“You okay today? You came in pretty rushed.”
There was a sandwich packet in the bag dangling from her fingers. My eyes locked onto it through the thin plastic and I could feel myself start to salivate. My stomach was already trying to digest itself.
“School stuff. It’s nothing.”
I got kept late because I still hadn’t put in my UCAS application and the career guidance counselor wouldn’t take the bloody hint. At St Paul’s Girls everybody went on to university. She said that if I wanted to go on a Gap Year, I should apply anyway and get my place deferred. She said that if trekking around South East Asia was something I was seriously considering then I should share my plan with her so she could help get it up to scratch.
She made me sit down and write a personal statement, which meant I had no time to eat before the start of my shift.
It was a miracle I managed not to laugh in her earnest little face.
But I couldn’t tell her I wasn’t doing either of those things. It would break all of Pierce’s rules. His reputation was the only reason I still had my place at one of the top private schools in the country. He couldn’t be seen treating his stepdaughter badly, no matter what went on behind closed doors. Couldn’t kick me out of my dead mother’s house either. Even though, as he loved to remind me, I had no legal right to it at all. Mum had died without a will. And deep down I knew he had something to do with it.
“Nothing, huh?”
“Yeah, Cassie, nothing. Sooner I’m done with it the better.”
“Don’t wish your life away, kid.”
Lately, that was all I did.
She must have noticed how hard I was staring at the sandwich, because she held out half when she opened it up, and I bit into it with precisely zero decorum.
“Christ Elizabeth. You’re supposed to be a lady.
I grinned at her around a mouthful of BLT. “Which idiot told you that?”
A lady wouldn’t do what I was planning. A lady wouldn’t sit in wait and bide her time like some kind of sociopath, playing an act.
The past three years I’d been as obedient at home as I could stomach to get ahold of whatever I could to take Pierce down. I grit my teeth through his flares of temper, knowing it had to have been one of those to cause Mum’s fall. I had a plan to stack up everything I could against him, and I was taking what I could get from him while I got it all together.
I was nearly there. The only thing holding me back was needing to take my final exams. I wanted to get out with good enough grades to give me a start somewhere on my own. Once they were over, all bets were off.
Three years, nine months and two days ago, my stepfather got into an argument with my Mum, and that was the last time she ever said anything at all. If it took losing everything I had left, I wasn’t going to let him get away with that. Revenge was a long time coming and I was more than ready to take it.
CHAPTER 2
Elizabeth
It was late when I clocked off and the half sandwich I had shoved down my throat on break hadn’t done much to make a dent in my appetite. But I had other things on my mind other than the hollowness of my stomach.
Making sure Cassie didn’t see me, I went around to the back of the kitchens after I had said goodbye. When I poked my head around the door of the office she was busy cashing up for the evening, a distinct frown on her face as she jabbed figures into the boxy computer on the paper-strewn desk.
The door to the alley was open, same as usual, spewing steam and cooking smells out into the air. It was always like a furnace in there. I didn’t know how the kitchen staff handled it.
Right on time, Ben stepped out into the street, wiping the sweat off his forehead and taking out a packet of cigarettes. Refusal to vape ran in the family. He was Cassie’s nephew. Her brother Mitch’s son.
He was an older guy, his body wasn’t bad, because he was down at the gym helping his dad out on most of his days off. But there wasn’t a thing about Ben that interested me. If he had more backbone, maybe I would have found him remotely attractive, but I just couldn’t be interested in a guy who thought it was fine to stay exactly where he was, in the hole he found himself in.
“Alright Ben.”
He looked up, cigarette between his lips, and he wiped his hand on his slightly grubby whites before he renewed the grip on his lighter and sparked a flame to light it.