The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [50]
She woke with a jolt, unsure what had disturbed her. She heard a thundering by her head—horses’ hooves galloping—and there were shouts. The jeep stopped abruptly, the momentum shoving Stevie’s body forward and off the seat. She landed heavily on the floor, smashing her elbow.
Loud bangs like firecrackers, then her mother screamed. It was the most frightening sound Stevie had ever heard.
Everything went still and quiet.
Her elbow throbbed but she was too afraid to move. Better not to move or breathe; if she stayed still enough, the bad thing might go away.
Stevie lay there for hours. The sunlight filtered through the cover over her eyes and made it glow red like blood. It was so hot and it was hard to breathe. Mamma and Pappa weren’t talking anymore and she didn’t want to know why. She was too afraid of what her little instincts told her was the truth.
The sunlight faded and it grew cold. Stevie knew she was all alone in the desert and no one was coming to find her. She let her bones absorb the stillness and the silence and the cold, and surrendered to the universe.
But Stevie survived. She was found semiconscious three days later by the French Foreign Legion, although she couldn’t remember any of it.
She was told she was lucky to be alive and sent to live with her grandmother in Switzerland.
For six months, Stevie didn’t speak. Her grandmother took her to the mountains and set about trying to piece back together her granddaughter’s tiny shattered heart.
She remembered David Rice visiting occasionally. He and Didi would talk late into the night in serious voices. One spring, he brought news: the Algerian investigating authorities found that Marlise and Lockie had been mistaken for important symbols of European power and assassinated. The area was thought to have been safe. The motive for the killing was later changed to ‘robbery’ by the officials. The killers were never found.
Stevie had been too young to be more than horribly confused at the time, but the light in her little life went out. The confusion had remained until she grew old enough, then it was replaced by a sense of waste. The sadness had never eased.
The murder of her parents had made her very aware of the possibility of sudden death as a child. She would still climb that tree or ski off the cliff anyway, but she always did it with a full calculation of the dangers involved. She became fascinated with both random and strategic— and strategically random—violence.
It was only natural, she supposed, that she had been drawn to the field of risk assessment. She felt she needed to keep people safe so that what had happened to her never happened to someone else’s child. Those hours alone under the shawl in the back seat had hot-fused into her brain. She never forgot how alone you could be, how terrifying it felt to be abandoned and surrounded by the violence of strangers.
Her grandmother’s voice on the phone brought her back to the present. ‘And how is London?’
Stevie paused a moment before answering. ‘Actually, I’m in Moscow, Didi. Doing a favour for a friend.’
Silence on the line. Then, ‘I’m sorry, Stevie. I’ll never stop worrying about you, no matter how much faith I have in you. I’m not a nervous woman, but I do know the world.’
‘I’m safe, Didi, I promise. There’s nothing at all to worry about.’
When Stevie hung up the phone, she hoped to goodness it was true.
Room service arrived under a silver dome, a baby bottle of vodka chilled in a silver bucket of ice. The kind concierge had thought that a woman staying alone in a Moscow hotel room—however luxurious— might be in need of solace and had added a copy of Hello magazine.
What Stevie saw on the cover should not have surprised her. In fact, it didn’t really. It was more that the existence of the Hammer-Belles and their baby Kennedy-Jack had completely slipped her mind. All three beamed in hyper-colour from the front cover, glazed and perfect like candied fruit.
Rice had put Owen Dovetail