Chapter 4 Penny
Penny
“What the fuck?”
Penny froze, looking down at the door of the garish green supercar she’d just closed.
The sound echoed around Rhys’s private underground car park.
Unlike the one beneath George Chomsky’s company, Rhys’s was full of cars.
Most of them were sports cars in that obnoxious green, illuminated by equally obnoxious lights, although there were several motorbikes and four-by-fours dotted around. “What? Did I break it?”
Rhys stormed towards her, his eyes on her face. “Your neck, Penny. It’s covered in welts. Hang on, look up for me.” She squinted up at the bright lights above her. “You’ve burst the blood vessels under your pupils. What the fuck happened to you?”
“I’ve told you. In the video—”
“Yes, we’ve already established you saw the sodding video, Penny.” Rhys’s exasperated voice bounced off the walls. “Move on. I thought you were having a mental breakdown. This is the first time I’ve seen you in the light. Tell me everything that happened.”
She almost laughed. A mental breakdown was far preferable to this nightmare. “Bielak heard me watching it. I tried to leave, but he was waiting in my car.” Penny swallowed, her heart thumping inside her chest. “He tried to strangle me with my seat belt.”
Rhys spread his hands wide, raising his voice.
“Why didn’t you lead with that?” He slipped a hand behind her elbow, leading her towards the metallic doors of what she presumed was a lift.
He frowned at something behind them, and Penny looked around to see a trail of bloody footprints that ended at her feet. “Are you bleeding?”
Penny lifted a foot to discover that, yes, she was bleeding—and that her barefoot sprint across a London street had left her filthy. “Oh. I guess so.”
“Get in.” Rhys shepherded her into the lift, muttering something that sounded like insane woman.
Neither of them said anything as the lift ascended, but neither did Rhys let go of her elbow, as though he was worried she was going to collapse at any moment.
When the lift doors opened again, Penny’s lips parted. She had expected Rhys’s home to be luxurious; of course, it would be, he was a multimillionaire. But this…
Huge domed ceilings stretched out before them, the kind of architecture she had only ever seen in museums. Equally vast arched skylights ran down either side of the room, outlined in patterns of green and cream.
Before she’d finished taking in the rest of the room, Rhys guided her over to the largest sofa she’d ever seen, directly beneath one of the wide arched skylights.
“Sit,” he said, rubbing the back of his head before kicking off his shoes and disappearing through a set of double doors beneath yet another window.
Penny looked back towards the lift, noticing yet another trail of bloody footprints—including on the large cream rug beneath the sofa.
Next to the lift, however, she saw an expensive-looking black suitcase standing on four wheels. A large set of trainers sat on the floor next to it. Were they Rhys’s? She’d only ever seen him in business attire. Did he even wear trainers?
“Here.” Rhys’s voice reached her a moment before he walked back through the double doors. He carried a tray with a steaming mug and a packet of chocolate chip cookies on it, placing it on the marble-topped coffee table in front of her. “Drink this.”
Penny did as he said, cupping the mug like her life depended on it.
“Thank you,” she muttered awkwardly, suddenly feeling embarrassed, but Rhys was already disappearing back through the double doors.
Now that she was somewhere safe, she felt the last few hours catching up to her.
She’d been running on a mishmash of autopilot and adrenaline ever since watching that awful video, but at last her supply seemed to be puttering out.
She raised her hand to her neck, feeling the indent of long, painful scratches. She’d made those. She stuttered out a breath as she curled her palm up to see her nails, realising there was more than a little blood hiding underneath them.
A shiver went through her as she remembered what happened after.
Rhys entered the room once more, a wide tub in his hands and a towel slung over his broad shoulder, ignorant of her unravelling mentally. He set the tub down on her lap, the soapy water inside it slopping to the side. A flannel sat beneath the water and—
A nail brush.
Perhaps he wasn’t as ignorant as she’d thought.
“Soak your hands in here,” he told her, wringing out the flannel and beginning to tend to her neck.
Penny leaned back until his touch left her skin. “What are you doing?”
He held up the flannel, gesturing in her direction.
She didn’t protest when he resumed his ministrations. His touch was gentle, dabbing away the dried blood drop by drop.
It was yet another incomprehensible thing to happen this evening.
At this point, she was too exhausted to fight it.
Somewhere in her brain, she was questioning why he was treating her like this when they fucking hated each other.
He’d spent eight years antagonising her, poaching deals out from under her nose, costing her endless amounts of time and money.
But right now, that paled against the violence she’d experienced.
“I threw a cup of hot coffee in Bielak’s face,” she croaked eventually, needing to break the silence.
Rhys tilted her chin as he inspected her neck.
He must have been satisfied with his work, because he dried her with the towel before shifting his attention to her hands.
“Must have been amusing,” he murmured, delicately cleaning the blood from her hands with the nail brush.
It was almost ticklish, but she tried not to squirm.
Penny felt her eyes welling up. “He screamed in pain. I don’t…I’ve never—never hurt anyone like that before, Rhys. It was like he was being tortured. Am I going to be in trouble? Should we call an ambulance for him? He must be in agon—”
“He tried to kill you.” His voice was softer than she’d ever heard it, far removed from the usual tone he used to needle her.
Yet somehow it was the most authoritative he’d ever been, the most commanding.
“You defended yourself. In the eyes of the law, you’ve done nothing wrong. Say it. You’ve done nothing wrong.”
Penny attempted to swallow her emotions, suddenly realising how sore her throat was. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Rhys nodded; his amber eyes locked onto hers.
