The Bruise_Black Sky (30 page)

He hadn’t gone to his own funeral. Funny that, when you thought about it. Everyone should be at their own send off.

They were going in a group—ANGEL. Jackson Keane, Andrea Gillian, Tim Watson, Michael Heathcote and, of course, Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen. Nikolas’s people. Those he’d chosen to surround himself with. Those he’d chosen to trust.

And now one had fallen.

Nikolas had no doubt whatsoever why the man seen talking to Kate on the station had not come forward.

He’d chatted to many people in railway stations in his time, too.

He’d never come forward either.

He had killed Kate as surely as if he’d pushed her off that platform himself.

In trying to save her, he’d killed her.

§§§

They were going to travel up from the London house for the service and then home to Devon. He didn’t want to draw any additional attention to Kate’s parents and had refused their invitation to the do after the funeral.

He needed to distance her family from anything to do with him.

But he wanted to pay his respects.

He went secretly on his own a few days before the funeral, when Ben was at Tim’s apartment for the evening.

Kate’s parents had once accepted an invitation to Denmark for Christmas only a short time after he had nearly been killed and Ben had almost been lost to him, and Nikolas remembered their gracious kindness with genuine gratitude.

And he had now repaid them by murdering their only child.

§§§

The Armstrongs lived in a large Victorian house near the train station in St Albans. It was a short walk.

It was snowing.

Half a world away, Paradise would be in warm sunshine. It was a strange universe, he concluded. Upside-down in too many ways.

Kate’s father answered the door and clearly recognised Nikolas, despite the fact his face was, for once, not battered or bruised.

He ushered him in. Reginald Armstrong appeared to be a man glad of any distraction from pain and grief, and only too willing to have that diversion male and therefore less likely to add to the world of tears he seemed lately to have found himself in.

He took Nikolas into the sitting room, a large, spacious, and beautifully decorated space, overlooking a traditional long Victorian garden, and offered him a whisky.

Nikolas accepted gratefully.

He was at something of a loss now.

Kate’s father didn’t seem to find it at all odd that her employer had come to pay his respects, and Nikolas allowed the fiction to continue. What else could he do or say? He handed the man an envelope and repeated how sorry he was. He was struggling to remember his English, his mind swinging back dangerously to his childhood language. The language of his lost innocence.

Reginald took the offering with a shaking hand, made to open it, gesturing helplessly to the mantelpiece where there were dozens more, such helpless gestures of sympathy. “I’d better let Jennifer open this. She likes to, you know…She’s made a list. Replies. Eventually.” He indicated towards the stairs, the stiff paper still in his hand, unopened. “Hasn’t helped, of course…Although I think it might. In time. All been a bit of a shock.”

Nikolas nodded. He had no idea what to say. He had lost so much in his life—mother, father, grandparents, brother, friends. And a child he had never even seen.

“I’ll give her a shout. Well, whisper. It’s all whispers these days.”

Nikolas closed his eyes and wondered if he should have come.

He was to be given no absolution, and he was bringing nothing to them.

He heard a murmur and a pleased, female response.

Jennifer Armstrong came into the sitting room, following her husband.

She had a baby in her arms.

She smiled and came over to Nikolas, kissing him on his cheek. “Sir Nikolas. This is so very kind of you. I’m sorry…I was upstairs…with…” She looked down, her eyes welling over with tears, which had clearly not stopped flowing for many hours. “We had no idea. Kate just came home with her. And now this…” She shifted the baby to the other side while she searched for a tissue.

Wordlessly, Nikolas handed her an immaculate handkerchief.

She took it with a grateful, apologetic nod, and dabbed her eyes.

“We have no idea who the father is. She wouldn’t tell us. But my daughter was a grown woman and lived her own life, and we’ve always respected her decisions.”

Nikolas was watching the baby.

He knew exactly who the father was.

