Wicked Ambition

She batted off the question. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘Well, I’m sure getting an introduction. See if that drags Cosmo out his office!’

‘Jax is a fool.’

‘Imagine it, though.’ Ava leaned in, a wicked smile on her face. ‘He’s got to be an animal between the sheets, hasn’t he?’

‘Hmm.’

‘Not that I’m complaining. Cosmo’s a tiger.’

Turquoise excused herself to visit the bathroom. She almost tripped in her haste to reach it and only when she was alone could she steady her breathing and get a grip of the thumping in her chest. She closed her eyes, stars bursting in her vision, images from the past rushing back though she tried with all her might to stifle them.

Cosmo can’t hurt you now. You have to get a hold on this; otherwise it’ll kill you.

Maybe that was what she deserved. She deserved to die and if it weren’t by electric chair then it would be by her own conscience.

He made me. It wasn’t my fault.

Or was it? She had been seventeen, old enough to know her own mind.

Stop. STOP! She put her face in her hands, pressing her temples till they ached.

What if it came out? What if the facts escaped? Every hour of every day she lived in terror of that revelation and what it would mean. Armageddon: the end of her world.

It won’t. Cosmo has his own reputation to protect. He’s the only one who knows…

Turquoise drew air in and out, in and out, slowly, till her pulse regained its rhythm. Gradually light seeped through and her goals readjusted. The first was to get through dinner.

Cosmo Angel had known her a lifetime ago. He had known her when she was a girl, vulnerable, weak. When she was someone capable of…

He didn’t know her now.

She made her way back through the restaurant and greeted Ava with a smile.

Grace Turquoise da Luca was born in Hawaii in 1986, the only child of religious parents. When she was a baby her father took her mother for a drive in the country and they never came back. The car was found battered and burned at the foot of a ravine and despite efforts to ascertain the truth of what happened, no definitive clues were found. Some said her father had been cursed by debt and had decided to end it; others that it was an act of God for having birthed Grace two months before they were married.

Grace had no memory of them throughout her childhood, save for photographs and scraps people told her. Her mother had been a striking woman, very dark, and her father ‘a stubborn man’. That was all she knew. Her parents were strangers.

After their deaths she stayed with a village woman, a friend called Emaline, because it was believed further disruption would damage her beyond repair. There she passed a safe, happy few years; she went to school, she made friends and she listened to the records piled high at home. Wonderful old-world singers like Billie Holiday, Ella and Etta, as well as Emaline’s own voice as she sang softly with a guitar on the veranda, sipping lime cordial. For her eighth birthday Emaline gave her a guitar of her own. From an early age Grace Turquoise knew that music would be her life-long obsession.

On rainy nights they would sit side by side on the couch, the fire burning, a woollen rug across their knees and Emaline’s arms safe and warm as she pulled the child close to kiss the top of her head. They would watch black-and-white movies together, get lost in worlds of romance and betrayal, lovers and wars, glamour and fantasy. Emaline would whisper stories about when she was a girl, and how one summer she had run away from home and spent long hot weeks acting for a theatre until her father had found her and brought her home. Grace’s imagination had been filled with the glittering characters Emaline had played, the handsome leading men she had known, and how Emaline had dreamed of some day becoming a Hollywood actress. ‘Do you know what I believe?’ Emaline whispered into Grace’s hair one sunset. ‘I believe that’s going to be you one day. My little star.’

Soon after her eighth birthday Grace was sent to live with her uncle on a farm in Pennsylvania. Ivan Garrick hadn’t seen her mother in years but it turned out he was her only living relative. Grace didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to leave her friends or Emaline. She didn’t want to live with someone she had never met. But that was the law and she could do nothing to dispute it. When she turned up on Ivan’s doorstep she was frightened.

But Ivan was a kind man. He was fifty or thereabouts and admitted to having had a dispute with her mother, after which he had been cut out of her life. He had always longed to meet Grace and had petitioned long and hard for her custody. Like her he had no surviving family and so they had to stick together, he said. Blood was blood, he promised. Lots of things happened in life but that could never be changed.

