Chapter 45 #2
“Yes.” Estella didn’t mince words. She looked Mike’s mother in the face and told her the bald truth. “It was him or me, by that point. I found out what he had planned for me, and after all the ways he’d already degraded me, I wasn’t going to let him kill me.”
“Good girl,” Cheryl said. Estella’s legs gave out.
She slid down onto the armchair, head-spinning, Cheryl taking a long draw on her vape.
“Don’t love speaking ill of my dead son but Mike was a piece of shit.
Got that from his dad. Which, by the way: who do you think got rid of him?
First time I was ever proud to call you my daughter was when you finally took action.
Alright. For fuck’s sake. What do we got to do to finish this? ”
Say what you like about Cheryl Grant, but she sure as hell was efficient when she wanted to be. Within two hours, they had Estella’s work laptop in the room, delivered by Vera, with Florence swiftly arriving on her heels. Estella watched, mesmerised, as the three older women circled each other.
“Well look who the fucking cat dragged in,” said Cheryl when Vera walked in. Two psychopaths, veterans of lives of crime. It was like standing in a police museum. “Should have known you’d be involved in this bullshit.”
“Good to see you too, Cheryl. You look fucking rough. Need some more work done.” Vera tapped her own crepey jowls and tried to lift them with her fingers.
Cheryl threw back her head and laughed, then almost died from her coughing fit.
Florence, for her part, only gave a sharp nod of greeting.
She was always above this kind of posturing, in it for her own reasons, none of them, for once, about ego.
“Alright ladies,” said Cheryl, like she was calling to order a jam-swapping session of the Country Women’s Association. “We’re not here to fuck spiders. Let’s get this shit done.”
Just like with the Florellis, eighty percent of crime was about accounting and Estella had spent years manoeuvring things into this position.
With each click of her mouse she ripped the strings out from filthy business after filthy business.
And with every transaction she signed her own death warrant.
There was no point even considering fleeing from the full weight of the justice system, that was the least of it.
Every bad motherfucker on the Australian Eastern seaboard would want her dead now.
With surgical precision, she destroyed allegiances and ripped apart deals.
She gripped the tiny white business card Yolanda had pushed into her hand on the way out of the station and used the email address on the back, copying files, documenting names and dates, gifting the detective all the evidence she needed to put almost every high-ranking Grant family member behind bars should she choose to. It took most of the night.
The other jobs were practical. First Vera, then Florence were dispatched out into the early morning to destroy assets and spread information, setting all kinds of trains in motion, all on an unstoppable collision course.
The next step was for them to get the hell out of dodge, to cover their tracks, to take whatever steps they needed to flee, no holds barred.
“I fucking love you, kid,” Florence told her, ruffling her hair, her wife waiting in the car.
“I knew you could do it. Your mum would be so damn proud if she were here to see you.” She wrapped her arms around Estella, her eyes wet.
“Whatever happens from here, wherever you end up, you’ll always know that, so hold your pretty head up high.
” She stopped talking, choking on her words.
They both knew Estella would be dead, in jail, or dead in jail.
Estella wouldn’t cry, though. Not while Florence was there to see her, because Florence had given everything to see this day, and Estella could never in a thousand years repay her.
Vera, for her part, just gave Estella a solid nod. “Good work,” she said. It was terrifying. Then she left.
“Well,” said Cheryl with a stretch and a yawn. “I reckon Belize looks good. I’ve got a flight booked for midday. I better make tracks.”
“I never thought I’d see the day we worked together,” Estella admitted, blurry-eyed with exhaustion. “Thank you for helping me kill the beast.”
“Who says it was me helping you?” Cheryl said, her eyes narrow. “Maybe this was you doing my dirty work all along, you ever think of that?”
There was no hug goodbye, but Estella wouldn’t let Cheryl within stabbing range anyway.
Estella awoke — head pounding, eyes gritty — several hours later.
She had a phone again, a burner that Florence had brought her, and the time on the screen was 4:30 in the afternoon.
