Wicked Ambition (11 page)

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No. Don’t. I’d rather you didn’t. It’s just a headache.’

‘Then let’s at least get hold of your car—’

‘I’m fine.’

The vehicle came to a stop. ‘I’ll call you,’ she said, before stepping out into the night, not caring if she was seen, hailing a cab like anyone ordinary and wishing with all her might she could be just a girl on the street, no one remarkable, invisible, untouchable, free.

Cosmo Angelopoulos liked to watch. Grace Turquoise got that pretty quick, the minute she turned up at the door to his Hollywood mansion and found a six-foot black girl waiting for her inside. The girl was drugged up to the eyeballs, reclining on a velvet sofa with her legs wide apart. Wordlessly Cosmo tore off Grace’s coat and pushed her to the floor
.

‘Open your mouth, cunt,’ he directed. ‘And look like you’re enjoying it.’

She recognised Cosmo straight away. She had seen him in the papers, on TV, the twenty-something up-and-coming actor who was billed to take Hollywood by storm. Yes, he was staggeringly handsome. Yes, he resembled a young Marlon Brando with his brooding looks and muscular build. Yes, he had the face of a boy who would never say no to his mom. Who knew he was also a despicable pervert who liked to beat on women? But she was here to do a job, and as one of Madam Babydoll’s she couldn’t afford to disappoint
.

Grace used her tongue in the way Cookie had shown her. The black girl’s thighs were strong and held her in place like a vice, hands snatching down to push her in deeper. It was salty and sweet and wet, and every time she broke for air Cosmo forced her back
.

‘Keep goin’, bitch,’ he snarled, kneeling next to them for a front row seat. ‘You like that, don’t you, you greedy whore?’ Grace closed her eyes and concentrated on the task
.

‘Oh, yeah…’ the girl moaned. ‘Yeah, baby, that feels so fine…’

Cosmo started to feel her up. He began by removing Grace’s thong, roughly dipping his fingers in, two or three at once, which made her gasp her discomfort. They were covered in a freezing cold gel that was meant to open her up but instead she contracted against. His thumb pushed violently into her ass, forcing her to cry out
.

‘Get back to it, slut.’

The girl’s hips tilted to meet her and Grace forced herself to keep going, despite the pain. Cosmo freed his cock and slammed into her, grunting at her rear, snatching at her breasts and pushing in deeper and deeper till it felt like there was nothing left of her to give. With a gurgling
whimper he climaxed. She felt a jet of warm liquid spurt across her back
.

If she’d thought that was it, she was mistaken. Cosmo could go all night
.

‘Your turn, bitch.’ He slapped the black girl’s face, twisting her pair of dark, hard nipples to bring her out of rapture. An enormous dildo appeared, its tip glistening. Obligingly the girl attached it to her waist, an obscene rubber proboscis, huge and frightening as Grace was flipped over a chair and her legs brutally spread. The hurt was like nothing she had ever experienced, tearing her in two, but still there was no mercy. The girl pounded into her, delirious, deaf to her complaints. Cosmo paced, proudly stiff once more, pausing at intervals to refresh his viewpoint. Eventually he stopped at Grace’s head and drove his cock into her mouth. She could taste the remnants of his first ejaculation and gagged
.

When it was over, she returned to Madam Babydoll’s with three thousand dollars in her pocket. It was the most she had ever been paid for a job but that made no difference
.

‘He likes you,’ encouraged Madam Babydoll the following week. Grace had only just recovered from the ache Cosmo had inflicted on her—but she’d never recover from the humiliation. ‘You’re his favourite. He wants you again. He’s requested you personally.’

The other girls were jealous. Cosmo was the biggest catch on the books
.

‘I don’t want to.’

‘It’s five grand this time, honey. You keep three and a half. It’s your call.’

