Wicked Ambition (53 page)

How had they got on to her so quickly?

There was no time to think, no time to hesitate. She had a plan to detonate.

Robin had taken the spotlight, inciting the cheers that had proved the soundtrack to her shameless, blessed, cheating life.

After all these years there remained just a hundred metres between them.

Hello. Remember me?

As Ivy stepped forward, drawing a hand inside her coat to retrieve the butt of the firearm, she shivered at making history that could never be rewound. When all was said and done these people were no
better
than her. They didn’t have the secret…she did.

That was what Robin never realised. She never stopped to think about average people or the average life she had deserted, her neglected, forgotten-about wasteland of a past, and the thing about the past was that it liked to find a way of coming back.

Now, Ivy was anything but average.

She forced herself to wait a moment, brief as it was, to savour her arrival, before raising a gun to the air and pulling the trigger.

89

T
he first bullet smashed through a giant candelabrum, amputating it from its moorings so that it hung, drunkenly suspended, precarious as a severed finger. Robin’s music cut and she went to scream but the only sound she heard was the cold blare of the security alarm.

Fear and confusion crashed through the auditorium as the arena hurtled to its feet, rushing to escape the raining bullets that sprayed the crowd like cattle as they darted for survival, stumbling over jewel-encrusted gowns and thousand-dollar Armani suits.

Mayhem. Chaos. Bedlam. The whole place moved like a landslide, tipping like a rocking boat in a squall, terror ripping through Robin along with the intoxicating aroma of fear. Bodies hit the floor. Blood smeared across the tableware. Chairs were thrown. In their desperation they trampled over each other, the spike of a heel in an ear, the tear of a dress, the pushing and shoving.

Someone grabbed her. ‘Fucking hell, let’s
go
!’

She couldn’t. Her feet were rooted.

A crimson glimmer flickered in the shadows, bright as a ribbon, a flame in the black.

Robin knew that woman. She had seen her before.

She saw her every time she looked in the mirror.

‘It’s her,’
she whispered.

If ever she had doubted it, validation came when the weapon was raised and Robin found herself staring straight into the barrel of a gun.

90

B
y the time McEverty and Moretti arrived on the scene, they were too late. The Palisades was scene to mass evacuation and hysteria, the stadium spewing out a gush of stricken luminaries as camera crews rolled up and reporters took their posts, chattering into microphones as the news broke, too much to take in and even more to communicate…the coverage of flashing lights and cutthroat excitement behind which lives were still being lost.

‘Am I seeing this?’ McEverty was sick to his stomach.

Inside was carnage. Gunshots rang out. Armed squads were prepped to bring the assassin down amid a writhing pack of thousands, vested up and packed with ammo as they were released into the hectic fray.

‘She got here first,’ quailed Moretti, bending to catch his breath, his hands on his knees. ‘The broad beat us to it.’

An overwrought woman, rabid with fear, was ejected from the melee. Beyond the wild hair and slashed dress
he recognised her as an RnB songstress. She clutched on to him.

‘Do something!’ she wailed. ‘You have to do something!
People are dying in there!
’

McEverty pulled his gun. ‘We’re going in.’

91

A
s if in a dream, Robin watched the woman approach.

Her hair was redder than before, her gaze more gleaming, ripe with destruction.

Bodies were strewn; fallen or dead, it was impossible to tell. Robin braced herself, knowing she was going to die but that she wasn’t ready. This was her life. She had worked for it, she had earned it; it was only just starting to happen. This couldn’t be the end.

A round of bullets sounded from the rear of the space. An army piled through, lasers crossing the massacre like ticker tape.

‘Don’t you know who I am?’ Her accoster’s voice was close enough to hear, intimate, as if they were alone in a vacuum, the still, silent plug at the heart of a tornado.

The gun came in, mere feet away now. It was near enough for Robin to see the polished metal and the pallid hand that held it.

Numbly she nodded. The woman was her age. Beneath
the surface discrepancies, they looked the same. She had known it since San Francisco. She had known it all along.