“But they’re looking for me now.” Her finger tapped a rapid beat onto her knee, her mind racing. “They were in my home. I don’t know—I don’t know what to do. I can’t call the police, what if—?”
Rhys rinsed each of her hands, now clean of blood, before drying them and placing the tub onto the floor. Its water had taken on a pinkish tint. “Soak your feet in here,” he told her. “You can stay here for now. I’m going to be away for a few days, so you’ll have the place to yourself.”
Penny glanced over to the suitcase next to the lift. She was going to be here alone? “You’re going on holiday?”
“Not quite.” He nodded towards the set of double doors he’d gone through earlier, and she couldn’t help noticing a smudge of pink on his collar.
Was that lipstick? Had he been with a woman this evening?
“I’m going to go sort out the bedding in the spare room and run you a bath.
Stay here. Drink the tea. Eat the biscuits.
You’ve done nothing wrong. Shout if you need anything, okay? ”
“Okay.”
Penny was silent as she watched him go, finally taking a sip of the tea and discovering just how raw her throat was. The burn of the liquid was almost soothing.
She blew out a long, weary breath between mouthfuls, realising how much her life had changed in the course of a few hours.
She didn’t know where to go from here. What would have happened to her if Rhys hadn’t been there?
Would Bielak have caught up with her? What if Rhys had let her go into her home?
Would they have killed her there and then?
“The bath’s ready for you.” Rhys’s voice intruded on her mental worst-case scenarios. She didn’t know how long he’d been gone. “Let’s get your feet clean first, and then you can relax.”
“I can do tha—”
He pinned her with an unyielding, almost dominating glare, his hand cradling her ankle. “I wasn’t asking, Penny.”
She fought the instinct to squirm, both from that look and the fact that he was handling her feet.
Her lips curled as the water darkened with the grime of London’s streets, but Rhys displayed no such disgust. At one point, she gasped as pain shot through her foot, after which he carefully extracted a piece of glass from her sole.
Her other foot was worse; Rhys worked free another two glass fragments.
Finally, he encased her poor feet in the soft towel to dry them, ensuring the bleeding had stopped before guiding her through the double doors.
His flat, somehow, was even larger than it first appeared.
A long corridor stretched out before them, doors dotting either side of it.
Rhys led her to the penultimate one, opening it to unveil a spacious bedroom dripping in expensive furnishings—piles of silk pillows heading a huge, deep-buttoned bed, heavy drapes, halo chandeliers, and graceful artworks that looked to be genuine paintings rather than prints.
Wherever she looked, wealth stared back.
Penny wasn’t poor. Far from it—she worked hard for her money, but this kind of luxury was on another scale entirely.
“The bathroom’s through here,” Rhys spoke, pointing to the second door in the room. “I’ve left some things in there for you, including a change of clothes. They’re the smallest I have, but they might still be, uh, a bit big on you.”
“Thank you,” she scraped out, flinching at how sore her throat was. The longer they stood in the bedroom, the stranger she felt. She knew how to interact with Rhys in meeting rooms and office corridors, but to be in a bedroom with him was so…unnatural.
“The bath is running now. There are a few different settings. Bubbles, lights, jets, it’s all fairly self-explanatory.”
Penny raised her eyebrows, but nodded along like baths with settings were a regular feature in her life.
“Kitchen is directly opposite. Help yourself to anything in the fridge.” He checked his watch, moving towards the door.
“I’ll be leaving at six o’clock tomorrow morning.
If I don’t see you then, I’ll be back in a couple of days.
Then I'll have to leave for California but we won't worry about that now. You have my number. Call me if you need anything.”
“Rhys.” Her voice was a quiet rasp. “Thank you,” she said sincerely, realising that without his help she could very well be dead…or worse. At the very least, she’d still have feet full of glass. “For everything, especially given our…past animosity.”
He hovered in the doorway for a moment before giving her a half-shrug. “Just because we don’t like each other doesn’t mean I want you dead.”
“Likewise.” Because, despite fantasising about pushing him off a balcony only hours ago, she knew she didn’t want him dead either. “Good night, Rhys.”
“Night, Penny.”
And with the click of the door, she was alone.
Silently, she headed towards a bathroom that, as it turned out, was every bit as grand as the bedroom—a huge bathtub full of what looked like jets, mirrored walls, marble flooring. As promised, a small pile of clean clothes sat on the marble countertop, topped with a first-aid kit.
Penny was relieved to see that the bathtub was full, steam seeping from its surface. She didn’t hesitate, locking the bathroom door behind her and pulling off her clothes, piece by piece.
She tried not to look in the mirrors stretching out on either side of her, but it was unavoidable.
Rhys was right. Vertical scratches were carved into her neck, lined up like dominoes waiting to fall.
She traced her fingers over them, wincing at the deepest ones.
She didn’t remember scratching herself, only her panic, her terror.
Joining them was the burst blood vessels beneath her eyes, an almost nightmarish addition to her appearance.
She couldn’t look any longer, tearing her gaze away as she stepped into the bath. It was almost too warm, stinging the cuts on her foot, but Penny added more hot water, needing to feel its burn on her skin.
She tried not to think about the video of Bielak murdering a man, or that Bielak had very nearly killed her, or that even now they could be in her flat searching for how to find her. And she especially tried not to think about the possibility that her days could very well be numbered.
Before she realised it, her eyes were filled with tears—and no matter how hot the water became, the chill in her bones stayed ice cold.