BELLS
We arrived at the Imperial College car park, near the Royal Albert. Jude must have pre-booked it. Of course he had. He pre-books everything, even… the violence.
I was still sat there, in his car, in the passenger seat next to my husband who had just done something monstrous. I was absolutely still, breathing shallow, a slight tremor in my jaw, in my chest. The air around me saturated with the scent of his cedar and cigarette smoke.
He handed me a pack of wet wipes. I wasn't surprised he had these here, prepared for the mess his staged performance would make of me. He had someone beaten and stabbed. And not just any person, my person. Someone I cared about. Someone who'd been kind to me. The wipes already open. He'd known I would cry, and had planned for it with care, factored my grief into our evening seamlessly.
"Wipe your face," he said. Voice smooth as velvet. Unhurried. The voice of a man not used to opposition.
I inhaled a shaky breath. Pulled the sun visor down and opened the little mirror there. A woman looked back at me - red-eyed, mascara tracking down her cheeks in thin lines, something ceremonial about it. Black traces spread over my skin like dried blood from an old wound. A delicate net of broken capillaries threaded the whites of my eyes. I startled at the sight of myself.
"Now," he said, with more urgency.
I glanced sideways at him. He was still holding the pack of wipes out to me, looking straight ahead. His profile in the amber light of the car park - the straight nose, the clean-shaven, defined jaw, the dirty-blond hair with that slight curl, still perfect despite everything. His free hand on the wheel. Still. He had beautiful hands, with long fingers, I had always thought, with the irrational loyalty of someone who has let those hands do things she shouldn't have permitted.
I took the wipes with trembling hands. Wiped off the trails of mascara, my foundation coming off with it, the blush I'd so carefully placed on my cheeks before leaving home. The woman in the mirror - pale. Exposed. This was me under the mask - powerless, defenceless, stripped back to something he could possess and control entirely.
He held his hand out without looking at me.
I handed the wipes back. He shoved them in the door pocket, then opened the door and stepped out, wordless. One smooth movement, all 6-foot-4 of him unfolding from the car with the ease of someone who has never had to make himself smaller to fit anywhere.
I couldn't move. Just watched him circle the vehicle - that walk, deliberate, like the pavement existed specifically to carry him - then my door swung open and there was his hand, extended again. Patient.
The perfect gentleman.
I was afraid what he'd do if I didn't take it.
So I did.
His touch was gentle. Warm. Indecently warm for a man capable of such cruelty, a man who had just sat and watched Valentin bleed into the pavement with indifference. He closed the door behind me, locked the car, then offered his arm.
"Jude." My voice came out small and shaky, with a pleading quality I despised in myself.
"I look a mess. I can't possibly… People will see me."
He looked down at me then. Properly. The full weight of his attention - unwavering, focused, too familiar - landing on my face and staying there. His eyes moved over me the way they always did, taking inventory of something that belonged to him.
"You look stunning," he said simply, a small smile tugging at his lips. Boyish smile that still made my stomach flutter, despite the something sinister in his eyes. Despite everything.
And the maddening thing - that made me want to scream - was that the way he said it made me believe it. Not the word itself. The absolute absence of flattery in it. He offered it the way he might state a fact about the weather, without performance or expectation. He looked at me, wrecked and bare-faced and trembling, found me stunning, and communicated this the way another man might say it's raining - as simple and irrefutable as that.
I laced my arm with his. Exhaled.
"Good girl," he said.
Inside, I kept my gaze lowered, conscious of my swollen eyes still telling a story I didn't want known. Jude's solid warmth at my side was impossible to ignore - that particular way he occupied space, more present than other people, generating his own gravity.
Each time I glanced up I caught women's eyes sliding toward him and then away with a quality I recognised. Want, quickly hidden. The discretion of desiring something you suspect you can't have.
He was careful during the performance. Attentive in a way he hadn't been with me for months - perhaps years, if I was being honest with myself in the dark of the auditorium. He leaned close, his mouth near my ear, and the warmth of his breath against my skin made me close my eyes for a moment, made my skin prickle in a way that had nothing to do with the music.
