CHAPTER 9
THE DIPLOMAT
I really don’t know what to do with this girl.
Now I understand why Mr Lewis just fucks it or fights it.
It makes life much simpler. With Stella, I’m doing neither, and that needs to change.
This girl has my mind in pieces, every thought splintering under her spell.
If it wasn’t for our urgent need to get the hell out of here, I’d be on my knees worshipping the ground she walks on.
My dick hasn’t seen pussy in years, and it hurts, and if I let it out to play I don’t think there would be much of Stella left by the time I finish with her.
Until that moment happens, I’m at her whim, praying for the both of us that one, it still works, which, by the constant raging hard-ons I’ve had since I’ve been here says it does, and secondly, that it will eventually subside and Stella survives.
Jesus. What am I doing? I’m hard for a murderer, a psychopath, and a woman who mutilates bodies to fulfill some need.
Yet, I want her. That much is undeniable.
But wanting doesn’t mean it’s right. Every fibre of my being screams this isn’t right.
Whatever this is – shouldn’t be happening.
She stands against everything I believe in, everything I’ve built myself to be, and yet here I am, caught in the pull of something that defies logic, wrapped in the contradiction of craving exactly what I shouldn’t.
I know she’s the tide that pulls me under, a current I cannot fight.
There’s no coming up for air when I’m around her.
No escape. Maybe I just don’t want to be saved?
The night is humming with a quiet tension as we weave through the hay field.
I listen beyond the rustling underfoot, the field stretching empty in every direction, but I know better than to trust the quiet.
Stella grips her crate of bats as I scan the field.
No figures lurking, no unnatural movements.
My car is parked just ahead. ‘We need to ditch the bats,’ I say, with little room for debate.
She stops mid-stride, tightening her grip on the crate.
‘Absolutely not!’ She’s not angry – just unwilling to entertain the thought.
I exhale, running a hand through my hair.
‘They’re going to be a problem,’ I insist. ‘It’s not like we’re taking a dog for a walk. ’
Stella raises her brow, tilting her crate slightly. ‘I know someone who can help.’
‘Who?’
‘The zoo.’
‘Not exactly on tonight’s itinerary,’ I sigh.
‘It’s me or the zoo. They’ll die otherwise.’
I hate we’re already past the point of arguing.
It’s what good couples do. Besides, I’m still at her mercy, succumbing to the power of the minge.
I sigh. ‘Fine.’
I tell her I’m famished. Not tired, not peckish – famished.
We leave the field behind, the crate of bats rattling on the backseat of the car like a bad decision. Spain loomed on the horizon, hours of road ahead, but first – food.
‘Can’t deal with animals on an empty stomach,’ I nod.
‘Let’s hope the bats don’t plan a mutiny then,’ Stella mutters.
Twenty minutes later, we pull up, parked like we had a reservation and a reputation to match. The restaurant didn’t blink. It oozed quiet elegance, a Michelin-starred bistro tucked down a crooked lane no tourist would dare stumble into.
Its velvet draped windows pulse with candlelight and shadow, and the crystal chandeliers dangle like frozen teardrops above us.
I’m sure she would agree it would be romantic under different circumstances.
But then, I watch the way her fingers curl around her wineglass and I know she’s not breathing right.
Not because of the food. Not the atmosphere. Because of me.
She sits across from me, her posture poised, but I catch the tension in her jaw, the way she studies her cutlery like it’s saying more than I am.
She’s barely touched the duck, despite it being confit de canard, cherry glaze, and a crisp skin.
I tuck into my tartare or Tartare de boeuf au couteau a l’italienne as the maitre d’ had described, and I catch her looking at me between bites.
I’m starving, and not just for food. The blood-bright beef marbled with rosemary and pepper soothes something feral inside me, so I eat slowly, deliberately.
I want her to watch, to feel how tightly I’m coiled inside this suit.
She’s not eating much, not pushing it away either. It’s a quiet rebellion. One I admire.
I reach into my breast pocket and purposely drop the small, plastic bag onto the white linen. The powder inside like fallen snow. Her spine goes rigid.
Good.
She thinks I’m about to unravel; that this is the part where the man sitting across from her turns into something dangerous. She’d be right again.
I don’t explain. I never do. I’ll let her ask the questions, but I’ll let her reach the wrong conclusions first. That’s where the power is.
She’s still watching me. She thinks she’s being subtle, how she glances up from her wineglass and then back down like I haven’t noticed the way her pupils dilate every time I move.
You want to understand me, but only from a safe distance, don’t you?
I take the knife, and I press its edge into the powder I laid out. Two clean lines. Methodical, like folding laundry. Normal, even. Then I lean in. One inhale. One perfect, burning inhale. It rushes through me like whiskey burning the back of my throat, and I groan.
‘I never saw you as the type...’ she speaks. And there it is – that note of dread laced with fascination. She’s already rewriting me in her head.
I smile as I meet her eyes. ‘Type?’
‘You know…’ she says, also leaning forward.
Good girl, still in the game.
She continues, ‘to snort cocaine.’
I laugh. Not because it’s funny, but because she thinks she’s right. She thinks she’s peeling back my layers.
‘It isn’t cocaine,’ I say, and I watch her chest rise just a little quicker. She wants to ask, needs to ask.
‘What is it then?’
Knew it.
I tilt my head, give her the half-smile that’s made others forget their good sense and safe choices. ‘Something far worse.’
And she still doesn’t give up.
God, I like her.
The restaurant hums with the clink of cutlery, murmurs beneath the noise of violin strings. It’s civilised, safe. I watch her watching me, too focused, too composed, thinking she’s got control, so I break it.
