the left, and the bullet she fired missed Mona. There was a quick, desperate struggle, but somehow she managed to keep hold of Gabriel and put the gun against his head again.
‘Shoot her!’ Mona screamed at Brittany, but Brittany hesitated. There was no way she could get a shot off at Eden without there being a high chance she would kill Gabriel.
‘Give it to me.’ Mona snatched the gun off Brittany and pointed it at Eden and Gabriel.
I tried to catch Ruth’s eye. We were six feet from the door. Mona had already demonstrated that she didn’t care if she killed Gabriel. But she must have known that if her first shot hit Gabriel, not Eden, then Eden would surely shoot her. To win this, she would need to hit Eden in the head with her first shot. And if she managed that, Ruth and I would be her next targets.
There was the rifle lying on the floor beneath Nick’s body. Brittany kept looking at it, then flicking her eyes towards Eden, measuring her chances of getting to it. Surely, any second now, she would decide to try it – because Eden couldn’t risk removing the gun from Gabriel’s head.
And then Gabriel said, ‘Kill her, Mona’, and that made up my mind.
I grabbed hold of Ruth and pulled her through the open door, slamming it shut behind us.
She pushed me away. ‘What the hell are you doing? I need to help Eden.’
‘No. We need to go. We’ll call the police.’ I tugged at her arm, pulling her to the lift and punching the button.
She struggled to free herself. ‘Dammit, Adam, I can’t just leave her.’
‘What? Ruth, please, come on.’ I stabbed at the button again. The ‘Up’ arrow was lit but there was no sign of the lift. ‘Where the hell is it?’
‘But I promised her,’ Ruth said.
‘What?’
‘This evening. She came to see me. She told me what was going to happen, except she said Gabriel was going to brand me.’ She shuddered. ‘She said she was going to get me out, but I had to promise to help her afterwards.’
I stared at her. ‘Help her? How?’ The lift still wasn’t coming. ‘We’re going to have to go down the stairs. There must be an exit here—’
A gunshot came from within the room.
At the same time, the lift doors pinged and slid open. Inside were half a dozen men, dressed head to toe in black, carrying guns.
Police.
‘Oh, thank God, thank God,’ I said.
Every gun in sight was pointed at us. More officers appeared from the end of the corridor; I guessed they had come up the stairs. They levelled their weapons at us as well.
‘Get on the floor and—’
The door to the communal room burst open. It was Eden, still holding on to Gabriel. Blood was pouring from a wound on her shoulder. Mona must have taken her shot but only managed to wound her.
The cops had turned as one, and were all now aiming their guns at her.
Eden dropped the weapon she was holding and let go of Gabriel at the same time. Gabriel fell on to his hands and knees, next to the Glock, while Eden stood there with her hands in the air.
‘Don’t move!’ one of the cops screamed at Gabriel.
He looked at the cop, then at the gun. Eden stood beside him, her hands still in the air.
‘Move and I’ll shoot,’ yelled the cop.
Gabriel seemed to think about it. I still wonder, sometimes, what went through his head in that moment. If he thought about everything he’d built. If he remembered where he’d come from, the boy he’d once been: the boy who liked the theatre and computers, who’d been bullied and humiliated. I wonder if he contemplated what life would be like for him in jail, all his power and wealth and influence taken away. Nobody to protect him anymore.
The cops continued to shout at him to leave the gun, to put his hands on his head, and then Gabriel locked eyes with Ruth.
He reached for the gun.
Chapter 43
I took my coffee out on to the front deck and, not for the first time, had to remind myself that this was real. We were actually staying here, in a house on Carbon Beach in Malibu. There were palm trees, a barbecue grill, five bedrooms, a beautiful pool, and every morning, after writing for an hour on the deck, I would take a walk along the white sand, down to the ocean, saying hi to the