The second occasion she went he’d hired a redhead with
freakishly large breasts. Grace took charge of the dildo and was instructed to nail Cosmo with it while the redhead sucked him off. The ordeal took hours because Cosmo was so high he couldn’t come. He made Grace call him a bad boy and tell him he needed his ass screwed to teach him a lesson. When finally he was done he was so exhausted that he had them run him a bath and put him in it, relaxing with a joint while he scoped them making out on the floor. Recovered, he took them in turn over the rim of the tub, so many times she lost count, and when Grace left the mansion at five a.m. she was sorer and more bruised than she’d ever been
.

After that he asked for her every time. Madam Babydoll tried to switch her appointments to accommodate before realising that Cosmo would pay more and more for whatever it was he couldn’t have. Soon a night with Grace reached ten thousand dollars
.

‘I said I was through with that,’ she told Madam Babydoll. But in truth she had almost enough saved to get her own place, try going it alone in LA and getting out of this sordid game once and for all. One last night with Cosmo Angelopoulos, that was it; she’d endured it before so she could endure it again, and after that she’d be made. How much worse could it get? The exchange was surely worth it. She’d never need to prostitute her body again. She could meet a guy, fall in love and do it like it was supposed to be done. No one had to ever know what she’d been through or how she’d lived. A fresh start…a clean slate
.

Deciding to go to Cosmo’s that night was the worst decision she ever made
.

The girl he’d got was young. Grace saw straight away
that he’d plied her with drugs—blow, pills, weed, anything he had going—and, judging by the clothes strewn haphazardly across the floor, had already had sex with her. The girl’s eyes were glassy and stoned, she kept giggling and slurring and when Cosmo beckoned her over to attend to his burgeoning hard-on she weaved drunkenly before crashing to the ground
.

‘I don’t think she’s well.’

‘Shut it, bitch. Take your clothes off.’

‘She needs a doctor. What have you given her?’

‘What she begged for: a big hard cock.’

‘She’s tripping. We should call someone.’

Brutally Cosmo slapped her. He grabbed her chin in his hand and squeezed. ‘I
said
, take your fucking clothes off. Now. Or I’m going to make you regret it.’

One night.
As Grace removed her stockings she repeated the promise in her head
.

One last night and then I’ll be free.

Kneeling, she fondled the girl’s breasts. The girl was out of it, slumped on the floor, her limbs shut down. When the girl arched her back, at first Grace thought it was with pleasure. It wasn’t. She’d started to spasm, her body jumping and seizing. Grace saw a pop of foam at her mouth, the eyes rolling back in her head until only the whites were visible
.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Cosmo cried
.

‘She’s fitting. Call an ambulance. Right now.’

Grace attempted to hold her down, tilting the girl’s head as best she could to prevent her choking on her tongue
.

‘Like hell I am.’

‘Do it. She’s in danger.’

‘So am I if we get the fucking cops round!’

Grace pinned him with a hateful stare. ‘Do you want her to die?’

‘She’ll get over it. It’s a bad trip, that’s all.’

It wasn’t all. The girl’s body surrendered to a series of rapid tremors before suddenly, too quick, impossibly quick, it strained a final time before becoming still. Frantically Grace touched her pulse. Nothing. She felt her heart. Still. Dead still
.

No. No, no, no, no, no…

Before she could think twice, Grace was resting the girl’s head back, opening her airways and breathing into her mouth. Cosmo was useless, hanging back and swearing, freaking about the mess on his luxury shag-pile carpet and how the fuck they were going to get out of this. She tried to remember what scant first aid she’d picked up off TV, medical dramas she’d half watched, and began to establish a rhythm. Two breaths, thirty chest compressions; she didn’t even know if that was right but she couldn’t stop. Two more, thirty more, two more, thirty more, two more, desperation building and panic surging and then…

Nothing
.

‘Don’t die on me, sweetheart. Come on, not here, not now…’

She didn’t know how long she kept it up for, and only stopped when she saw the girl was grey in the face. She was dead. It was over
.

Grace sat back on her knees. Cosmo was clothed, stalking the room. He tossed her belongings and numbly she dressed. ‘Get her the hell out of here,’ he ordered
.

The word floated in Grace’s throat before she caught hold of it. ‘What?’

‘You whores stick together, don’t you? Get out and take her with you. Far as you’re concerned she never set foot in this place.’

