Until Death Read Free

at. You think I can go into meetings looking like a pussy who can’t control his wife? If I can’t keep you in line, how can I run a successful business?’
    She could feel the stopper on her rage beginning to loosen. ‘I am not something you own! You don’t control me!’
    He got up from the table so fast he knocked the chair to the floor behind him. He walked away into the laundry room, a doorway leading off the kitchen where the bleach was stacked and the ironing board erected once a week by the cleaner or his mother. Kelly followed him in. They were far from the kids here, their marital mess wouldn’t be heard.
    He bent over and plugged in the iron, slammed it down on the board.
    ‘What are you doing?’
    He ignored her. ‘You have to understand how this works, fast. If you try to leave me, I’ll make sure you never see the kids again.’
    ‘You don’t mean that.’
    ‘I always do what I say I’m going to do.’
    The stopper blasted off her anger and she screamed at him now. ‘How dare you even say that aloud!’
    ‘Those kids are never leaving me and neither are you.’
    ‘You can’t stop me.’
    ‘Try me. Nothing is impossible, Kelly.’
    ‘I’ll go to the police.’
    ‘No, you won’t. I’ll have you classed as an unfit mother. Those pills you take for your panic attacks? You’ll be lucky to stay out of a mental institution once I’ve finished with you. We’re married until death us do part, Kelly.’
    ‘You’re having an affair. You’re cheating on me!’
    ‘Sylvie is irrelevant. This is about you – and me.’ He spat on the plate of the iron and the water bounced away in crazy bubbles of heat.
    ‘Christos, please.’ She felt tears of frustration and heartache well inside her. ‘There is no you and me. We don’t know each other any more.’
    ‘You don’t know me? What a fucking joke. Of course you don’t know me – I protected you from the reality of what it costs to cling to wealth and power. You should thank me, not abandon me.’
    ‘I’ve tried, I’ve really tried to make this marriage work, but I can’t go on any longer—’
    ‘Can’t go on. You have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve survived the death of your child. I
know
you can keep going.’
    He was right. She had survived the worst that life could throw at a mother. And as a mother she realised that she was programmed to do one thing above all others: protect her children. She had failed at that once before, she wouldn’t again. She turned to the door. She was going to go downstairs, pick up the bag and walk out of the door with the kids. She would call his bluff, wait for him to calm down, but he whirled round with a force she hadn’t been expecting and threw her to the floor. She was stunned, the breath knocked out of her. She lay on her back looking up, thinking here was the line that he had casually crossed and she had no idea what lay beyond it.
    He picked up the iron, the tendons in his forearm standing proud like ropes. For a moment she actually looked round for the shirts, and then a second later she understood how bad it could really be.

3
     
    Two Weeks Later
     
    K elly glanced at the security camera in the corner of the bedroom. The fisheye lens stared back at her, unmoving, like a bully at school. She looked away. Her image was being relayed and stored on tapes in ‘security control’, a machine that had been set up in the office. It collected images from fifteen cameras that surveyed every room, noting movement, the comings and goings of family life, butting in on secrets and confidences. Christos was paranoid about security, fearful that the world wanted to take away what he had worked so hard for. The flat had been built with a complicated alarm system and security cameras by the two lifts, one that led to the garage and the other that doubled as the front door, but the day after she had asked for a divorce a workman had arrived and installed nine more cameras, in every room,