Twenty minutes later my phone rings. My heart is thudding so loud she can probably hear it. I pick it up and Brian says, ‘We got him.’

‘Thanks,’ I say, my voice sounding thick and guttural. For the first time since Brian called to say that Sorab had been kidnapped that lump of ice in my chest melts.

I look up at her. She is watching me curiously. As if I am an oddity she cannot understand. Or she is a child. The look unnerves me. I have arranged for her to be murdered. She is my sister.

‘Siblings used to kill each other for power and inheritance,’ she says.

‘I don’t want anything from your father. It’s all yours.’

‘Sometimes siblings just want revenge.’

‘Is that what you want, Victoria?’

‘I did.’

‘What’s changed?’

‘You have friends in high places.’

Surprised, I stare at her. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You didn’t know, did you?’

‘Know what?’ I can feel the tension coming back into my body.

‘They are not done with you.’ And she smiles. A cruel taunting smile. ‘You can’t ride off into the sunset just yet, Blake.’

I stand. ‘Are you ready to go?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Let’s go then.’

She takes the papers on the desk and I ring the bell.

The nurse comes and opens the door. We walk to the reception desk. The doctor is hovering about waiting for us. I nod at him. He nods back and smiles at Victoria. She smiles back and then we are walking out into the sunshine.

Victoria lifts her face toward the sun and breathes a sigh of satisfaction.

I look at her. She is my sister. The thought is foreign. I can’t murder her.

She turns and looks at me. ‘If she had not come we would have mated and bred. And produced something special.’

I shudder inwardly. ‘We might have produced monsters.’

She smiles. ‘You don’t understand. That’s what they want.’

A hired chauffeured Bentley comes to a stop at the bottom of the steps. ‘Here’s your ride. Goodbye, Victoria.’

She shrugs and walks down the rest of the steps and gets smoothly into the back of the car. The driver closes the door and tips his head toward me before he drives off. For a moment I stand on the steps and lift my face toward the warm rays of the sun as Victoria had done. I can’t do it. I can’t kill another person in cold blood.

I take out my mobile and call him. He picks up the call, but does not say anything.

‘Abort the plan. Do you understand?’

‘Yes. Plan aborted,’ the voice on the other side says quietly.

My breath comes out in a great rush of relief, ‘Thank you.’

I feel a sudden shift inside me, a strange letting go. All the actions that have brought me to this moment have been sanctioned by a higher power than their demonic God. He did not win. Never once in my nightmares did the horse manage to break down the flimsiest of wooden doors and come to me. And never again would he be able to.

I will take my little family and go where no one knows us.

Victoria Jane Montgomery

I get into the car and watch him through the window. How very strange. The voices in my head have all fallen totally silent. Could it be that I have left them all behind in that wretched place? I watch Blake’s large, lightly tanned manly hand close the door—I’ve always loved his hands—and a single tear rolls down from one eye. I touch it and look at it with amazement.

I must still love him… Shame he will be dead soon.

A twinge of something hurts my heart, but I will not meddle with it. It will make a sniveling, timorous coward out of me.

The car pulls away, and I turn back to look at him through the back window. Framed against the hospital he stands very still. Seems such a waste. Such a contradiction to kill that which you love so deeply. Such a beautiful man, too. But I’d rather stand by his grave, below a hill, where a sentinel Cyprus tree stands guard and mourn a loss love than watch her victorious.

‘Where are you taking me?’ I ask the driver.

‘Longclere Hall, Lady Victoria,’ he replies politely.

It will be good to see my parents again. I sit back and cannot help smiling. I’m out and I’m free. I look down at the papers in my hands. I did it. I crushed him and next I will crush her. But her death will not come easy. I will make her beg me to die. I turn my head to look out of the window and my smile freezes. A tall, souped up SUV with large metal guards is speeding towards us. They planned it well. They knew which side I’d be sitting in. As it crashes into the side of the Bentley with a sickening sound of crushing metal, and a white hot pain, my gasp simmers in the air.

Once, a long time ago, I had a laugh like the tinkling of chandelier glass. A sweet sound. It’s not lost. There it is in the distance, but coming nearer. The light gets brighter and whiter than anything I have ever seen.

It’s a relief to let go.

Thirty

Blake Law Barrington

Our highest truths are but half-truths; think not to settle down forever in any truth. Make use of it as a tent in which to pass a summer’s night, but build no house of it, or it will be your tomb.

—Earl Balfour

I watch the car bearing Victoria move away from me until it turns the corner at the driveway and disappears from view. Across the road Tom is waiting for me. I take a step toward him, and I see a long black limousine, its windows tinted black, crawling toward me. I am not afraid to die, I never have been. It comes to a stop beside me. I lift my face toward Tom, let him know that all is fine. Perhaps I won’t be long, but even if I am, all is fine. I did the right thing. No more will I bloody my sword.

I open the door and a blast of air-conditioned, gently perfumed air hits me in the face. The perfume is disconcertingly familiar. Sick to my stomach, I bend my neck and look into the dim interior.

‘Hello, Blake,’ my mother says.

I look at her with dazed eyes. In the rubbish and the flotsam of the memories discarded as unimportant, tiny events, little snippets of conversations, a look here, a gesture there, bubble to the top and demand recognition. Delicate nuances of a language I did not understand until now. The darkened cold interior of the car yawns. I fall into it, feeling sick to my stomach, and close the door with a soft click.

‘I killed the wrong parent, didn’t I?’

She smiles. ‘You killed the right parent. You just didn’t kill the power behind the throne.’

‘You?’

‘Your father, as powerful as he was, was nothing more than the visible, coarser grains in the suspension of particles that is this war in our matterium. Power is never where you think it is, and never kept where one can see it. The value of anonymity for continuous power is incalculable. If you see something then you can reach out and take it.’

I stare at her with astonishment. I could not have been more amazed or shocked if she had grown horns. Nobody could ever have imagined that behind the scenes she is the hidden hand. The invisible power in the grand scheme of things. It is impossible for me to describe what I feel. Even the thought that my own mother is one of a handful of the most powerful people in the world, known only to the highest initiates, sitting at the pinnacle of the pyramid of world domination and directing the agenda of all the secret societies in the world, is too fantastical to believe. And yet here she is.

‘Why are you here?’ I ask, dazed.

‘Your car is due for an accident.’

‘I canceled the hit on Victoria,’ I say dully.

‘We did not.’ She glances at her watch. ‘It should have been done by now.’

‘Why?’

‘Because her plan was to kill my son, then my grandson, and finally my dead son’s wife.’