‘You heartless bastard. I’m taking her nowhere.’

‘You’re in this too, cunt.’

‘I tried to save her.’

‘Or else you killed her. I bet you finished her off right there, thumping her chest like that without a clue what you were doing!’

Grace’s mouth was dry. She didn’t believe him, she couldn’t, but even as he uttered the words she knew they would haunt her as long as she lived
.

They folded the body into the trunk of Cosmo’s car. He told her that if she breathed a word to anyone he would kill her, and it had been both their faults because if she’d given him time to think then they might have been able to save the bitch. Grace didn’t speak a word as they drove out to the desert. Cosmo flicked the radio on and smoked manically out of the window. All she would remember of that drive was Bruce Springsteen on the airwaves, ‘Born to Run’, and it seemed that her whole life had been spent doing exactly that
.

She shivered in the cold night as Cosmo dug the hole. It took forever. A host of stars observed overhead as the body was thrown in, eliciting a sickening thump. Grace pleaded once more to go to the cops and he hit her so hard she was thrown across the hood of the car
.

‘This goes nowhere,’ he told her on the ride back to town. ‘Do you understand? I give you your money; you crawl back to whatever hole you came from and I never want to see you again. That bitch is nothing to me, and neither are
you. You claim to know me and you’re a crazy-ass motherfucker off the goddamn street. You even think about telling anyone any of this and you’re more of a corpse than the girl I just buried. Got it? It’s your fingerprints all over her, too. Never forget that.’

Grace Turquoise quit Madam Babydoll’s the next morning. She didn’t leave a note, just the cut she owed. Downtown she rented an apartment and took a job in a bar. One night she was singing as she worked and invited to the stage, where as long-overdue luck would have it a visiting record producer encountered the most astonishing voice he’d ever heard
.

A week later she was signed to her first label. Cosmo Angelopoulos soon became a horrifying memory, one that would wake her in the night, bathed in sweat and remembering his words. He couldn’t touch her now…could he?

She wasn’t to know that her flourishing stardom was going to lead her straight back into the ring. And that one day she would have to face her adversary—and then, only then, one of them would be made to pay
.

14

R
obin’s tour manager had arranged a dance audition in West Hollywood. They needed to select eight principal dancers and twenty backing, and with hundreds queueing round the block from six a.m., they knew they had their work cut out.

‘We’ll see you in groups of thirty, three rows of ten,’ Marc Delgado told them. ‘When I hold my hand up like this, front row goes to the back and the next comes forward. Clear?’

The studio was a kaleidoscopic jumble of leg warmers, slashed T-shirts and hairstyles that rivalled even her own. California-tanned bellies peeked out above hip-hugging slouch pants, and smooth, powerful limbs practised stretch warm-ups with ease. There couldn’t be more than an ounce of fat in the room. Robin didn’t think she’d ever seen so many gorgeous people in the same place: African, Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic, each was as cute as the next.

‘This is going to be tough,’ she said, grabbing a coffee
and taking her place alongside Marc and Barney. Barney was flipping through the dancers’ profiles.

‘Jeez, where do we start?’

‘Stamina,’ Marc advised. ‘These guys need to be able to perform night after night and week after week. Today should give you an idea of how they keep pace. We’ll have the finalists moving for an hour or more, but any sign of flagging, breathlessness or ill-coordination and it’s a no as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Harsh!’ said Robin.

Marc shrugged. ‘But true.’

The routines fired up to Robin’s opening number ‘Told You So’ and an army of bodies slipped into the choreographed routine. Marc had arranged a killer string of steps, jagged one minute, supple the next, and the dancers adhered with poise and precision.

After the first round the panel conferred, starring the names of those they’d call back and striking through any who hadn’t made it. Marc explained it was a rigorous process and the dancers selected would be made to endure several gruelling cycles before decisions were made. He found Robin’s determination to employ a majority of women refreshing, and unlike most stars he’d worked with she was unthreatened by their beauty. ‘If you’re doing me a hot show, Marc, then I want the hottest girls there are.’