Tonight she had a takeout box.
“You have a good day?” I asked her, knowing she couldn’t hear. It was a bad habit to fall into, but I’d started it weeks before.
There were no microphones, no voice receivers . I hadn’t been able to get in to bug the house – too busy tailing Sutherland. That was going to be the next step, but to do it right, I needed a far better locksmith than me, and an entire team to scour the place, plant bugs and leave it looking entirely undisturbed in the small window of time we could guarantee. Either that, or we needed someone with a key who could come and go at will, and do it piecemeal.
Until then, I only had eyes on the building, eyes on her, even though I wanted far more than that. One day soon, I was going to make my approach and get it, but before then, I could imagine I was talking to her at least.
“You look tired. You should have a bath. I could run it for you. Candles, too many bubbles. Then I could take you to bed.”
She deserved better than the life she had. She should have had every luxury at her disposal and I vowed one day that I was going to give it to her. It made me more angry than I knew what to do with that she was letting Sutherland’s reputation stand.
For what he’d put her through, he should have been dragged through the mud already. But I was going to set the record straight. He should have been locked up in jail, and I had friends there who could give him a thorough education on exactly what became of spineless men like him who thought it was okay to hit a women. He’d beg for death by the end of it, and I’d only let him have it when I thought he’d had enough.
I watched her tip her food out onto her plate as she sat down by the window. Noodles maybe. Chow mein, pad thai? I wished I knew what she liked best, but I’d been stuck here, watching Pierce all evening and he hadn’t left his study.
“That looks nearly as rough as mine. I know a place in Chinatown you’d like. I’ll take you some time. When this is over.” I dug into my lasagne, forking off a chunk and waiting for the steam to settle.
“Cheers, Elizabeth. Bon appétit. Not long now. I’m coming for you, I promise.”
Elizabeth
I was eating dinner in the kitchen when Pierce came in.
He stood there, wavering in the doorway with an empty whisky bottle in his hand. I could smell the alcohol on him from where I sat even before he staggered forward to set it down on the table.
No doubt he hadn’t left his study all evening, still putting the finishing touches on his grand exposé, or planning all the grand, congratulatory dinners that were going to follow all the grand, publicity dinners he was currently swimming his way through like a soused herring.
I despised the man.
Instinct made me keep my head down, but it wasn’t enough to avoid drawing his fire.
“What the bloody hell are you doing in here? I’ve told you about this a hundred bloody times!”
I had never called him dad and he wouldn’t have wanted me to. Just because he married my mother, it didn’t make us family. He’d been drilling that into me for the past few years and there wasn’t a day that had gone by that I didn’t believe it.
“Having my dinner, what does it look like?”
When they got together, I was fourteen, but even then I knew something about him was off.
By then I had a well-honed sense of the shift in atmosphere when I was in trouble over nothing at all. He’d bring it in with him like a thundercloud crossing the sun, and I’d known that if I breathed wrong, I’d be in for it. It made me long for the superpower to be able to disappear.
He was way too smooth. Alway had been. All the compliments to Mum had always sounded fake to me, and he loved to make out like he was the most intelligent one in the room. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Mum thought he was so clever. At first everything she did was pure perfection. He idolized her and Mum wanted that to be true so badly.
They got married in a whirl, and suddenly all the criticisms started worming it’s way in, and his temper flared into life over nothing. She told me not to go out of my way to annoy him, when all I was doing was being me. We’d learned, the pair of us, how to creep around to avoid setting him off. Only sometimes that annoyed him too, and he’d start shouting about how we all acted like he was some kind of monster.