Chapter 16
Ellie had made a lot of mistakes in her life; she could own that.
But today really capped them all off. What the hell had she been thinking?
Estella Grant was a dangerous criminal; she’d always known that to be true.
But she hadn’t fully understood how depraved she was.
Not until this exact moment, as she stood under the full fire of the glaring sun on a Melbourne afternoon in the height of summer, a blaze of hot white sand before her and loud music thudding a bass rhythm so deep she felt it in her chest. This, quite surely, was hell.
She shouldn’t have come in the first place, but the truth was that she was feeling a tiny bit addicted to the rush that seeing Estella Grant brought her.
She was dangerous, that was inarguable fact, but what she offered Ellie — a peak into her world, the chance to inhabit her skin, the flashes of insight into a fascinating character to embody — there was just no saying no.
She couldn’t help herself. After their conversation in the park — lazing back on a picnic rug, sweet crumbs of pastry on their tongues, Estella quietly revealing her childhood, her relationship with her mother, the savage pain of her death — the afternoon had slid by far too quickly.
They hadn’t even got to the part where Estella had met Mike yet, when the gentle dappled shade had grown darker and Estella had blinked, as if coming out of a dream, and announced she had to go.
It had been Ellie who’d asked — please — for more.
It was barely a week later when the message from an anonymous mobile — a burner, she was sure — had arrived with a location and a time pinging onto her calendar.
Which: how the hell had Estella gotten her phone number in the first place?
And still, here Ellie fucking was, in the very worst place on earth: St Kilda Beach.
It was a Sunday afternoon, in mid-December, which meant the sun could peel layers off your skin if you merely dared to walk outdoors.
A hot Sunday afternoon meant the entire population of Melbourne — as well as every tourist in the state — had decided to decamp to its closest urban beach.
Ellie had been smarter than to try to drive here from the other side of the city — there wouldn’t be a carpark within miles — instead sweating her way from one tram stop to another, before stumbling her way to the beach.
Only to find she had the wrong fucking beach.
Because of course Estella Grant wouldn’t pick the main St Kilda beach.
It turned out there was a whole other West Beach that Ellie had to stumble along to in the heat, until she finally arrived here: poised on the edge of the sand, baked to a crisp, sweating and parched.
She was enraged enough to snap Estella Grant, just like that, to the predictably young and stunning maitre’d of the beach bar when she’d asked if Ellie had a booking.
To her credit, the woman had only stilled herself for a second, her eyes giving Ellie a surprisingly subtle once-over to examine the guest of Melbourne’s top crook, before smiling and saying of course, just this way.
Ellie followed her out onto the sand, amongst hordes of picnic tables and beach umbrellas, boisterously laughing groups of drunk friends and couples on dates, complete with panting wet sandy dogs, all the way to the collection of small beach cabanas branded with the bar’s logo.
And there, with a respectful boundary of perfectly empty sand encircling her, lounging languidly in a beach cabana made for two, was the head of the Grant family criminal enterprise.
Estella propped herself up on one hand and examined Ellie.
“Careful,” she said, by way of greeting. “If that sunhat was any bigger, you’d have whole families trying to shelter under you for shade.”
“Shut up,” Ellie grumbled, her exasperation enough to make her momentarily forget that Estella was dangerous and demanding of caution.
Estella, though, was laughing, reaching out to condescendingly pat the other end of the cabana for Ellie to sit in.
The structure was made of wood and cream coloured canvas, similar in shape to a large sturdy hammock.
It had big cushions at each end, just enough for two people to lounge facing each other, without touching, as long as you curled your legs just right.
It was startlingly intimate, but the canvas overhead created enough shade for Ellie to be quickly lured off the hot sand and into the shelter.
“You’re late,” Estella observed lazily. She wasn’t red and flushed like Ellie, just sun-kissed and glowing.
She was wearing a bright yellow mini sun dress, all long-limbed and tousled golden hair, her lips a dewy natural shade, the first time Ellie had seen her without her characteristic bright red.
For a single second, Ellie’s stomach flipped as she had to admit openly, for the first time, that Estella Grant was heart-stoppingly attractive.
