Chapter 2
Estella Grant paced the interrogation room at the Ascot Vale police station.
Her face was streaked with mascara-black tear stains, not a shred of lipstick.
She wore a black dress: high at the neck because she was in mourning, but fitted to her curves because she wasn’t dead yet.
Her hair was in a simple knot at the back of her neck, as befitted the widow she’d suddenly become.
Small wisps of blonde escaped around her ears to soften her appearance while dainty pearls decorating her lobes provided a hit of respectability.
You never knew exactly what weapon you might need, so in Estella’s experience, it was best to come armed with them all.
She knew the cameras were on; they were always fucking on.
Adrenaline fuelled her, making it impossible to remain still but she forced herself to keep the pacing slow.
Just enough that she was stretching her legs, not enough to look maniacal when it was inevitably leaked to the media.
She’d been here for sixteen hours now; the police just about wetting themselves in their desperation to strip her of her dignity and send her to a holding cell.
They weren’t going to get the satisfaction this time.
Estella had to do nothing more now than to wait it out.
This wasn’t her first fucking rodeo. Who did they think she was?
All the pieces had been slid into place long before these imbeciles had even tied their clunky black boots this morning.
All she had left to do was deliver her two lines and sit back and wait.
Please excuse me, I’m grieving the loss of my husband and I will not be answering any questions without the presence of my lawyer.
The thought they could intimidate her into anything more was frankly adorable. Checkers with a chess player.
She paced to keep the exhaustion at bay.
A police station was no place to sleep and she calculated she hadn’t slept now for almost a full twenty-four hours.
It was all she could do to keep her wits about her, as her vision blurred around the edges.
The images kept flashing through her mind, the final fruition of years of planning.
She’d thought of everything — everything — and her planning was watertight.
She had a safety net, and a safety net for her safety net.
Layers of obfuscation, of intimidation, of pure fear that she’d meted out through the ranks.
Nothing was left to chance, not a single chip in her immaculate armour. None, that is, except Alison Hartmann.
Goddamn that woman. Goddamn Simon, and goddamn her own sense of misplaced honour!
Alison would have sold her for dogfood in a heartbeat, and perhaps she should — Estella had destroyed her marriage after all — and yet Estella still couldn’t stomach the idea of Alison ending up in a shallow grave.
Not considering her only real crime was to be hoodwinked by Simon Hartmann, an error in judgement Estella understood all too well.
It had been reckless of her. This was the one day that her entire life hinged on her actions remaining normal and yet she’d risked it all in a moment of panic.
Years in the making and she’d changed things up at the last fucking minute.
Up until 9:48AM yesterday morning, her plan had been to go neatly about her day — shopping in high street stores, getting a facial at her favourite day spa — all beautifully caught on security cameras and aligning perfectly with her credit card transactions.
But when the tip-off came, she’d sped like a demon from hell on the freeway out of Melbourne, all the way to that tiny pinprick town in the Victorian countryside to save not one, but two lives, as it turned out.
And now, all she could do was grit her teeth and hope she hadn’t destroyed her own life in the process.
She thought of Alison’s girlfriend, with her soft brown eyes wide with fear, like a goddamned trembling doe.
She didn’t deserve a pointless death, even less so than Alison, who’d somehow still managed to betray her elegant disdain of Estella, even with her life hanging in the balance.
A brief memory of Alison’s mouth, the way her lips had parted with the shock of Estella’s kiss, made her smirk, right there in the police station.
She quickly pulled her face into line, but oh it had been worth it for the quick reminder of her dominance.
Estella might be trash, she might be — gasp and grab your pearls — a criminal, not to mention a garden-variety home-wrecker, but now she was also the reason Alison Hartmann fucking lived and breathed and now they both knew it.
She took in a long deep inhale through her nose and sighed loudly from her mouth, the way her yoga teacher taught them.
She remembered the instructor’s eyes widening the very first time Estella had entered the class.
Fear, largely, but also — more entertainingly — irritation.
Who was Estella Grant to muddy the chakras of this glossy sanctuary to enlightenment?
Interestingly enough the yogi never got around to protesting after her classes quickly became packed, every suburban housewife within spitting distance wanting to tell their friends they shared a yoga class with a notorious underworld wife.
That was way more exciting than a mere football WAG.
Her breathing settled, she retraced her steps for the thousandth time.
Her information had been received on a burner phone, long since destroyed.
No one from within the family knew she’d been in Gold Hill, except Devo — now neutralised — and Kenneth - who was probably loyal, but also implicated, being that he’d personally disposed of Devo’s remains in the Wombat State Forest. No, there’d be no trail to harm her from within.
