My attention turns to the light spilling from the open doorway—not daylight—an electric light, flickering across a beast on the floor. A beast that roars and pounds. As it beats a man’s head into the ground.
‘For fuck sakes, Remy.’ The silhouette in the doorway sounds like Rhett. I cough out a very, very grateful laugh. One I’ll remember not to tell him about later.
He pulls at the beast, still yelling. ‘He’s not worth the fucking paperwork.’
The beast rolls and roars, and then I’m in his arms.
He smells like bergamot and spice.
And copper and dirt.
He feels like home.
Epilogue
Remy
The baby reaches out, catching Rose’s finger between five fat little digits.
‘You’re a natural.’ My voice breaks the connection between their gazes; a mutual appreciation society that isn’t taking applications for new memberships. But that’s okay. Rose and I have our own kind of club. One where I’ve promised her my undying devotion and truth above all else.
I promised her truth and yet, still I lie.
‘I don’t know,’ she muses. The smile she sends my way is a burst of happiness to my heart that I will always try to deserve. ‘This baby looked very much at home in your arms earlier.’
‘Beginners luck,’ I answer, tipping back my head as though to study the precision in the weaving of the grass roof. We’re on the island of Sumba in Indonesia, on a resort I’d helped build with my own hands a few years ago, before Wolf Industries fell to me.
‘I don’t believe that. You’ll be a good dad,’ she answers. ‘I can tell.’
But how can she, given the hand I was dealt?
Few sons are like their father. Few are better. Many are worse.
I thought I came into the last category. That I was worse than my father. I wish I could say I take comfort in the discovery that I’m not. With all my heart I wish I could say that my sins outstrip his because then Rose’s mother would never have suffered as she did.
I hope the bastard is rotting in hell. I know Hayes the older rots from the inside out now that his grandson has distanced himself. He isn’t cut from the same cloth as the elder. A fact I’d begun to realise in the course of our dealings, dealings where he’d also expressed an interest in helping Rose raise funds for her own charity foundation. In a strange turn of events, Rose and my mother have become firm friends in the course of the venture.
‘Do you want to hold her?’ Rose asks, bouncing the tot in her arms.
I shake my head. ‘The view from here is too beautiful to spoil.’
She rests in a chair framed by the window; the wooden shutters open to the view beyond. Blue skies. Coconut palm swaying in the breeze. Bougainvillea winding its way around the pergola, brilliant pink against a wash of blue sky. The ocean laps at the sand a few short metres away, and the sun hangs like a brilliant jewel in the sky. And that’s not even the best part of this view.
Rose is.
She wears a gauzy white cover over a jade coloured bikini. Her skin berry-brown and her hair piled haphazardly on top of her head. She is Venus. Juno. Made of hills and valleys and curves as abundant as the love that pours from her heart.
She is a prize I won’t ever deserve.
But she’s mine anyway.
That terrible day, when we’d arrived at a building that wasn’t the shack we’d anticipated, but a modest house at the end of a long track no one would ever happen across by accident, I knew I wasn’t afraid to die, should it come to that. I was only afraid of living a life without her.
The windows were boarded up, the heavy doors locked. Everything about the place screamed abandoned. We found Ben’s car stowed out of sight in a nearby outbuilding, Rose’s suitcase in the back, a length of rope and a hunting knife in the trunk. The sight sent a shiver down my spine. That she might leave me tore me in two. That she may have been forced to leave, that she may have been murdered because of me, left me in a purgatory filled with helplessness and rage.
Would I ever hold her again?
Steal a kiss from her at the bottom of the staircase?
And then, the sight of her on the dirt floor.
Her voice no more than a pained whisper as she fought.
Fought him off. I had a gun in my hand—I’d used it to break the lock—but I didn’t think to use it because I’d wanted to kill him with my bear hands.
He was going to keep her there, she told the police, for reasons that made no sense. For revenge, for madness? I don’t think a sane person would ever understand—could ever understand. That’s not to say Ben is insane, though his legal team have begun to prepare this as a possible defence. As I understand, his premeditation will prevent any chance of this. We’ve told to expect he’ll go to prison for a very long time.