Page 13 of Unbind

‘Right? It seems ridiculously far-fetched, but I suppose these billionaires all hang out together.’

‘Yeah.’ He scoffs. ‘In the Big Dick club. Do you know why Gen wants to talk to you?’

‘No clue. Maybe she wants to make him apologise to me for all the devastation he’s caused my family? Or maybe he’s angling for an Alchemy membership and she won’t let him in without getting the go-ahead from me.’

Of all the scenarios spinning around in my head, that seems the most likely. Surely he was there last night to check the place out—as well as its female patrons. Yuck.

‘What would you say if that was the case?’

‘God, I don’t know.’ I rub my hand over my forehead. ‘It’s her club. I’m mortified that I’m causing a fuss. It was so embarrassing last night.’

‘You know Gen won’t see it that way,’ Evan says sagely, making quick work of the rest of the rear skirt panel. ‘She’ll have been absolutely horrified on your behalf. He gouged your brother’s eye out, basically. I have no doubt whose team she’s on.’

He’s right, of course. Everything about Gen’s reaction last night tells me she was heading off to give Mr Wright a giant bollocking after she put me in a prepaid black cab. The cab fare home to Seven Sisters was seventy pounds.Seventy pounds!I felt awful about it, but Gen insisted. She really is so lovely.

‘Doesn’t make me any less terrified for this evening,’ I mutter. ‘But that’s six hours away. I have no intention of spending any more time obsessing over it now.’

I can’t. I have fabric orders to put through and a particularly “relaxed” Italian mill to chase up for missing their delivery deadline. I need to price up next season’s collection, which is by far my least favourite part of the job and a task I’ve been putting off and off, and I have a call this afternoon with the woman who does all our social media graphics to discuss the aesthetic for Instagram for the coming weeks.

It’s so much. Too much, really. Too many hats. So many balls in the air that if I stop to think about it, the terror hits me like a wall of freezing water.

But, given the epic size of the horrors that await me this evening, right now it feels like a blessing.

8

NATALIE

Iwas eight when Stephen was attacked. Instead of a full picture, I have blurry snapshots. I’d been at my primary school for almost a year, and I still missed my former prep school. The prep school I had to give up when the successful private wealth firm Dad managed with his oldest friend, Bob, went under, courtesy of a Ponzi scheme good old Bob had concocted.

Bob went to prison, while my parents and lots of their friends lost their life savings. Dad was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, but the financial regulator found that his lack of awareness and failure to ask questions of his partner amounted to gross negligence and struck him off. He was no longer permitted to work in finance.

Obviously, my full understanding of these details came much later, just as my full understanding of the atrocities Adam Wright inflicted on my brother came much later. I was young, and I was shielded from the worst of both events.

All I knew was that we couldn’t pay for private school anymore, so Stephen and I were uprooted from our friendsand thrust into the local state schools. We couldn’t afford our mortgage anymore, either, so the bank foreclosed on our comfortable, stylish home in a quiet cul-de-sac and we found ourselves in a squalid eight-hundred-square-foot council flat in Croydon. I traded in my beautiful pink bedroom for a tiny box room.

That was the worst part, by far.

I think Mum cried for a solid six months.

That’s one of the things I remember most clearly, even before Stephen’s attack.

But back to the attack itself. I clearly remember my teacher telling me gently that I was going to the after-school club that day because my mummy couldn’t come to pick me up just yet. Auntie Jan came eventually and took me back to her house, where she explained that Stephen was in hospital.

When I was allowed to go visit him, he looked like a mummy, his head and body all bandaged up, with plasters over his nose and just one big black eye peeking out.

I screamed when I saw him. I remember that much.

They couldn’t get me me stop.

The man standing before me in Alchemy’s airy meeting room is immaculate.

That strikes me as the most unfair part.

He’s tall and golden-skinned and wonderfully proportioned, so much so that the designer in me can’t help but marvel at how perfectly his frame was built to wear a suit. Rather than look at his face, I focus on his jacket. I swear that’s Brioni. It’s got to be. Those lapels are definitely hand rolled. Hand stitched. The perfect way it moulds to his bodysuggests there’s a layer of canvas adding structure under that super-fine wool exterior.

Exquisite.

The workmanship, that is.

---