Chapter 24
Ellie awoke early with the solid sense that something terrible was happening.
Then it all flashed back to her. Estella’s face, just before she plunged the office into darkness.
Someone’s in here. The sound of a man scary enough to frighten Estella Grant, moving around the room, hunting them.
The sound of the safety clicking off that gun; Ellie had handled enough prop guns in season six alone to know it instantly.
Hurling herself into action so fast she had no time to second guess it.
The crack of the heavy lamp on his skull, the sensation jarring up her arm all the way to her shoulder.
Blood. The terrifying bodyguard exploding through the door and into action. Weeping in Estella’s arms. Ellie opened her eyes and sat up abruptly in bed. What the fuck had she gotten herself into?
She’d just wanted to do a good job on television, and now, her life was blurring all the way into Estella’s. Drinking with a mobster, exploring her lair, considering kissing her, getting caught in the crossfire between Grants and Florellis, almost killing a man.
Her brain scrambled, trying to catalog the moments that had followed.
Hanging back in horror as Estella helped her bodyguard haul the bloodied, half-conscious man onto one of those pristine couches in the waiting room, huge industrial cable ties cuffing his arms and legs.
He was groaning incoherently from the blow Ellie had given him to the back of his head.
She’d been terrified and trapped, sure, but how had she also committed a fucking assault last night to keep another mobster safe?
Estella had straightened up, looked down at the injured thug bleeding out on her beautiful sofa with a solid glare of distaste.
Then, she’d all but dusted her hands, picked up her shoulder bag and escorted Ellie out.
Down at the front door to the street, she paused and dialled a number Ellie knew wasn’t 13CABS because the car that arrived barely a minute later was unmarked.
“Get her home safe,” she said to the driver who popped out to open the back door for Ellie.
He was an older white man, but solid and fit, like he could be the bodyguard’s somewhat less terrifying brother.
Estella gave him Ellie’s address, like it was nothing, like it was right there in the front of her brain, because, of course, this woman who so casually tied up notorious gangsters had also been inside her apartment.
Ellie didn’t budge, despite Estella nudging her toward the back door. “Will he be okay?” she asked.
“The driver?” Estella frowned over toward where the man was sliding back in behind the wheel. “He’s safe, I promise.”
“Not him. Gio,” she hissed. Estella shrugged, already looking away.
“He’ll be fine. We’ll take care of it.” Ellie didn’t love the sound of that. Estella nodded toward the cab, her eyes unreadable under the cold gleam of the streetlight. “Ellie, you need to go, it’s not safe to be out here like this tonight.”
Ellie grabbed her wrist. “Please,” she said, “tell me what happens?” She wanted to be clear she hadn’t fucking killed someone, but Estella just set her jaw.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s better that you’re not a part of this. This isn’t your world.” Her gaze was steady and implacable, and Ellie gritted her teeth. She wasn’t being dismissed like this.
“I will fucking stalk you again for the rest of your goddamn life unless you fucking call me, Estella,” she said, drawing herself up as fiercely as she could.
Estella was trying to walk her back toward the cab door, like she couldn’t get rid of Ellie fast enough, but at that, she paused, the two of them pressed tight, right up against the open car.
“I’ll be in touch,” she relented. Ellie nodded. She slid into the back of the car and Estella slammed it closed after her. It was only as the cab drove away that Ellie could feel her legs shaking.
Her whole morning felt groggy. She ignored a call from Zara and another from Sophie.
There was a message from Jimmy Jenkins himself, inviting her to have drinks with him the following week.
Ellie couldn’t bring herself to deal with any of them.
She folded into herself, curling up on her sofa, feeling ice cold despite the blue blaze of the sky outside her apartment window.
And there she stayed, for what felt like hours.
Finally, she picked up her phone and called the only number she could think of.
“Darling!” boomed Hugo. “I was just speaking about you. Telling my new friends about my favourite protégé and her big starring role. You’ll never believe who I just met out here, in this delightful little town—”
“Hugo,” she interrupted him. “I think I’ve fucked up.”
“Well,” he said, almost fifteen minutes later, when she’d poured out the whole story.
“I suppose that’s what I get for teaching you Stanislavski right out of high school.
” She snorted out a laugh. She heard him take a long breath over the phone, like he was pausing for time, aiming for the biggest impact he could.
“Eloise. I think you know perfectly well you’re taking method acting a little too far, don’t you?
No role on earth is worth getting yourself killed. ”
She shook her head, even though he couldn’t see her. “I know. I took it too far the moment I started following her. It was only ever going to lead to disaster.”
“I can’t fault your determination,” he said, with a sigh.
“And god knows I would have killed for the chance of getting to follow Henry the eighth before I played him on screen.” Ellie winced, thinking of the dent to Gio’s skull.
