Page 71 of I Would Die for You

“Where are we?” she asks, looking up at the metal gantries suspended between the buildings on either side of her.

Michael turns off the engine and, without warning, lunges across the seat at her. He mauls at her top as his mouth clamps onto hers.

“Wh-what are you doing…?” she manages, pressing herself into the seat in a futile attempt to get away from him.

He doesn’t say a word, just keeps forcing himself onto her as he attempts to lift himself over the handbrake.

Cassie’s flailing hand searches for the door handle and as shereleases it she pushes herself out of the car, falling onto the pavement. She scrambles to her feet, her legs feeling like jelly beneath her as she tries to run, but she’s not quick enough. Michael is a second behind, slamming himself into her and bundling her into the open doorway of a disused building. Disturbed by the unexpected invasion, pigeons flap and fly out of the holes where windows should be.

“Get off me!” she cries, desperately trying to dig her heels into the loose rubble under her stilettos, but she can’t get any traction, her feet seemingly skating on ice.

“Shut the fuck up!” he sneers, his eyes hollow and devoid of empathy.

“Stop!” she cries, as he pushes her onto the ground, his crushing weight falling on top of her. “Get off me!” She pushes herself back, feeling the sting of tiny particles of loose stone leaving their imprint on her skin.

“Don’t pretend this isn’t what you want,” Michael snarls, pulling at her underwear until it rips. “It’s what youallwant.”

“No!” she mumbles, the word lost as his hand closes over her mouth, making her feel as if she’s suffocating.

She takes herself to another place and another time, back to when she’d been sitting on the roundabout in the park. She must have been only six or seven, but as her mum had turned her back to her to get an ice lolly from the kiosk, a group of older boys had come along and started pushing the roundabout. Hollering as they ran around and around, Cassie had held on to the bar until her knuckles turned white, but the faster they went, the more she could feel herself sliding from her seat. She wanted to call out to them to stop, but she didn’t want them to know she was scared, so she allowed herself to be thrown off, at what felt like forty miles per hour, onto the unforgiving tarmac. Her skin felt much the same as it did now, the sense of burning getting ever hotter as the grit worked its way into the open wounds.

And however brave she’d forced herself to be then, she has to dig even deeper now as Michael pushes himself into her, and his smothering hand cuts off the last semblance of air.

35

“It’s me!” comes a frantic voice as soon as Nicole accepts the reverse-charge call from the operator.

“Cassie?” Nicole gasps, her sisterly instinct immediately telling her that something’s wrong.

“Where are you? What’s happened?”

“I-I’m in town,” sobs Cassie. “But I haven’t got any way of getting back home.”

“What? Why?”

“I-I just need you to come and get me,” pleads Cassie. “Right now.”

“Where are you?” asks Nicole, her impatient tone more a sign of frustration that she isn’t already with her than anything else.

“I’m on Tower Bridge.”

“OK, stay in the phone box,” says Nicole.

“Pl-please hurry,” cries Cassie.

“I’ll be with you as quickly as I can,” she says, slamming down the handset and running out of the door.

In the twenty minutes it takes to get there, Nicole runs through every possible scenario that would result in her normally streetwise sister being stranded in town and sounding terrified. But when she pulls up outside the phone box, with the lights of the bridge’s grand piers shining onto the filthy windows, nothing could have prepared her for what she sees.

“Jesus!” she cries, as Cassie falls into her arms, bloodied and bruised. “What the hell’s happened?”

“I-I…” starts Cassie, before her chest convulses and her shoulders wrack with vicious sobs. “He… he…”

Nicole’s blood feels like it’s stopped pumping. “Hewhat?”

“Everything… everything was fine,” cries Cassie. “He was bringing me home; he was looking after me, but then…”

It’s taking all of Nicole’s restraint not to shake it out of her.

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