She supposed that all in all, when she was locked in a jail cell she’d be pleased that she’d managed to spend her last day on the outside sleeping in 5000 thread count sheets in a luxury hotel bed.
She’d slept for hours, her life’s mission finally complete.
She tried to feel it, but it seemed impossible, the emotions too big and confusing to grasp.
She rolled over, her gaze falling on the empty other half of the bed and just like that she was winded with pain.
Ellie Graham. The thought of her almost broke her in half.
Estella had never in her life been so free as in this moment, nor so utterly doomed.
Death or jail, her life was over, and all she could truly feel in her last moments of freedom was an agonising longing for someone who never wanted to speak to her again.
Ellie had looked at her with such horror and derision in her beautiful dark eyes.
Estella Grant the murderer. She hadn’t been able to tell Ellie, in that moment, that even the recent Florelli deaths had, in the end, been nothing to do with her.
That it was turf war. Because the truth was, Estella had set it all in motion.
Grants versus Florellis, a tale as old as time, but this time the fight was to the death for both of them.
If one family went down, the other would only grow in power, absorbing the other’s repugnant business, unstoppable and bloodthirsty.
Both had to go for there to be any chance of redemption.
Of course, Estella wasn’t stupid; she knew that other actors would simply sweep in, that the cruelties of the drug trade and human thirst for exploitation would grow up again in the void they left behind.
It would take a long time though, for anyone to recreate the legacies of suffering their combined families had wrought.
Estella couldn’t fix the damn world. Vengeance, in the end, was the best she could offer for thousands of ruined families, and, ultimately, her mother.
Estella had never really stopped to consider any cost to her personally.
She’d had nothing left to lose, Mike had long made sure of that.
But then, Ellie had happened. Right there in the hotel bed she squeezed her eyes tight, hot tears leaking into the pillows.
She’d known having nothing to lose was what gave her the strength to act, so she’d held Ellie at bay, for as long as she could.
But now, her mission complete, Estella had no choice but to let the feelings rush over her like a tidal wave.
She loved Ellie Graham. She loved the warmth in her eyes, her sensitivity and ferocious insight, the way she could undo Estella’s layers of obfuscation and see through to her truth.
She loved Ellie’s laugh when she was surprised, her stupid bloody-minded bravery that made her seek out a mob boss in the first place, and step out from hiding to take down a thug with a gun.
She loved Ellie’s protective streak, the way she made so damn clear that love was an action verb, like the way she loved her sister and nephew.
She loved seeing Ellie perform, loved the silk of her skin, loved her on her knees, so clear in her own desires.
She loved that kiss in the foxgloves, Ellie’s shocking clarity, everything is better when you’re around.
Had anyone ever thought such a thing about Estella Grant?
The truth was, Estella — if she’d been given her whole life over again — would do everything in her power to spend it loving Ellie Graham.
She tried to imagine it: a world in which Estella deserved that.
It was an impossible dream. Estella was stained by her own choices, by those of her family, those of her husband.
She was grubby beyond any possible measure, so sullied by the world she’d chosen to stay in that she’d mar Ellie’s innocence with her mere presence.
And yet she was out of the bed before her brain could catch up with what she was about to do.
She was propelled to action, forced to her feet, because it was unbearable that she would die or go to jail and Ellie would go the rest of her life thinking that Estella was evidence of a stain on her character.
Ellie Graham walking around in the world thinking I fell for a psychopath’s charm or worse, I’m attracted to danger.
Oh god. Estella thought through the possible outcomes of that: Ellie walking boldly into lion’s dens, offering her beautiful submission to someone who couldn’t be trusted, all because she thought she was the kind of woman who couldn’t trust her own judgement.
She slipped the gleaming red dress over her head that Florence had brought her, a gift of glamour for her final moments, so that when Yolanda came for her, her perp walk would be with a certain fuck you dignity, rather than Estella Grant delivered to justice in track-pants.
She met her own eyes in the mirror as she washed her face and applied her makeup.
Last day on earth, huh? If that was the case, then the one last thing she had left to do was to finally tell Ellie the truth.