Hugo didn’t seem to notice what he’d said.
“I think though, my darling, that you know quite well that finally, this is enough. You see that, don’t you? ”
“I have to see her again,” she confessed, her voice almost in a whisper. “Hugo, I can’t explain it. It’s like a drug. She’s got me hanging on her every word. And every moment, every little lie she tells me, it just gives me more.”
“I see,” Hugo said. For the first time in the many years she’d known him, Hugo sounded uncertain.
It made her stomach clench. For a long moment there was silence down the line, and she tilted her head up to the ceiling with discomfort.
Finally, he sighed. “Eloise, you are an adult. And a professional. Did you call me because you think I’ll give you permission to do what you’re already planning to do? ”
Ellie swallowed. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe I want you to tell me that it’s brave. That I’m committing to this role beyond anything reasonable. That acting demands it of me.”
“I think you know better,” said Hugo. “For what it’s worth.
” For a long moment there was silence again.
“Ellie,” he said, more serious than she’d heard him in years.
“You are my best and brightest. Whether it happens now or later, I have no doubt you’ll make it to the very top.
Stage or screen, the pick of roles will be yours.
But if there’s one actor in the world I didn’t think I’d have to remind that life is more important than work, it would be you. ”
Ellie blinked back tears. She remembered the first time he’d sat her down explaining this simple fact to her.
She was 23 years old, about to renegotiate what would be her second year on the biggest springboard to stardom Australia had — Home and Away — when Zara had called her, broken and weeping, back in Melbourne, alone with the then three-year-old Arthur.
She’d never stopped being grateful for the pragmatic kindness he’d shown her, on that terrible desperate day.
“I know,” she whispered again now. She’d heard the message he was too kind to say.
Think about Zara. Think about Arthur. He knew, better than anyone, that for years that was all she’d done.
She longed with a ferocity so deep it shook her, to be alone and free, for once, to make every terrible, selfish, dangerous choice she ever wanted. It was her life, after all. Wasn’t it?
“Eloise. You have everything you need from her and more. It’s okay to stop now.”
It was a final attempt, from the man who’d taught her everything she knew about acting. He was the closest thing she’d ever had to a father figure. They’d treated each other with the utmost respect and Ellie had never lied to him, not once. Not until now.
“I’ll try,” she said.
She got through that day, trying not to stare at her phone, trying not to wait for Estella to call her and let her know two things that felt increasingly urgent to her: if Gio had survived, and when Estella would see her again.
It felt darkly confusing, a pull and a push.
Estella’s life repelled her with its violence and danger.
But Ellie felt alive in her presence, maybe even because of that danger.
She could turn into Estella on a switch now, she could feel her in her bones.
She could slide into Estella’s body, walk her walk, slow her speech into that just right drawl, but even more than that — the thing that had Ellie really hooked — was the way she was sure she was starting to feel Estella’s feelings, as if all the way from the inside.
She knew now when Estella was lying, even if she didn’t yet know why.
She knew with absolute certainty that Estella was getting hooked on Ellie right back, that the pull was coming both ways, intense and magnetic, even though she couldn’t understand yet what it was Estella was getting from her.
And she’d known, with every fibre of her being that when Estella had pulled her close behind that curtain it had been with equal parts protection and pure, sharp terror.
And that was what was fucking with her mind.
Because Estella Grant was a murderer. She had to be.
Nothing else made sense without that fact.
And the only way Ellie could feel this pull toward her without losing her sense of self was to squash that fact until Estella was all but a cartoon villain.
She imagined her, quite clearly, in a 1940’s trench-coat, speaking out the side of her mouth with a transatlantic accent, a fiery dame with a smoking gun.
If Estella were to shoot that gun, the only blood would be in black and white, distant and unreal.
Estella was bad. She had a very real, very scary criminal network at her disposal. Bad guys were afraid of Estella Grant.
And yet, there behind the curtain, Ellie had felt her trembling.
She’d felt Estella’s terror so acutely that even when she was across the other side of the room, throwing out bravado, all but goading a dangerous man to take a pop at her like she was bulletproof and eight feet tall, Ellie could feel her fear.
Estella Grant was real. She was human. She was a woman with a sketchy past and an uncertain future.
It felt akin to being a small child and seeing your schoolteacher in the supermarket; Ellie was aghast to realise that Estella was just a fucking person all along.
If she got shot, she’d die. If she took a wrong turn — distracted by a tipsy actress to take a turn into her office for some sightseeing — she could die.
And yet, pushed to that point, Estella had chosen to protect Ellie.
To step out, into the line of fire. To literally die for her, if that was what it took.
If Ellie had thought she was getting to know Estella Grant — through lies and flirting, through watching her mouth and studying the lines of her body — last night had taught her she knew nothing about this woman at all.