I reach into my trouser pocket and pull out the lace. Soft, warm lace. I flick my wrist and let it fall across her wine glass.
Her knickers.
I see the shift in her face, the split-second blankness, the scramble behind her eyes while she recalibrates everything she thought this meal was. I smile. Not wide. Just enough.
‘You can have these back,’ I say.
I sit back in my chair, sip my wine and let her decide whether to pick them up like they mean nothing – or like they mean everything.
She blinks. That’s my first reward. She reaches. She actually reaches for them, and folds them into her palm like they’re fragile.
‘Classy,’ she says.
I let my smirk deepen. ‘You look better without them. Besides,’ I tilt my head, letting my voice drop into that sweet abyss between cruelty and charm. ‘I’m done with them now.’
There’s a beautiful ribbon of humiliation racing up her neck.
She tastes iron. I know because her jaw tenses like she’s about to bite something that isn’t food.
I drape my arm over the back of the chair, lazy and languid, like I didn’t just dismantle her in front of two dozen strangers and a sommelier.
She’s still trying to figure out what game we’re playing, but I’ve already won.
Her lips part like she’s searching for the script but forgot the lines, and I lean in. ‘You don’t think I’d have left your knickers behind, do you?’ I say it softly, like it’s a perfectly reasonable conversation to be having in a restaurant gilded in gold and old money.
She doesn’t answer, so I continue. ‘You see, sweetheart. Surviving in this world means walking into a room like the smoke parts for you because it’s desperate to be inhaled by your lungs. And I – I pretend. That’s how I survive. That’s how I stay on the inside without getting my hands dirty.’
‘I’m not following,’ she says. ‘What has that to do with my knickers?’
‘Everything and nothing. Lactose powder, baby formula, crushed vitamin C. I’ve got it down to a performance; the deep breath, the roll of a hundred, the twitch of my jaw.
They cheer. They trust. And I’m clean. You see, in this world, pretending isn’t lying.
It’s living. You don’t blend in with wolves by whining about fleas.
You learn to howl. You should know that better than anyone, Ms Dubois… ’
‘I get it,’ she nods.
‘Hmm. You ever see a wolf play dead?’
‘No.’
‘They roll over, bare their vulnerable stomachs, and the pack leaves them be. It’s smart. You can learn a lot by looking harmless. In this world, they think I’m one of them. They watch me snort, hoot, holler, slap backs. But it’s all theatre. All of it.’
‘So what you’re saying is you just snorted lactose powder or something?’
‘No, darling. This time, it was crushed Vitamin C and your pussy juices that had dried in the gusset of your knickers.’
She shoots to her feet, the chair scraping sharp against the tiled floor, breath caught somewhere between panic and outrage. I don’t move. I don’t need to. I set my fork down slowly, deliberately like I have all the time in the world. ‘Sit down.’
Her eyes flicker, uncertain. One step back, her shoe catching on the lip of the rug behind her.
‘Are you forgetting where you are?’ I go on, my gaze steady. ‘Or who you’re with?’
The silence that follows isn’t empty, it presses in, thick and as hot as summer air before a storm.
She sits. The restaurant, with its candlelight and clinks of cutlery carries on around us like nothing had shifted. But it had. Oh, it had.
‘Stella, when will you learn that I will ruin you?’ I say, ‘Not just your plans. Not just your name, I mean, you – emotionally…spiritually… and the parts of you no one else sees.’
I don’t raise my voice. I don’t add any theatrics, just weight - the kind that settles behind my ribs and doesn’t leave.
‘You, Sal,’ she grimaces, lips twisted like the taste of my name turned bitter on her tongue.
‘Go on,’ I murmur, ‘tell me I disgust you. Go on. Tell me.’
She holds my stare, jaw clenched, and her throat works around the words that want out.
‘I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.’
I smile.
She never stood a chance.
‘You could say everything is an illusion to some extent, Stella. Even butterflies.’
‘Butterflies?’
‘Yes. Do you think butterflies land on you because they’re attracted to beauty? No. They come for the salt. The iron. The blood. The scent of decay beneath your skin.’
‘Decay?’ she asks.
‘You don’t even feel their proboscis while they feed.’
‘STOP! Don’t say things like that. You’re making beautiful things sound cruel.’
‘Beauty is the mask cruelty wears when it wants to be loved. Life is cruel.’
‘Then when I die, lay me in a field of butterflies. Let them feast. Let them flutter and gorge. Let them carry me away in fragments,’ she answers.
‘And I’ll remain, watching, until the last piece of you is gone.’
I reach for the bill without glancing at it, sliding my card across the table with the same indifference I reserve for bad wine. As we head for the door, she pauses. ‘I need the toilet,’ she says, already her eyes scanning for signs.
I smirk, tilting my head. ‘Do be thorough, love. Wouldn’t want you sprinkling loofetti across this fine establishment.’
She stops mid-step. ‘Loofetti?’
I shrug, my eyes glinting. ‘You know, small bits of toilet paper. Rogue droppings. The tragic confetti of poor hygiene.’
She stares at me, half horrified, half amused. ‘You’re vile.’
‘Only mildly. Besides, you have nowhere to stash the evidence. You’re not wearing any knickers.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘You’re insufferable.’
‘And yet, here you are having enjoyed a wonderful meal that I paid for, and you’re off to powder your nose while I wait like a gentleman. A very patient and very misunderstood gentleman.’
She returns a few minutes later, and I offer my arm with mock gallantry.
‘The plumbing survived I see, and I didn’t have to rescue you from a soap dispenser uprising.
Let’s go,’ I say. She follows, still rattled, but moving, and as we leave I hold the door, not like a gentleman, but more like a man who knows control isn’t something you give, it’s something you are.