Her vehicle of choice had been taken from Kenneth’s never-ending garage of stolen cars with swapped plates, now simply switched out again: a ghost car.
Her cover story wasn’t as sound as she’d previously planned but all her alibis were held in place with both a generous carrot and a hefty stick.
As always, when it came to the Grants, it was all about mutually assured destruction, and Estella, it turned out, excelled at destruction.
Which left Alison. Ugh, and her pretty little fawn.
Estella considered everything she knew about Alison Hartmann — quite a fucking lot, actually — and decided her only option was to continue to believe what she truly, deep down believed.
Alison was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a fucking nark.
Besides, Estella had promised her that she’d finally have her safety; what woman on the planet would play fast and loose with such a gift?
The door swung open, a faint creak on the hinges announcing two new arrivals.
One was her lawyer, Sasha Vogel, tall, cold and elegant — shades of Alison, Estella belatedly realised — and the other, Detective Barry Dobson, the man who longed to be her nemesis.
Estella had grown over the years to think of him as barely more than an annoying mosquito she’d love to slap, and she was delighted to see he looked as worn down and exhausted as she was, his face sallow and puffy, sagging with defeat.
“Barry.” She raised her eyebrows, as if she were dying to go another six rounds of refusal to cooperate.
“We’re free to go,” Sasha said, a note of icy pleasure in her tone.
“Don’t leave town,” was all the bluster Barry had left in him, and Estella found it in herself to smile. She fluttered her eyelashes at him and followed her lawyer out the door and into the night.
In the dark air, reality rapidly caught up.
She couldn’t go home. Her living room was a crime scene, after all.
Sitting in the back of the car, she tried to repress a shiver, only to find her hands were shaking.
She’d never set foot in that house again, as long as she lived.
Did any part of her truly regret it? A violent flash of the night before rushed over her in a wave and she tasted vomit, swallowing compulsively.
She lifted her head to watch the dark city drift by and made herself go blank.
She decided her only regret was how she couldn’t even pack a suitcase beforehand without raising suspicion.
There was the smallest of overnight bags tucked in the footwell below her, barely more than a change of clothes and some toiletries.
She forced herself to think of her exquisite walk-in wardrobe, with its acres of designer dresses and found, to her concern, that she barely cared at all.
Was it numbness? Was that the feeling? What was the appropriate emotion to feel when you had blood all over your hands?
Five lives. Five deaths. She was too tired, as it turned out, to feel anything much at all.
Instead she gazed out the window and watched the city lights blur into the darkness that surrounded her.
When the car slowed to a stop, she jolted sharply, her body on the cusp of sleep. She cursed herself; she couldn’t afford to lose even an ounce of vigilance, especially now. Kenneth, however, had his eyes studiously averted out through the front windscreen. He wouldn’t even look at her.
“I’ll walk you in,” he announced. Estella was — today of all days — sick of the sight of him, but tonight the dark unnerved her. It was laughable: Estella Grant was by any measure the most dangerous creature in Melbourne city tonight. Who could she even fear, the boogie man?
Kenneth was fifty-four years old, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him.
His chest was a brick wall, his legs like concrete pillars.
He’d been with the Grants as long as she had, though somewhere lower down the ranks until now.
Now, he was indispensable. She thought of the bloodshed that had occurred over the last twenty-four hours of their lives and wondered exactly where such a man would stand now.
He opened the car door for her and stood between her and the street, before escorting her up to the glossy front door of the hotel.
She nodded at him as the glass slid open, and he strode over to commandeer a large armchair in the reception area.
He’d be there all night, keeping watch on the only set of elevators up.
He was her last line of defence and she felt somehow sure, that tonight, he wouldn’t let her down, even though he too, had been interrogated for hours.
The young clerk at the front desk went sickly white as he took her name, glancing from her to the heavyweight fifteen feet away and back again.
He didn’t make a peep about the arrangement though, and Estella was too tired to slip him cash or even smile.
Fear would work just as well at this time of night.
Finally, the door of the anonymous hotel suite on the nineteenth floor closed behind her, and Estella swept the room for safety.
She stripped off every item of clothing on her body and crawled immediately inside the clean sheets.
She badly wanted a shower, but she couldn’t stand the sight of herself.
Another wave of memory threatened, the smell of blood sharp in her nostrils and she squeezed her eyes closed tightly. A single word formed in her mind: no. She breathed it, over and over — no no no no — until she was blank.
Tomorrow, she’d swing into action and claim for herself everything she’d earned.
Tomorrow, she’d build something in the rubble of the empire she’d brought to its knees.
Tomorrow, her new reign would begin, and her plan would slowly swing into action.
But tonight? Tonight, for the first time in years, she would close her eyes and sleep like a fucking baby.