything, his face went all the harder, more determined, frighteningly determined. ‘Yes, you do,’ he insisted. ‘I am talking about what happened to you the week before you married me. The night you were attacked.’ He spelled it out brutally. ‘On your way home from working late. I know, cara,’ he repeated with a pained kind of gentle intensity. ‘I know...’
It was like having a spring uncoil inside her and she jumped violently away from him. ‘No,’ she said, as her surroundings began to spin. ‘You can’t know.’ She denied it absolutely. ‘No.’
‘Listen to me—’ he urged.
‘No!’ she began to back away from him, face white, eyes gone slightly wild, while Sandro watched her with a kind of distressed understanding that almost sliced her in two. ‘No,’ she said again when he took a step towards her. ‘You don’t know,’ she insisted. ‘I don’t want you to know!’
‘But, Joanna—’
‘Not you, Sandro. Not you!’ she cried out in such heart-rending agony that he seemed to catch it in his chest like a blow.
Her stumbling backward steps took her all the way to the wall opposite the doors to his apartment, but still she kept going, sideways now, tracking herself along the wall while Sandro stood there watching her with such grim compassion in his eyes that she wanted to die, wanted to shrivel up where she was; she wanted the floor to open up and swallow her whole.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she breathed, feeling trapped and helpless and so exposed she could have been standing here naked, while her fevered mind filled with looming dark shadows, lurid bulks of silently moving flesh leering at her, laughing, sniggering.
And then there was Sandro, coming towards her, slowly, stealthily, like a man approaching a frightened animal. ‘It had to come out into the open!’ he uttered in a harsh, driven voice that pleaded even as it whipped her. ‘You cannot—I cannot keep it hidden any longer! Madre di dio!’ he sighed. ‘Can you not see what it is doing to you?’
‘No.’ Refusing to listen, refusing to accept, she shook her head. ‘You don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t want you to know.’
‘But why?’ he demanded in pained bemusement. ‘Why can you not trust me with this? Why do you need to shut me out!’
Why was easy, but she was in no state to answer him. Her tracking fingertips made contact with wooden framework, sending her face twisting sideways to where she found herself staring through the open doors to the waiting lift. Somewhere inside her head there was a strange buzzing sound, and in the distance Sandro’s voice, low and deep and oddly constricted, was saying something about them going into the apartment and talking about it.
But she didn’t want to talk about it! She didn’t want to be here in this place!
Escape.
She had to escape before it all came crashing down on her.
‘Joanna—’
She made a dive for those open lift doors, almost hurling herself inside them.
And suddenly there it was, the big black hole she had spent so many months carefully skirting around. Only this time it claimed her. She tumbled headlong into it, falling—falling for what seemed like for ever, until eventually there was nothing, nothing but a strange feeling of utter weightlessness and the blackness, that terrible, all-enveloping, mind-numbing blackness...
The climb back to reality was a long and arduous one. Every time she thought she might be getting there, the rim of the dark hole would crumble beneath her grasping fingers and she would slide back down again, sobbing in anguish and in fear, her teeth gritting in frustration. Her fingers scrambled to catch hold of something, anything, to stop her falling, so she could begin the laborious climb out once again.
Sometimes she feared she would never make it, that she was destined to spend the rest of her life climbing the steep walls of this hole, only to slide down again. And sometimes ghastly familiar faces would come leering at her over the rim, laughing and taunting her wasted efforts. Sometimes it was the leering young face of a skinhead yobbo; sometimes it was Arthur Bates, his greedy eyes warning her what to expect if she did ever get out of her dark prison.
Then Molly would come, pushing those awful men out of the way and smiling reassuringly at her, urging her upwards with a hand stretched out for her to try and catch hold of. But the hand always stayed those few precious few inches out of reach. ‘It isn’t fair,’ she whimpered fretfully. ‘It just isn’t fair. I can’t reach you.’
‘Shush,’ a soothing voice murmured. ‘I am here. I have hold of you.’
And she frowned, because that voice wasn’t Molly’s voice; it was Sandro’s. She looked up, saw him leaning over the rim of the hole and reaching down for her. His arm was longer than Molly’s, he managed to grab a hold on her wrist, pull her up. Up and up. He bodily yanked her over the rim of the hole, then tossed her to ground which was too far away for her to tumble back in.
It was such a relief, such a wonderful relief, that she smiled and thanked him. He covered her up with a blanket. ‘Go to sleep,’ he commanded. ‘You are safe here.’
And she really did feel safe at last, so safe that she drifted into a blissfully peaceful and uncluttered sleep where she felt warm and protected by the arms enfolding her.
Joanna opened her eyes to find sunlight seeping in through a silk draped floor-to-ceiling window onto a cream and pale blue colour-washed room. It was a lovely room, she decided sleepily. She liked the high ceiling and the feeling of space it seemed to offer. She liked the subtle use of the two pastel colours; they were cool and restful. She wondered who the room belonged to.
Where was she? She frowned, having a hazy recollection of something terrible happening, but as for what, she couldn’t quite manage to recall at the moment.
Then a grimly protracted voice murmured flatly, ‘How do you feel?’ making her head turn sharply on the pillow to find Sandro reclining in an easy chair beside the bed.