‘We’re family. It’s nice to meet you, Robin.’ Her voice was elusive, one second tight to Robin’s ear and the next far away, like a message coming from the distant end of a tunnel.

Robin’s tongue was thick. She couldn’t speak.

‘I’ll do anything,’ she whimpered. The words seemed to come out regardless, her basic instinct for survival. ‘Please…’

‘Say it.’ A thin smile.

‘I can’t—’

‘Say it!’
The gun shook.

Robin remembered the grip of the woman’s hand in hers, cold and stifling…

The messages, the roses, the scrapbook, the phone call…

The childlike handwriting on the back of the photo…

The old lady in the chair, the clock stuck at a quarter to three…

The girl in the London flat…

‘You’re my sister,’ she choked, searching the woman’s eyes for compassion, affection, anything at all. Only the gun stared back. Behind it, her attacker spoke the words she had let go of such a long time ago, believing they would never arrive.

‘That’s right. We’re family, Robin. I’m the family you never had.’

Robin dropped to her knees. White noise flooded through her brain.

‘We should have turned out the same, you and me. We would have, if you had stayed and I had gone. Only I didn’t get that choice.’

She thought she would pass out. Somehow she managed to stay upright, palms in the air, begging for mercy. If she lost consciousness that would be it: she wouldn’t wake up.

‘It can’t be,’ she gasped. ‘It can’t be…’

‘You lived while I perished.’

‘I didn’t have a choice.’
I don’t want to die
. ‘I’m like you. I’m just like you—’

‘It’s too late.’ The blue eyes flared. ‘You don’t deserve this. The place you came from, the
people
you came from…You don’t deserve it. I’m the one who paid the price.’

‘My mother…’ Robin had trained herself out of saying it, thinking it, even.

‘Your mother was a drunk. She ruined me. She took me to hell and I never came back. Where were you?’ Though it was a question, the words couldn’t escape that horrible, dead, flat tone. ‘You left me behind. I was your responsibility, and you
left me behind
.’

‘Please,’ she sobbed, tears pushing through the shock, ‘I never knew, I swear it—’

‘People like you think you can walk away.’

‘It’s not what I wanted,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s not what I chose.’

‘I didn’t forget. I never forgot. I’ve been following you. I know everything. I know you better than anyone. Isn’t that what sisters are for?’

From deep within, Robin found a kernel of strength. It was defiant, self-possessed, unwilling to falter or to fail. If it had seen her through this far, it would see her through again.

‘Don’t hurt me,’ she beseeched, her arms reaching. ‘We can talk about this. We can work it out—’

‘No time.’

‘There is, please, there is—’

‘We’re through.’

The gun was levelled squarely at her forehead.

‘Goodnight, Robin.’

92

A
shot was fired. Impact hit her from the side and Robin was thrown, a crack of white light before darkness spun.

Falling…falling…

Instead of impact she became aware of strong arms around her, holding her tight.

When she looked up, she came face to face with an angel.

‘It’s you,’ she said, and thought one thing:

I’m alive. I’m talking; I’m still here
.

Leon Sway was covering her, his body warm and the smell of his T-shirt smoky and sweet. She could hear his thrumming, pulsing heart.

Was she dreaming? No. She would know him anywhere.

His back formed a wall to the source of the bullet. Beyond she saw where her sister’s missile had ripped into a life-sized replica of the Platinum Award, a silver-plated idol belting into a mic. The head had been blown to pieces—exactly where Robin’s should have been.

Leon shielded her from a shower of gunfire. His body
was steel-hard, solid as armour and firm as a rock. She gripped his upper arms, his skin beneath her fingers where the fabric had torn, and through the angle of his elbow she saw her twin go down.

Ivy Sewell jerked and thrashed as she was sprayed with lead, vacant eyes staring glassily at Robin for a long, last, lingering moment until her body caved.

Leon didn’t let her go. He kept whispering in her ear, again and again:

‘You’re safe now, you’re safe, it’s over; you’re safe…’

A stinging tear escaped her eye.

‘We made it, Robin,’ Leon said. ‘It’s OK, we made it.’

