Chapter 21
“I thought we were done with stalking,” Ellie said, her voice high with surprise, but she didn’t try to let go of Estella’s warm grip.
She was still shaking off the creepiness of the encounter with Jenkins, and it said something about just how unnerved she was, that cuddling up to Melbourne’s top criminal felt comforting in comparison.
But oh, it was. Suddenly, sharply, she craved Estella’s presence, the heat of Estella’s power like it would protect her.
It took everything in her not to press herself into Estella’s body and hug the murderous crime boss.
“You think I could resist hearing about your first day?” Estella asked her, silkily.
Ellie caught passers-by doing a double take as they walked up Collins Street.
Estella was so brazen and out in the open, unmissable with that bright gold hair and bold red lip.
She could at least try to fly under the radar, but it seemed she didn’t care to. “What kind of a friend would I be?”
“You’re not a friend, you’re snooping for information,” Ellie refuted, trying to recover herself, letting the warmth of the Melbourne evening wipe that ice cold corridor scene from her blood. Estella smirked at her.
“That too, darling. Have you eaten?”
Estella wined and dined her so efficiently that Ellie couldn’t tell if she’d planned it to a tee or if perhaps every fine dining institute in the city knew to hold for her their best, most private table, and expedite the service.
Ellie watched her voraciously. Was Estella charming the wait staff with her lashes and flirtatious smiles or were they just acting their parts perfectly out of terror?
Did she just float through the city, taking whatever she wanted for herself, or did certain businesses court her favour, for means of their own?
And why had Ellie missed this woman these last weeks?
“You don’t look anything like me,” Estella said out of nowhere, as she spread chestnut butter on a slice of the best focaccia Ellie had ever tasted. “I’d never have cast you.”
“You watched the last season,” Ellie said with a shrug. “I had a great wig. I called her—” she hesitated, remembering who she was talking to. Estella raised her eyebrows, waiting, and Ellie immediately confessed. “I called her Hot Bitch.”
Estella bit back a laugh and smouldered directly at Ellie like she wanted to eat her alive. Ellie was trying to be used to this now, had figured out the notes as a combination of eyes and lips and a slow downward turn of her chin. “Of course you did,” Estella drawled.
“The blue contacts irritated my eyes,” Ellie told her, feeling all of a sudden like that was Estella’s fault. “And the fake tan smells disgusting.”
“I mean it would, since you must have to wear at least eight layers of it.” Estella looked pointedly at Ellie’s pale cleavage in the skin-tight dress she’d put on in her honour. Estella was far more dangerous than a sleazy television producer, so why did her gaze feel so damn different?
“There’s nothing to tell you,” Ellie reiterated over dessert. “No hot gossip, no indication which way the script is going.”
“Did I even ask?” Estella looked miffed. “You insist on ulterior motives, even as I fill you up with great food and too much wine.”
“You think you can get me drunk and I’ll spill secrets?” Ellie was only one glass in, but she reminded herself, briskly, to stay in control, even though Estella had ordered them the whole bottle. She remembered the impact of that haze of tequila and swallowed, hard. “I don’t have any to share.”
“Mm, I think you do.” Estella winked at her. Winked. Ellie wanted to laugh because it should have been corny, but somehow Estella pulled it off. You had to be quite the combination of beautiful and dangerous to make a move like that seem cute.
“Do that again,” she demanded.
“Do what?”
“Wink at me.”
“Wink? I did no such thing,” Estella recoiled slightly. “Don’t be embarrassing.”
“Oh, but you did,” Ellie informed her. “It was quite something. Please, please do it again. Come on. It was sexy.”
“Oh, cute.” Estella scrunched her nose up at her.
“Give it to me, then. Your best Estella Grant wink.” She gazed at Ellie challengingly and Ellie surrendered to the alcohol hitting her blood stream and gave it a red hot go.
Estella nearly spat out her wine. “You’re fired.
Oh my god, what were they thinking, casting you?
I swear to god: who do I have to kill about this? ”
Ellie burst out laughing though part of her flagged that jokes about this woman committing murder shouldn’t be sliding past her so easily. “It’s not my fault you refused to give me another demonstration.”
“I’m so fucked. I’m going to be a laughingstock.”
Ellie couldn’t take that lying down. She fixed Estella with a long gaze, then she tossed her hair back, letting her fingers hesitate just where her jaw line met her throat, before they drifted to let the very tip of her pinky finger gently play with her bottom lip, her lips parting a fraction as she let her eyes float slowly down Estella’s body.
Then she flicked her lashes up, let her eyes narrow, derisively, and then she laughed.
Estella’s three-note giggle, the one she did when she was trying to make you think you were funny.
Estella went very still. The look in her eyes didn’t give Ellie the gotcha moment she’d hoped for.
Instead, Estella looked slightly shaken.
She raised her hands and gave a slow clap.
“Way to call me out,” she said, but her voice was tight and low.
“Fuck you too, Eloise Silver.” She smiled but it didn’t meet her eyes.
“You hated that,” Ellie observed. She couldn’t tell if she was asking the question for character insight or because she just really wanted to know. “Why?”
Estella considered her for a beat. Ellie wondered if she was deciding whether or not to lie.
“You put me on like a costume,” Estella said shortly.
“Like I’m a dress you can pull on or off.