The jet-black hair and wide-set green eyes rather gave it away.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Nikolas was well aware that his friends—Ben’s friends—thought he was a control freak. He would have liked to see what they would be like if they’d had his life. There had been many times when he had not been able to affect anything, so manipulating everything now was the only way he could cope. It wasn’t strength. It was weakness. He knew this really. Like a man with OCD, he was condemned by his obsessions, not freed by them, but, nevertheless, it was how he got through each day.

He’d applied that principle to Kate when she had been dating Ben all those years ago. He’d known everything about their relationship. Once Ben had moved in with him, he’d enfolded Kate in his suffocating grip, so she could not act independently. She owed everything she had to him and his money. He paid all his employees ridiculous sums for doing little more than being loyal to him and being willing to be controlled by him.

But she’d broken free.

She had stolen from him and now there was this.

This was beyond his control.

He could see this.

He couldn’t make it go away.

Ben’s daughter.

What the fuck was he supposed to do about this?

Kate had created something from Ben. How can you control the very act of creation? All he could do was destroy.

A sliver of Ben now existed separately and independently.

But that wasn’t tolerable.

He
owned
Ben Rider-Mikkelsen. He always had, and he always would. He was a very, very jealous owner.

But a small Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen seed had escaped the lockdown. She’d liberated it and
made
something from it.

It defied belief.

He was undone by the knowledge of the baby, and could not see how to proceed.

At least he’d impressed on Kate’s parents not to bring the baby to the funeral. Further, he’d encouraged them not to mention her existence at all. He was clever like that, persuasive when he wanted to be. Let people grieve wholly and naturally for Kate as an individual and not as a new mother. Don’t diminish the tragedy of her death by implying that being a mother now made her death more poignant. They’d been confused, but had gradually come around to his point of view. Had he played on their innate, middle-class English wish not to admit their daughter was an unmarried mother to all their St Albans friends? Of course, he had. It’s what he did.

§§§

Ben was home when he entered the kitchen of their London house. Radulf scrambled up from his basket to greet him, and Ben made him a cup of tea.

“Where’ve you been?”

“I went to make my apologies to the friends I had been at the concert with.”

“Oh. They okay about it?”

“They understood fully.”

Ben slid into a chair opposite him and began to flick through a magazine. He’d been crying and was keeping his eyes lowered so this wouldn’t be obvious. Nikolas almost huffed. As if there was ever anything Ben did that he didn’t notice. Except father a daughter. That one had slipped him by.

The resemblance was so marked that anyone seeing them together would make the connection. Less than five percent of the world’s population had green eyes. What were the odds?

“What are you thinking?”

Nikolas picked up his tea. “Nothing. How were Tim and…Michael? They were fond of her, I know.”

Ben shrugged. “You know.”

Nikolas rose and held out his hand. “Come. You’re tired. Think about this tomorrow. It doesn’t go away.”

Ben rose. “My mum didn’t have a funeral. Did yours?”

Sensing a good topic for distracting Ben, Nikolas answered without lying about anything in particular. “Of course. In Copenhagen. One of her colleagues in the orchestra she had toured with played the piano.”

“God. You must have been…”

“Nika was crying, of course. I told him the coffin was actually empty because they never found her body. He seemed to find that more upsetting, although I only meant to make it easier for him. Actually, I think I was cross because why have a coffin at all? I wanted to have the funeral at the beach—a Viking longboat set on fire. But no one ever listened to me. And it was December. If you wanted, we could have a service for your mother. People do.”

Ben shook his head. “Who would come? There’s only me left.”

Nikolas closed his eyes for a moment, the irony almost too much.

They climbed into bed and lay next to each other, both on folded arms, studying the ceiling.

“Peter called. He’s in talks about getting the film back on track.”

“How do you feel about that?”

Ben turned on his side, facing him, running his finger idly up and down Nikolas’s ribs. “I can’t summon up much enthusiasm.”

“No. But it might be good to get away for a while after this.”
Very convenient.

“I guess.”