Epilogue

Winter 2013

N
ovember brought with it the first snap of cold. In London the trees had lost their leaves, brittle branches silver and still. An icy spell froze the ground, the ponds sealed over, children wrapped in scarves and hats as they played in the frost-crusted park and prayed for snow. The sky was pink and blue. Fires were lit. The nights drew in.

Turquoise da Luca was filming in the capital with British director Xander Jakobson. Her costume pinched at the waist and her hair tumbled loose, a gypsy girl come to land in the Docks, her beauty matched by her fearlessness. The movie was a romantic adventure about a woman who travels back in time to change the fate of her star-crossed love affair.

‘They meant it when they said you were a natural,’ gushed her lead when the first scene was in the can. ‘You made
True Match
.’ He checked himself. ‘I mean, I know that sounds bad after…you know…not to say that Cosmo wasn’t—’

‘I get you.’ She smiled. ‘Thanks.’

In her trailer, Turquoise took a call from Donna Cameron about her new single, ‘Strong’, which was due for release at the end of the month. Her career was hurtling to stellar heights and she cherished every moment. Since the drama of the Platinum Awards, the upsets of which were still raw, her profile had skyrocketed, as had anyone’s who had been there that fateful evening and had survived to tell the tale.

Turquoise had arrived both as a Hollywood movie star and as a world-class diva. Few artists could pull off both.

Finally, she was liberated from oppression, from fear, from the clutches of Ivan and Denny and Cosmo. She had never imagined that this day would come, and while it had done so at a price, a terrible price for so many, her history no longer had the power to destroy her.

She had stopped looking over her shoulder at every turn. She had stopped waking up in the night, bathed in sweat and flattened by memories. Her deliverance was exquisite in its transparency and scope, as if the world had been laid before her and she had been unchained to explore its riches that until this point had been swathed in obscurity.

‘Your flight gets in at eleven and then it’s straight to the studio,’ said Donna. ‘Try to sleep on the plane. Are you eating OK?’

‘Never been better.’

‘Resting when you can?’

‘Donna, I’m fine.’

‘You know I’m looking out for you. I can’t think of one person involved who’s gone straight back to work, never mind taken on what you have. You could have been seriously hurt that night, Turquoise. You could have died.’

She could. In fact if it weren’t for a kind intervention, a twist of fate, she would have been caught in the crossfire and suffered like so many. It was funny how a split-second decision could change everything. Following her performance she had craved fresh air. By the time she’d emerged the evacuation was underway and the throng was being guided out.

Luck had been a long time coming.

‘I know,’ she replied. She couldn’t say,
I’ve come closer to death than that
, and instead supplied, ‘It’s easier to focus on the job.’

Donna hadn’t been able to understand her client’s stoicism the morning after the Platinums, amid the shock and wreckage, when news of Cosmo had come in. Turquoise hadn’t reacted at all, just listened while the facts were disclosed.

Didn’t she care? Cosmo had been her costar, her collaborator—and, yes, while he had been revealed as being as depraved and degenerate as the next monster, they had known each other, they had surely been close…wouldn’t she at least feel
something
? Anything?

She didn’t. There would have been no other reason for Cosmo to attend the Platinum Awards that night other than to confront her. In tracking Turquoise down until the bitter end, he had sealed his own grim destiny. There was justice in that. She felt no sympathy.

Even if she had, relief would have buried it.

Because only then had she known it was truly over.

Cosmo Angelopoulos would never darken her door again. The joy she felt at that realisation was phenomenal. She might have ruined his reputation, but as long as he was
still breathing she could not have rested easy. His funeral had been well attended, though not by her. Instead she had focused on a different ceremony: one for the girl who had been exhumed in the Anza-Borrego desert. She had sent flowers incognito, unsure if they’d been received. It wasn’t a crime she could ever confess to, because it hadn’t been her crime. She saw that now. And she saw that the true perpetrator was dead, slain just days after his worst nightmare became a cloying, inescapable reality. Fate moved in mysterious ways.