Happily, however, she was also quite probably a serial killer and most definitely a mobster, not to mention maybe also grieving her recently dead husband.
All combined, that quite perfectly put a limit to any dangerous admiration on Ellie’s end.
Still, she couldn’t help but remove her giant sun hat and tousle her own hair to remove any hat-flattening.
She tossed it down onto the sand below them.
“I went to the other beach.” Ellie glared from behind her sunglasses.
She could see herself reflected in Estella’s own polarised lenses.
Two small, flushed versions of herself — wilted in her thin-strapped singlet and short skirt — gazed back at her.
A waiter in tiny tight shorts and a fitted black t-shirt materialised and handed her a small sweating glass of something gleaming and gory red with a skewer of pineapple and maraschino cherry across the top.
It also happened to be filled with ice, so she took it gratefully and pressed it to the hot skin of her cleavage, even as she raised her eyebrows at Estella in question.
“Bikini martini,” Estella said, with a small smirk.
“Does this strike you as the kind of drink I’d order?” Ellie squinted at her and took a sip. It was sweet, strong and tart but deliciously cold.
“Not at all,” said Estella. “Which is why I got it for you.”
That made just about sense to Ellie. Everything about this situation was uncomfortable for her, so of course Estella would find it necessary to throw her even more off balance.
“Why did you want to meet here?” Ellie’s voice came out just as whiny as she felt.
Estella tipped her glasses down her nose to fix her with a bright blue, amused glance.
“Here? On one of the prettiest beaches in the city? On a beautiful day? With a private cabana and delicious cocktails being ferried directly to our hands? I’m so sorry for your suffering.”
“Ugh.” Ellie scoffed. She sipped her drink again.
It was — annoyingly enough — delicious, coconutty and tropical, and absolutely not what she’d ever in her life order for herself.
Estella was still looking at her in askance.
“Have you seen my skin?” Ellie looked down at herself, glowing white even in the shade.
“I’m not built for these conditions. I’m wearing so much sunscreen right now I could take off all my clothes and still not be naked. ”
Estella raised her eyebrows even higher, pushing her sunglasses back up to cover her eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, without an ounce of sympathy in her voice. “Next beautiful day we meet up, we can make it in a cave.”
Ellie huffed, but something in her chest lit up.
Estella was entertaining meeting her again.
It felt like being given a prize — one she shouldn’t want quite as badly as she did — a whole bounty of Estella Grant’s inner life arriving in her lap.
Suddenly the afternoon hit differently. A light ocean breeze gently teased her hair, lifting it off her sweaty neck.
The pounding of the DJ settled into a comfortable background beat, a relaxed party Ellie was somehow at the centre of.
The raucous laughter turned into a joyful soundtrack of people having the best day of their lives.
A couple of dogs splashed happily through the shallows, outracing each other for a stick in the mellow waves.
Ellie looked across at Estella, who had her cheek propped up on her fist, watching her right back. She found herself smiling.
“Tell me everything,” she said impulsively. “Make this horrible day worth my while.”
“You want everything?” Estella drawled. She paused to sip on her own mysteriously bright cocktail, lips slipping around the paper straw.
Ellie dared to dream that the alcohol might loosen her tongue, show glimpses she’d never otherwise get.
“You’re daydreaming, Ellie Graham. I’ll give you exactly what you can handle and nothing more. ”
“Then tell me. What happened when you met Mike Grant?”
“I was dumb as rocks,” Estella said so easily that Ellie immediately spotted a lie.
This woman who had irritable opinions on Chekhov?
Okay, sure. “My parents sent me to private school, did you know that? The money might have been dirty, but it’s amazing how much respectability it can buy.
When my mum got… sick, they tried making me stay at school for nights and weekends as a boarder, but I refused.
Just kept running back home until they gave in.
” She took a sip of her drink and lay back in the cabana, her expression inscrutable behind her sunglasses.
“But I’m sure you can imagine what kind of education that was.