"The legato notes," he murmured. "Exquisite." Then he planted a soft discrete kiss on my earlobe: "Like you tonight."
The warmth I have been craving for so long, the softness there I'd nearly forgotten he was capable of. But then his hand covered mine on the armrest. Firm. Claiming again and I recalled it was the same hand that had pressed his phone once and sent three men walking away from Valentin's crumpled body.
I stared at the stage, let him hold my hand and tried to remember how to breathe at a normal rate.
During the intermission I excused myself to the bathroom. Something stern crossed his face - a fractional tightening - but he released me.
Once there, I locked myself in the stall. Pulled out my phone. Tried Valentin. Once. Twice. Straight to voicemail.
Please, I thought. Please just pick up. Please just be somewhere with signal, somewhere warm, with someone caring for you, somewhere not the pavement.
Then I heard it.
"...absolutely gorgeous, isn't he? That height, those eyes." A woman's voice. Somewhere to my left, near the mirrors.
I knew, immediately, they were talking about Jude.
"Don't forget that broad back, Anna." A second voice, amused. "The things I would let this man do to me."
"Mrs Ashcroft, control yourself, you are married. And so is he." The other woman - I presumed Anna - added, and then uttered with a sigh, "Unfortunately"
"The good ones always are..." retorted the other voice - high pitched, with that upper class accent.
The good ones, the phrase lingered on my mind like a tasteless quip. She had no idea what kind of a man he was.
"That wife of his." A pause, the sound of a handbag clasp. "I guess she is pretty enough."
A soft laugh.
"She was gorgeous once." A third voice now. Lower, softer. Almost kind. "It's the weight. Not doing her any favours."
I stood very still behind the stall's door.
"I heard she worked for him. Started as an analyst or something equally dreadful." The way she said that word, *dreadful*, made it linger in the room.
"That's how women like her get men like him," the second voice - Mrs Ashcroft - said. "Access and proximity over time."
"Must be. She's… ordinary. I heard he used to go out with a Swedish model at one point. Tall, stunning. More of his… calibre."
The Swedish model. Yes. I knew about Klara. That he'd been with her the few months I'd resisted him, before I'd finally accepted his proposal, that he had called her a "placeholder woman" once. I knew why he got with her. To make me see he could. To destabilise me. Make me crawl to him. These women didn't know that. Didn't know any of it.
Voicemail again. Valentin's name on the screen going dark.
"Do you think he is happy with her?" one of them asked. I lost track which.
"Darling." The other's voice carried the warmth of someone delivering received wisdom.
"Men like Jude Larssen don't marry for happiness. Or for love. She is a Hann, of the Hann family. They might be broke now but they are still connected. The name association still carries weight."
He didn't marry for love.
I was clenching my palm around my phone. Because again, they did not know the half of it. How Jude had been quietly obsessed with me from the day he laid his eyes on me. Had poached me from another firm. Had circled me for years with that patient, particular focus while I was engaged to someone else. Had - and this is the part I couldn't quite look at directly - made that relationship collapse, spectacularly so, with an act so destructive I thought I would not forgive it. He'd been wanting what he wanted and working toward it for years. He'd eventually made it impossible for me to pretend I didn't feel what I felt.
He hadn't married a Hann. He'd married me. The distinction mattered, even now. Especially now.
"She is probably really organised," the voice continued, "coordinates his schedule, will be forever grateful to him and loyal."
The women hummed in agreement.
Forever grateful and loyal.
I looked at my phone. Valentin's name. The voicemail icon. Again.
Like I had any choice.
"Do you think he ever strays?" Anna asked, lower now, a giggle threading through it.
Don't, I thought. You silly, silly woman.
"Probably," the other said. "Men like him always do."
Not Jude. He was entirely too obsessive. Too specific. Too dangerously, exhaustingly, ruinously focused on the one thing he'd decided he wanted.
Which had been me.
For years.
I heard the women's voices carrying through the open bathroom door now, they were filling out. I exhaled sharply, unlocked the stall. Washed my hands. Looked at myself in the mirror - bare-faced, eyes no longer red - his diamond earrings still cold against my neck.
She was gorgeous once.