“Don’t decide now. Think about it.”
I’ll decide for you and let you know when it’s the right time to accept.
“Emmy will be home next week. Then it’ll be Christmas.”

“Christmas will be terrible for Kate’s parents.”

“Yes.”
Busy as well.

“I’m glad Em didn’t have end of term stuff we had to go to or we’d have had to cancel.”

Nikolas narrowed his eyes.

He’d forgotten.

Kristina.
“Shit.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking that I have left my black suit in Devon. I will have to buy another.”

“Nik…”

“Hmm?”

“Why is your office empty at home?”

“It’s not. It’s full of ugly monitors. I am regretting my impulsive act now.”

“I looked in your desk drawers.”

“Last time you did that I didn’t hear the end of it for months. I’m surprised you aren’t pleased they’re empty.”

“But why—?”

“I have moved it all to another house I own, Ben. Nothing to worry about. I just felt we needed to be more secure now that we have Babushka and Emmy with us. That’s all.”

“Your papers would threaten—?”

“Why do they say death makes us feel like having sex?”

“Huh? I—does it for you?”

“I always feel like having sex with you, Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen, so how can I tell?”

He pushed Ben down under the sheet to discover for himself that this was true.

Could he do it?

Could he flee this life of being Nikolas Mikkelsen as he’d fled being Aleksey Primakov? He had all his affairs sorted, bank accounts changed, funds enough for ten lifetimes secreted away.

He’d been planning it for months, on the off chance, contingencies…

But now this.

He could be on a plane under an assumed name even before the funeral.

Away from all of this and the ties he’d bound himself with. The pressure bearing down upon him all the time, the suffocation from that spreading bruise. A new name, a new man, and he would have no guilt about the things a man called Nikolas Mikkelsen had once done.

He stroked his palm over Ben’s head, feeling the familiar rising pleasure. If he let him, Ben would suck him to completion, and he would spill in Ben’s mouth and be swallowed.

He tore himself away and flung Ben over onto his belly, rising furiously behind him.

Because of course, this, Kate’s murder, wasn’t the thing he knew that was coming. It was something worse. And the only way he could keep Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen secure now was by leaving him.

He’d done the tearing halfway across the world to protect him, but now it was the leaving of him that needed to be done. As he’d told Ben, he did whatever had to be done to keep Ben free from the shit that he’d swum in his whole life.

A little lap of shit coming towards them…a bruise spreading…

Ben gasped, arched and came, and Nikolas shuddered and fell on him, covering him, filling him.

If only keeping Ben out of harm’s way was this simple.

It wasn’t. He would run, and what was coming would turn and follow him, and Ben would be safe.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Ben sat in the armchair, studying Nikolas.

He had to make a decision soon or it would be too late. Nikolas would wake, and then his window of opportunity would be gone. Whatever Nikolas had decided to do would be done. Ben didn’t know what was going on in Nikolas’s mind, but something was, and that something wasn’t good. But it wasn’t his characteristic not good either. This was something new and different that Ben hadn’t faced before.

How dumb did Nikolas actually think he was?

All his office files gone?

Clothes gone?

He rose silently, and very softly went over to the still figure. He sat on the edge of the bed, sensing Nikolas stirring.

He took the strong wrist, considering the scar for just one moment, and then before Nikolas came to fully and could object, Ben clicked one hand into the handcuffs he’d fastened to the brass bedrail.

Then he stepped away, because now Nikolas
was
awake.

At first, Ben could see that Nikolas thought this was a clever joke. This belief continued all through Ben fetching him some tea and the paper. The amusement factor apparently wore a little thin when he went downstairs to make phone calls—Tim, Squeezy, Andrea and Jackson.
Go on your own to the funeral. Make our apologies. Emergency with Emilia at school. London house shut up.

Then he went back upstairs and removed the empty teacup.

He sat down in the armchair.

Nikolas was reading the paper. He made to look at the time and frowned when he noticed his bedside table was empty. “Where’s my watch? And phone?”