If her parents had been devout then Ivan was in another league. Every day he spent hours at church, talking with the pastor and praying for his sins. Grace couldn’t understand. Ivan was a gentle, lonely man and she couldn’t imagine him sinning any more than she could Emaline refusing her a kind word. Bad people existed but Ivan wasn’t bad.

A short time later, they received word that Emaline had passed. Grace travelled alone to her funeral and cried as she had never cried before. Ivan organised her return ticket and was waiting at the station to meet her when she arrived. ‘You’re home now,’ he said.

Sometimes Ivan disappeared at night. She would wake to find the big house empty and pad through its dark chambers, calling his name. The next morning he’d stay asleep until the afternoon, and would emerge looking tired and haunted. Those days he prayed the most.

Grace settled into her new life and concentrated on her music. At ten years old she learned to read compositions; at twelve she was strumming on the guitar Emaline had given her and at fourteen she realised she had a voice to go with it. Ivan would ask her to sing and would sit and watch her, telling her how beautiful she sounded and what a lovely young woman she was becoming. Grace liked it when he said that. Not a girl any more but a woman. It made her feel grown-up, ready to embrace the exciting life ahead of her.

Soon after, she became a grown-up for real. Playing outside one day, she felt wetness in her skirt and when she went to the bathroom she found blood. Her first thought was thata monster had crawled inside her; the monsters Ivan talked about that he promised the Lord would protect them from. She shook in his arms, and Ivan had to explain as best he could that this wasn’t a disease but a natural progression—one he had, in fact, been counting on.

We’ve been waiting, he told her. Fear nothing, my angel. You’ve arrived.

It was six months before his meaning became clear. The last six months of innocence.

It happened on a Tuesday night. She would always remember the moon, crisp and white like a marble in the sky. Ivan crept to her bedroom and told her to come outside, there was something she needed to see; it was a present he’d bought for her. He was sweating and his fingers trembled, waxy in the dark, but she’d thought it was the puppy she’d longed for and so in her nightgown had descended the stairs and pushed open the door to the yard.

Outside was a circle of people, dressed in black robes and hoods that covered their faces. They were chanting. At the centre a fire sparked and burned, hot and red and orange, an angry fire that told her this was wrong. Something was wrong. They wanted to hurt her.

No, she wept, I don’t want to.

I don’t want to. It became her mantra for the years ahead. But nobody listened.

And they didn’t listen then. Grace struggled to break free but they pinned her down, tying her wrists above her head and looming like giants, the chant building and gathering pace, becoming frenzied and wild. Through the vestments she recognised the pastor’s eyes, flashing grey and watery with lust as he knelt between her legs…

Her agony shattered the night.

The next day, she ran. In a sense the ordeal was the anaesthetic she needed. All Grace could focus on was escape, numb to everything but the terror she had endured and the lone goal of freedom. Ivan was sloppy, a careless, cowardly man. He’d underestimated her spirit. She packed a small bag and left the next afternoon, walking the road out of town, walking and walking until she didn’t care any more if her legs gave in and she lay down and died. She thought of Emaline. It made her cry but it also made her strong. Emaline’s voice told her to keep going and not to give up. Songs she loved played in her head, all the women she’d grown up with walking alongside her, holding her upright and pushing her on.

Some time before dawn a car picked her up. ‘Hey, baby, you wanna ride?’

The guy in the driver’s seat was young. He had a nice smile.

Grace Turquoise pulled open the door. Sleep rushed at her like a tidal wave and she embraced it, secure in the knowledge that now she was saved. Now it was over.

But she was wrong. It was only just beginning.

7

Robin was wired when she came offstage. She had performed her breakout single ‘Lesson Learned’ at the annual Palace Variety to rapturous reception.

‘They’re loving you, babe,’ encouraged her manager Barney when she stepped into the wings. ‘Twitter’s going off the wall.’

‘One more time for Robin Ryder!’ The host’s voice boomed through the studio.

‘Wanna go out?’ Robin headed to her dressing room, Barney in close pursuit. ‘I’ve got an invite to Level 7, the new place off Poland Street. It’s worth checking out.’

‘Are we celebrating?’

‘We’re always celebrating.’

‘We will be when you hear who I’ve been talking to.’