(no subject)
The door of Dick Maynard's flat shuts firmly, solidly, irrevocably behind her. Tessa sighs, leans back against it, stares up at the ceiling; her hands are trembling, and she's aware in a very cold way that the feeling sweeping up from the pit of her stomach is halfway between fury and sheer bloody humiliation, and it's a few deep breaths before she can pull herself under enough control to straighten her shoulders and run her hands through her hair.
"Bastard," she says, and again because it seems the expected thing to say; "bastard." She's been dropped before, of course -- sometimes more painfully -- but never quite so coolly and never, it occurs to her, by a man she'd just confessed to killing for. Who'd taken that news in with the thinnest, most facile expression of shock imaginable, and then brushed it off, and she'd known even before he'd got on to announcing his newfound freedom that he wasn't whatever she'd seen in him when they'd started out.
Johnny wouldn't have let her out of bed for a week, and there's an ache she'd have been quite satisfied not to have reawakened.
She jams her hands into her coat pockets as she walks down the hallway to the lifts, and turns the possibility of revenge over in her mind. It would take her, she estimates, seven phone calls to ensure that the job at Harvard would dry up and blow away, and not more than that to arrange a nasty accident somewhere between now and his arrival in America; she almost laughs, wondering what sort of man could be quite so casual about splitting up with a woman who'd just admitted murder. Not the sort who deserves any further effort of any sort on her part, not now, and she steps into the lift determined to put him out of her mind for the time being.
She's got better things to think about. The little bundle of nerves that's Zoe and her conscience, to begin with, and Harry. Always bloody Harry.
The doors ding open, and she makes her way across the lobby with her head high and her mind entirely clear. If there's a small, nagging sense of regret, of something like loss, it's pushed too firmly back to be acknowledged. Sergei Lermov is better off gone, and and she's better off without the complication of being involved with a married MP. She covered her tracks well enough that she won't be caught, and she'll work out some way of soothing the humiliation.
The sunlight hits her eyes as she steps through the door -- dazzling-bright and entirely wrong, even before her vision clears, for a cold grey London winter, as wrong as the heat and the hiss of waves and the sliding give of sand underfoot. She turns automatically to look back at the building, at the street behind her; they're gone, evaporated into thin air, and all she can see is sand and water and a green blur of trees in the distance. Her heart thuds hard in her chest, pure chemical panic running down through her veins, and she forces herself to stay still and take in the situation.
I've gone mad. Or the bloody Russians have worked out something deeply inventive in retaliation.
"Bastard," she says, and again because it seems the expected thing to say; "bastard." She's been dropped before, of course -- sometimes more painfully -- but never quite so coolly and never, it occurs to her, by a man she'd just confessed to killing for. Who'd taken that news in with the thinnest, most facile expression of shock imaginable, and then brushed it off, and she'd known even before he'd got on to announcing his newfound freedom that he wasn't whatever she'd seen in him when they'd started out.
Johnny wouldn't have let her out of bed for a week, and there's an ache she'd have been quite satisfied not to have reawakened.
She jams her hands into her coat pockets as she walks down the hallway to the lifts, and turns the possibility of revenge over in her mind. It would take her, she estimates, seven phone calls to ensure that the job at Harvard would dry up and blow away, and not more than that to arrange a nasty accident somewhere between now and his arrival in America; she almost laughs, wondering what sort of man could be quite so casual about splitting up with a woman who'd just admitted murder. Not the sort who deserves any further effort of any sort on her part, not now, and she steps into the lift determined to put him out of her mind for the time being.
She's got better things to think about. The little bundle of nerves that's Zoe and her conscience, to begin with, and Harry. Always bloody Harry.
The doors ding open, and she makes her way across the lobby with her head high and her mind entirely clear. If there's a small, nagging sense of regret, of something like loss, it's pushed too firmly back to be acknowledged. Sergei Lermov is better off gone, and and she's better off without the complication of being involved with a married MP. She covered her tracks well enough that she won't be caught, and she'll work out some way of soothing the humiliation.
The sunlight hits her eyes as she steps through the door -- dazzling-bright and entirely wrong, even before her vision clears, for a cold grey London winter, as wrong as the heat and the hiss of waves and the sliding give of sand underfoot. She turns automatically to look back at the building, at the street behind her; they're gone, evaporated into thin air, and all she can see is sand and water and a green blur of trees in the distance. Her heart thuds hard in her chest, pure chemical panic running down through her veins, and she forces herself to stay still and take in the situation.
I've gone mad. Or the bloody Russians have worked out something deeply inventive in retaliation.