Wicked Ambition (21 page)

‘What’s up?’ she squeaked.

‘It’s Kristin,’ he admitted, taking a slug of his beer. He burped gently and she wished he wouldn’t do that, because Scotty Valentine never burped, in fact he never endured any
bodily expulsions because he was a god, a prince, and thus above the mess of human biology. Only yesterday Bunny had been watching Fraternity’s dreamboat Christmas single ‘Keep You Warm’ and lusting after his cute smile and the poetry that flowed from his lips, so the reality was faintly disheartening. But she’d forgive Scotty anything—absolutely anything.

‘We’ve split up,’ he announced, eyes flitting suspiciously across his captive audience’s face. ‘You knew about that…right?’

Bunny wrung her hands together. ‘Is that why she’s gone away?’

Scotty assessed her for the first time, as if he was trying to figure something out. ‘She hasn’t spoken to you?’ he hazarded, visibly relieved.

‘No. She just left. Mom and me don’t know why, but I guess…I guess it makes sense if it’s about you…’ Bunny would run to the ends of the earth if Scotty ever dumped her, and toss herself into the abyss.

‘OK.’ He put his fingers together, resting his chin on their tips, thinking carefully. He was so sexy when he concentrated! She had no idea how he’d even got through school without being suffocated by hordes of girls. ‘Do you think she’s told anyone that we’ve split? Or—’ again he squinted at her ‘—the reasons why?’

Bunny shrugged. ‘I don’t think she can have,’ she replied innocently. ‘Like, it was so quick. She just came back on my birthday, and…’ A pause. ‘You remember my birthday?’

‘What? Oh. Yeah. Course.’ But clearly he didn’t remember that he was supposed to have made it and the fact he
hadn’t bothered had cracked her fourteen-year-old heart in two.

‘And she started packing.’ Bunny pouted. ‘No explanation or anything.’

Scotty rubbed his chin. Oh, it was a handsome chin.

‘I need you to do something for me, Bunny,’ he said.

‘OK.’

‘I need you to get Kristin back.’

Bunny grimaced, hating to disappoint him. ‘We’ve tried, only she won’t listen.’ Against his desolate expression, she tacked on, ‘I’ll ask her again to come home. Promise.’

He shot up off the couch. ‘I don’t mean that,’ he said gruffly, running a hand through his hair. ‘I mean, yeah, obviously she needs to do that, but what I’m saying is that
I
want her back. I
need
her back. With me.’

His words were torture. Kristin was so lucky and she didn’t even know it!

‘Why did you split up?’ she asked, quiet as a mouse.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Scotty quickly. ‘The important thing is that it hasn’t leaked to the press, and hopefully we can paper over Kristin’s disappearance once we work out a plan.’ He was nodding, as if formulating his next step. ‘We
have
to work out a plan.’ Scotty’s eyes flitted to a framed photograph of Fenton, and Bunny guessed that Fenton wasn’t happy about the split either. Together, Kristin and Scotty were the perfect package.

‘She listens to you,’ Scotty continued, coming to crouch, imploring, in front of her. ‘If you tell her…’ He stalled, putting a hand on each of her knees and sending sparks of electricity zooming through her bloodstream. ‘Just tell her I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, and that I can explain.’ His face
changed, more like the old Scotty. ‘It’s her I love; tell her that. You just have to get her back for me, Bunny, you
have
to—I don’t know who else to ask. I’m trusting you with this, OK? Do you trust me back?’

Bunny nodded. Her heart shivered. Scotty Valentine needed her! He
needed
her, and no one else would do. She gazed at him with love unadulterated, her hero, her safe place, and vowed she would not prolong his suffering, whatever it took.

What they said about losing someone was true. First, there was the shock. Grief pounced soon after, then, finally, anger set in. Anger was where Kristin was at, and though she knew acceptance would be coming, she wasn’t hanging around to wait.

Five weeks she had spent weeping and feeling sorry for herself, and the thing about being miserable was that after a time it got boring.

‘I’m done here,’ she had told her rep the previous morning, making an early call to LA and setting the wheels in motion. ‘Get me a flight home.’

‘You bet. Good to have you back, Kristin.’