Posh school by day, junkie mum at night, Florelli stench and glamour following me all the way into class so even my maths teacher was nervous to fail me. ”
“Get good marks did you?” Ellie sipped from her own glass to cover her confused feelings. Because while she felt sorry for this teenage version of Estella, something felt off and she couldn’t put her finger on it.
Estella snorted. “None I deserved. Like I said, dumb as rocks. So when I graduated high school with a shithouse education, a recently dead mum — an overdose, mind you — a dad who swapped out one bad mob for another and bam, I met my own handsome bad boy… well, I was easy pickings, wasn’t I? No chance.”
Ellie frowned. Estella was definitely lying to her now, she could feel it, as clear as day.
She sounded so sincere, self-deprecating, almost self-pitying, three things Ellie was quite clear Estella Grant was not.
She wasn’t about to call her on it, though.
She wanted to see where this went. “You weren’t conflicted?
” she asked. “You’d seen what gang violence did to your family.
Why would you have willingly sought that out in your own life? ”
“I know you’re not that naive,” Estella said sharply ,and Ellie tried not to jump.
Apparently, Estella could read her right back.
“I know you know that’s not how trauma works.
I was eighteen years old and that life was all I’d known since I was a little girl.
Besides, you can’t imagine what it’s like, being attached to something that notorious when you were just a kid.
The judgement, the stares, the fear all around you, even from grown adults.
There’s no way for most people to understand it.
Mike did though. He’d grown up the same way. ”
“He was a Grant. You were a Florelli.”
“Yes. But my dad defected as soon as my mum died. He hated the Florellis with a passion, even though, technically, they were blood. He’d stayed, out of fear and lack of other choices.
But when she died he went straight to Alan Grant — he was head of the family at the time — and swore him loyalty and insider information, in exchange for protection. ”
“And you? Your mum was… no longer at risk. But you were.”
“Why the hell do you think I was around the Grants so much? They were my protection too.”
“And that’s how you met Mike?”
“Got it in one. He was Alan’s youngest son and got told to keep an eye on me.
I think they knew exactly what they were doing.
Pretty eighteen-year-old, hulking handsome young protector.
We fell in love — or at least, we thought we did — and everyone leaned hard for us to get married.
ASA-fucking-P. Make clear as hell to the Florellis we were Grant family now. Have been ever since.”
“You said heroin killed your dad too. What happened to him?”
“Where’s your dad?” Estella wriggled herself upright and brushed back a lock of her hair. “You’ve never even mentioned him.” Her chin was raised, her expression suddenly jaunty like probing each other’s hardest secrets was a game they were playing.
Ellie bit the inside of her cheek, fighting with her feelings.
She didn’t want to share anything private with Estella when it was clear she was getting nothing but half-truths from her in return.
And yet she was aware of one real truth being betrayed: Estella was struggling to talk about her past too.
“Fine,” she said, deciding to gift Estella the break she was asking for. “My dad ran off when I was four. Left my mum to raise me and Zara. Apparently told her he’d never wanted to be a dad in the first place and moved away to Perth. Never heard from him again.”
“Mm,” said Estella. She pushed her sunglasses up her forehead, as if to look at Ellie more closely and let her mouth fall into a sultry pout. “Daddy issues?”
Ellie saw the unmistakable flash of teasing in those blue eyes and suddenly, irrationally, she felt a solid stab of like for this woman who point blank refused to shy away from anything uncomfortable.
Estella treated nothing with kid gloves, gave no awkward sympathy, just a bluntness and an irreverence that sounded a lot like me too.
The alcohol must have found its way to Ellie’s bloodstream because she found herself extending her foot to poke Estella’s bare leg with her sandy toes and letting the laugh she was fighting bubble out her throat.
“Fuck you,” she said and Estella laughed back at her.
This was how she got you, Ellie could see it now.
Estella was charming and far too beautiful, pushing your buttons and playing fast and loose with the truth.
This, she told herself. This is Estella Grant.
Remember this — her eyes sparkling as she reaches into your chest to excavate your weak spots, her mouth wrapping around a smile to make you believe a lie, her throat curving back because she knows most rational people would want to watch her body move — this was all gold for a character actress like Eloise Silver, and she’d take every drop of Estella and use it.