And I don’t like the idea I’m so easy to…
deconstruct, because it reminds me that I am a construct…
this creature I make myself. And I hate that, because if you can see it, maybe everyone else can see it too.
” Ellie was speechless. Estella took a solid sip of wine, and when she put down her glass, all traces of reflection had disappeared from her eyes.
“You,” she said, “are quite the paper doll, Ellie Graham. What else are you hiding in there?”
Somehow, dinner and two large glasses of wine turned into a stroll by the river, paper cups of gelato in hand.
Ellie never stopped being aware of the utterly terrifying Kenneth, who was always a respectful distance away, out of earshot, but not ever out of sight.
It sobered her, just enough, to remember that she and Estella Grant were not really friends and certainly not anything else, even though here — sitting on the grass now, watching the street lights reflect on the rippling surface of the Yarra river, while Estella stole a spoonful of hazelnut gelato from Ellie’s cup and laughed when Ellie called her a thief — it was far too easy to forget.
“Okay, so we’ve talked about Mike,” Ellie said, the weeks of silence making her wonder how many more chances she was going to get to ask questions of this woman. “Now tell me about Simon Hartmann.”
Beside her Estella sighed. “You really know how to ruin a good time, Ellie Graham. Are we really still doing this, tonight?”
“What else would we be doing?” Ellie felt slightly electrified. Surely Estella, at least, was keeping track of the reason they kept meeting.
“Ugh,” Estella said. If she knew the question wasn’t actually rhetorical, she didn’t bite. “Fine. Simon was… the worst mistake I ever made.”
“Huh.” Ellie turned that over in her brain. “I’d have thought marrying Mike was.” She felt Estella go still beside her and instantly regretted her loose tongue.
“Marrying Mike was strategic,” Estella said sharply, and Ellie filed that away in her mind.
Dumb as a bunch of rocks, huh? She liked catching Estella in a lie even more than she liked hearing the truth in the first place, because the combination never failed to add up to reveal more.
“Simon was nothing but weakness and… misinformation.”
“How so?”
Estella sighed. “When I met him, he seemed so different from the men I knew it felt like night and day. I thought he offered something I craved. But it was all smoke and mirrors, in the end.”
“What did you crave?” The answer to this question was catnip for the actor in Ellie; it could be the key to her performance of Estella, she could feel it. But she knew that wasn’t the full reason she was on tenterhooks to hear Estella’s response.
“Tenderness,” Estella said. She sounded so derisive that Ellie felt for sure it was the truth.
“Respect. He wanted to hear my thoughts, my opinions, my daydreams. At least, that’s what he made me think.
Turns out it was nothing more than the way he operated.
Pretend to see you as a whole human; no better way to get a girl to take her dress off for you than that. ”
“You think he played you?” Ellie said. She hadn’t seen it that way, when she’d last tried slipping into Estella’s skin. She’d thought that maybe he’d seen her, wanted what he couldn’t have, then fallen in too deep. She’d thought maybe he was just a coward and a fool, in love.
“Of course he did.” Estella’s eyes flashed steel. “And I fell for it, hook, line and sinker, just like a lovestruck girl.”
Ellie watched her. The remains of Estella’s gelato was melting into the bottom of the cup but she didn’t seem to notice.
She was too caught up in her own story. “He fed Mike to the police,” Ellie pointed out.
“He turned informant on his own client to keep him in jail just so he could be with you. It was an enormous risk and it cost him everything.”
“That fucking idiot,” Estella all but growled. “If I’d known what lengths he’d go to to try to keep me, I’d have never gone near him.”
Ellie kept quiet. She let Estella contradict her own narrative, wondered if she’d even notice she’d done it. “So you didn’t suggest it to him? You weren’t trying to send Mike to prison?”
“For fuck’s sake, Ellie!” Estella dumped her gelato cup forcefully on the ground, turning toward Ellie, her mouth agape.
Offence poured off her. A little too much, Ellie thought.
“Mike wasn’t perfect ,but I loved him.” She’d never said those words to Ellie before and finally, Ellie detected a slight quaver in her voice about the dead man.
She wondered what it meant. “Besides,” Estella added.
“If Mike went down, there was every chance I would too. I’d be implicated.
So why would I plan something that stupid? ”
Dumb as a bunch of rocks. “I had to ask,” Ellie said softly. “It goes to motivation.”
“Do I need to check you for a wire, again?” Estella asked abruptly, and Ellie wondered if the delicately building trust between them had been shattered.
The streetlight glinted off Estella’s eyes and Ellie remembered Estella’s hands on her body, ghosting between her breasts, stroking low over her abdomen.
She bit her lip and leaned back on her hands, arching her back slightly as if offering herself up for the taking.
“Do it then,” she said, stealing Estella’s own confident sultry tone. Estella watched her for a beat, before she scoffed and her lips twisted into a smile. She knew exactly what Ellie was doing. She’d do it herself.
“Would you sell me out too, Ellie Graham?” she asked instead, her eyes becoming intent. They were sitting so close that Ellie could hear her breathe in, then hold it, waiting to hear her response.
“In a heartbeat,” Ellie said. It was the only safe answer she could possibly give. Estella sighed and leaned back on her hands.
“Of course you would,” she agreed. “Everyone always does in the end.”