But they weren’t getting her back. Kristin White wasn’t the same girl she had been: she had shattered into a thousand pieces and had been forced to reassemble, but putting something back together rarely achieved an identical mould and parts had switched, shifted, integral parts. Over the past month she’d had endless time to work out where the fuck it had gone so wrong, and the resounding answer she’d kept coming back to was:

I’m too good
.

All her life she’d been good, doing what was bidden, holding her temper, nodding along like a stupid dumb puppy. All her life she had tolerated other people’s crap: her mom’s, her record label’s, her fake boyfriend’s. All her life she’d borne it uncomplaining, and look where it had got her. It had to stop. How much longer could she be the fool?

Kristin showered and packed her bag. Her jet would depart in an hour. At the mirror she took a pair of scissors to her long pale hair and began cutting. She took it to her chin, satisfied as great sheets of blonde wafted to the marble floor like silk, until she was standing in a mountain of it: Rapunzel after her true love’s desertion. Scooping it up, she cleared the bathroom and left a generous tip for her maid along with a note:

Thanks for everything. I’m checking out
.

26

T
he weather in London had been uncharacteristically clear for November. Nights were cold and cloudless, and domed with stars that were normally seldom decipherable through the city smog. In flat 39B, Ivy Sewell stepped out of her bedroom and into silence.

Four a.m. The dismal hum of the North Circular droned on, and if she listened closely she could hear her mother’s brittle breath as she slept. An empty bottle of brandy rocked on its side by Hilda’s chair. Her neck was tipped back and she was exhaling through her mouth, eliciting an occasional whimper, as if she were being chased by nightmares. Hilda must have spent the last twenty years being chased. Never had she turned and faced her sins, content to have them pursue her to the grave and beyond. Who knew what lay past death? Hilda wore a silver cross around her neck but that didn’t mean she could claim redemption.

Some things were beyond forgiveness.

Ivy was ready. Her destination: Los Angeles. Her target: Robin Ryder.

Only her sister could answer to this. Ivy could not be held responsible for what happened. Robin’s ignorance was the culprit, her ability to live like a queen with no thought to the wreckage she had left behind. If Ivy had been given that exit, what could she have become? She would have been capable of anything: a life with no limits, a life hunting her own desires, a life of luck and grace, one lived for her and her alone…

A life without Hilda.

Calmly Ivy collected the cushion and squeezed it in her dry hands. It smelled musty and the dust caught in her throat, forcing her to suppress a cough.

Sickly light drained into the living room, syrup-thick.

It wasn’t difficult to hold the cushion over Hilda’s face. It wasn’t difficult to apply the pressure that would steal the last breath from her mother’s lungs. It wasn’t even difficult when the struggle began and Ivy had to restrain the flailing, panicking limbs.

Suddenly, still.

Just like that, it was over. Slowly she removed the pillow, her mother’s eyes and mouth wide open in terror, as empty in death as she had been in life.

Ivy straightened, the merciless soldier. She felt nothing.

How easy it was to kill. How unfortunate that was for her twin.

LA was the city of sunshine. Ivy had seen it on TV and in Hollywood films, the rich blue sky under which tanned, slim bodies skated beachfront or rode past in open-top
Jeeps. People lived frivolously here, bent on a cycle of self-gratification and excess.

It was like stepping into the movies. Only Ivy wasn’t the pretty starlet dreaming of Tinseltown fame; she was the disease in the veins, the glitch in the blood. Fame would be hers, but not the hollow vanity for which this place was renowned. They said that celebrity should be a festival of achievement…could it not be a festival of destruction?

Her intent was to destroy—and oh, it would taste sweet. No drama the movies could bring would ever rival the cataclysm she was set to release.

Downtown Ivy passed through the streets as darkly and invisibly as a virus, sweating beneath her clothes, her flamered hair matted to her scalp. Opening the door to the shop, she locked on to the nervous trainee and produced her wad of cash. She had rinsed her dead mother’s savings, shocked at how much Hilda had stowed away. Not that she’d ever seen any of it, of course; the witch had kept that one quiet. Had Hilda once had wealthy relatives? Had a loser boyfriend chucked guilt money her way? Ivy no longer cared. All she cared about was that she had inherited more than even she had planned, and the reward was simple: freedom. After all this time she deserved it, and she deserved the best.

‘Do you want to make a sale today?’ She took a seat, slapping the money down on the table and fixing him with a dead glare. ‘I’m your buyer.’