I straightened my shoulders. Thought about his hand on mine in the dark. The warmth of his breath at my ear. The way he'd looked at me in the car park - that devastating "you look stunning" - like my grief and my bare face and my trembling hands were not problems to be managed, no. They were to be cherished, my devastation feeding his ownership, turning that boyish smile on.
Again, I thought about Valentin on the pavement. The way the rain had looked on the dark wool of his navy coat.
Then I went back out.
His eyes found me the moment I appeared - across the foyer, through the crowd, immediate and unerring, like something pulled by a cord. He stood exactly where I'd left him. Tall. Still. A glass of something in one hand, watching me cross toward him with that expression that had no name I'd found yet - not satisfaction, not hunger – but the sharp and still instinct to cage and devour. Sending chills down my spine, either of fright or exhilaration, or worryingly, both.
I reached him.
He handed me a glass of wine – sanguine - without being asked. Leaned over my ear.
"Took you a while…" his voice piercing through me like a long needle. I swallowed.
He knew – I thought. He somehow knew I called Val. My body tensed up against his.
He always knew, because that was the torture of him - the attention, the relentless specific attention, the way he noticed everything and forgot nothing and used it all when the time was just right.
His hand found the small of my back as the bell sounded.
We went back in.
When the performance concluded he'd led me out the same way he led me in. Stern, steady, the hard plane of him beside me, one hand at the small of my back - proprietary, navigating me through the departing crowd like something he was transporting. My four inch heels clicking on the marble, then the pavement. Each step a reminder that he'd selected them. That he'd selected everything.
He opened the car door. I sat. Watched him circle the bonnet in the amber dark - that walk again, inevitable - and fold himself into the driver's seat beside me. The door closed with a definitive thud. The city moved around us, indifferent.
Inside, the silence settled, thick as smoke.
"Enjoyed the performance?" he said.
Something cool in his voice. A quality I had learned to recognise - the stillness before something breaks.
"Beautiful," I managed. Barely.
"You were distracted." A pause, momentary. "The intermission. You were gone a while."
My stomach tightened. The bathroom stall. Valentin's name lighting the screen. Call failed. Call failed again.
He knew. There was no moment of my life he wasn't somehow present in, no bathroom stall in any concert hall in London far enough away from his attention.
"I don't like repeating myself, Belly."
The nickname landed softly. Almost affectionate. My pulse ticked in my throat.
"I needed a moment," I said.
"Did you." Not a question.
He exhaled.
"I need you focused. On us."
His voice had dropped to something quieter now, sharper.
"I need you to appreciate the music."
I said nothing. My hands were very still in my lap.
He reached for the stereo.
My body understood before I did - the same reach, the same screen lighting up. Strings flooded the car, lush and mournful, a classical piece rising out of the dark.
He listened for a moment, head tilted fractionally, eyes sharp, the way he always did when something had his attention. When he was considering something.
Then his eyes lifted to the rearview mirror.
And found mine.
"You promised me something tonight," he said slowly.
I swallowed.
"Yes."
I did. I said I would not speak to Valentin again, when he had him beaten. When I begged him to stop. That is when he stopped.
"And yet." A faint exhale through his nose. "You still tried."
The words slid into the space between us. Not angry. Certain. Carrying over the music. My fingers curled into my palms.
"I..."
He cut me off.
"That's the problem with you, Belly." A slight shake of his head, voice low and lethal.
"You always think you can negotiate."
Then his hand moved.
I heard the sound of the zipper.
I looked straight ahead. A couple walking, someone's umbrella turning inside out in the wind. Ordinary things. The ordinary city, moving through its ordinary night.
His hand found the back of my neck. The swift pull down.
"Open your fucking mouth" he said, timbre low.
And when I did, he forced my head down, deep. I gagged as he passed through my throat, the impossible girth of him. He did not relent.
"The D-major scale" he said, a slight huff. The music more urgent, he pulled me up by the hair, then down again, I gagged again.
"Listen" he said. My head led by the hair, by his closed fist, the music swelling as he did. I heard him groan. Crescendo. Felt tears in the corners of my eyes. His climax coating my tonsils.
"No more distractions."