An hour later, Ivy was proprietor of a two-bed single-storey villa with its own pool. Next she purchased a car to park in the drive. She claimed a mass of new clothes to hang in the
closet. She acquired a TV, a radio and laptop: all the better to carry out the final leg of surveillance.

On the day she moved in, a neighbour dropped by.

‘Hi,’ he said, watching her unpack, ‘I’m Connor. Have you got everything you need?’

Connor was extremely short, with glasses. Every time he spoke a small pink tongue darted out and swiped his bottom lip, like something in a tree canopy that dives at prey.

‘Yes.’

Connor shifted his weight. ‘It’s not long since I arrived here, as it goes. What do you say we hang out some time?’

‘I don’t think so.’

He gulped. ‘Right. OK.’

Ivy went to close the door but he stopped her.

‘Wait.’ Behind his spectacles, he blinked nervously, like a mole surfacing from the earth. ‘Would you like to come for dinner this week? I’ve invited the others.’ He gestured round the block. ‘They seem a good crowd.’ Anticipating her response, he added, ‘I can fit in with your dates—’ and the voice sagged as her withering glare bored into him ‘—if you want…’

‘I said no,’ Ivy replied, shutting the door on his bewildered expression. People were a distraction, nuisances to be got rid of. Her focus had to be sharp, her goal untarnished.

Stepping out on to her balcony, Ivy watched the Hollywood hills like a hawk.

According to the press, Robin was set to make LA her second home. Perhaps she was already here, innocent of the calamity. It was only a matter of time before Ivy rooted her dear sister out—and the rest, devil permitting, would follow.

27

R
obin returned to London for a string of meetings finalising the details of her tour. Barney Grant and Marc Delgado welcomed her at her label’s HQ, where Marc proffered coffee and donuts and talked the band through the last push.
Beginnings
would kick off in January in a multitude of venues across North America, culminating in a live appearance at the biggest music event of the year: the ETV Platinum Awards, an annual trophy-fest held at the renowned LA Grand Palisades Arena. Major world-class artists would be there, from Turquoise to Fraternity, from Kristin White to Puff City. It would be quite a finale.

‘Have you been looking after yourself?’ Barney teased.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ Robin withdrew a pack of gum and offered it round. Polly was already chewing but she added to it and proceeded to blow an enormous pink bubble.

‘Ah, you know, all that time in the US hanging out with the A-league…’

‘It’s a serious question,’ put in Marc. ‘You need to be fit for this tour, Robin.’

‘Hence why I’m now only partying six times a week.’

Marc was aghast.

‘Kidding. I’m kidding!’

‘We’ll look out for each other, won’t we?’ Matt was inspecting the donuts, prodding them each in turn before grimacing on the brink of his hangover. ‘Hey, I’ve seen some of those dancers and I’ll
sure
be looking out for them.’

‘I thought that guy in apricot legwarmers seemed your type,’ threw in Polly.

Matt made a face. ‘Hilarious.’

‘This isn’t a joke,’ Marc said sternly, and Barney bobbed his head obediently in agreement. ‘Get real, you guys. None of you has done anything like this before.’

Polly raised her hand.

‘Apart from you,’ conceded Marc, referencing Polly’s stint on tour several years ago. ‘That means you’re the adult in this situation.’ This elicited a ripple of classroom giggles.

When the meeting was done they jumped in a cab and headed for the Hideaway Club. Matt got chatting to a gaggle of doe-eyed girls and Robin and Polly settled at the bar. Within minutes Sammy and Belle joined them. Both girls embraced her tightly.

‘Spill, then!’ prompted Belle.

‘About what?’

‘Your LA adventure, what else?’ Sammy couldn’t stop smiling. The girls had met when Sammy had been a mess and a lot of people would have turned their backs—but not Robin. No one got Sammy like her best friend did. To
think where Robin had come from and how far she’d travelled was incredible.

‘How was Puff City?’ asked Belle.

‘That makes it sound like a place.’ Polly was tapping at her phone.

‘How
were
Puff City? For the pedants among us.’

Robin got giddy just thinking about it. ‘Trippy. Weird. Amazing. Wouldn’t say they all rate me, though.’

‘Whoever doesn’t rate you is clueless,’ said Sammy loyally.

‘Then Principal 7’s without a clue.’

‘How do you know he doesn’t like you?’ Belle asked.