She hears another noise then as he rustles around inside the kitchen cupboards.
She has no idea what the fuck he’s doing out there and she doesn’t want to hang around to find out. Escape is her only option.
Staring over towards the front door, she wonders if she can loosen the cable ties, just enough so that if she makes a run for it, if she reaches the door, she’d have a fighting chance of being able to get out. But as she yanks at the cables, she knows it’s no use; they’re too tight. The rope on her feet is too.
Mark’s voice stops her dead in her tracks.
‘Good luck breaking out of them,’ he says, strolling back into the room with a glass of water in one hand and two large boxes, containing her sleeping pills and painkillers, in the other. Rebecca watches as he places them down on the table in front of her, the smirk on his face as she reads his mind.
‘Poor, poor Alex. That’s what they’ll say when they find your body. She never got over her husband cheating on her and taking her child. The same way your mother went. Just another mad, crazy bitch who took an overdose. That’s what she did isn’t it?’
He smiles triumphantly then, watching her face pale.
‘Oh, I know all your secrets, Alex. I made it my business to find out everything there was to know about you. And you’re just like her, aren’t you? A murdering fucking psycho. That’s what they’ll say when they see the note you leave. Confessing to killing Jessica before you cowardly kill yourself.’
He opens the pill boxes, tipping them out on the table and stacking them into a neat little piles.
And she knows that he’ll do it. He’s not bluffing.
He’s going to kill her.
‘Please don’t do this, Mark. Please?’ She’s crying now, Unable to do anything else, as she recognises the malice in his eyes. He’s really going to do this, and there’s nothing she can do to stop him.
‘Please, Mark, at least hear me out. I’m sorry.’ She’s whimpering. A trail of snot hanging from her nose that she can’t wipe away with her wrists bound.
She must look pitiful. Pathetic. But she needed him to believe her.
‘I never meant to hurt her…’ Her words come as a whisper, a mere tremor as they leave her lips. All the colour drains from her face as the memory of the last time she saw Jessica flashes through her mind. And Mark, hanging lifelessly from the front of the car, his body, twisted and broken. Plumes of smoke spiralling out from the bonnet.
He was supposed to be dead too?
She finds her voice again. ‘Two bodies? The headlines said they found two bodies?’
‘Neither of them were mine.’ He tilts his head, as if to dislodge the words stuck to the back of his throat. Stopping mid-sentence, despite himself, leaning in close, close enough for her to see the emptiness behind his eyes.
‘There was a man sleeping rough nearby. That’s who you hit, Alex. That’s what made us veer off the road. Don’t you remember? There were two bodies, Alex. A man and a child. But I wasn’t that man.’
Mark pursed his mouth, letting her take this information in.
All this time she’d thought he was dead, that she’d killed him. Finally, she was learning the truth.
‘I lived to see another day. Another painful, shitty, non-existent day, over and over and over again. While you… You were nowhere to be seen. Because you didn’t hang about, did you? You left us. You left her.’ His face twisted with rage. ‘I tried to get her out of the car, you know. But it was too late. She was trapped and I couldn’t reach her, and the fire was out of control. I had to stand there and watch her burn. Can you even imagine for a second how that felt? How desperate I’d felt, how helpless?’
‘I’m sorry…’ Her voice breaks as she starts to sob loudly.
There’s another pause and he closes his eyes. Fighting back his own tears. Refusing to cry. Because crying is for the weak. He needed to be strong now, to focus.
‘She was dead. Gone. And there’s nothing I can do to bring her back. But there’s everything I can do to seek my revenge now and make you pay.’ Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to say what he needed to say without breaking down.
‘You killed the homeless man on impact, so I placed my ID nearby.’ He laughs. ‘I let them all think that I was dead too. Because, technically it wasn’t a lie. I did die that night, Alex. I died inside. And there would be no punishment the police could have given you that would have been good enough to avenge what you did. So, I vowed to myself that I would find you. No matter what. And I would make you pay.’ Another smirk. He was enjoying this.
‘And they’d never catch me, would they? When I caught up with you. Now. Because I no longer exist.’
He pauses, smiling at the genius of his plan. ‘She died because of you, Alex. You murdered her!’
He stops himself from saying her name.
Even now, he stills finds it so hard to say it out loud.
Even to Alex.
The pain still so raw, that most days he fought so hard to block the memories out.
Her little laugh. Her sparkling blue eyes. Her tiny hand tucked into his.
‘Jessica died because of you,’ he forces the words out now, taking a slow deep breath as the memories make his chest constrict.
He wondered how much thought this selfish bitch had given his daughter over the past few years.
None, he expected. And it sickened him to his core that Rebecca could just carry on and pretend it never happened. That she could start a whole new life. That she got to experience what it was like to have her own child.
‘You don’t deserve any of this.’ Mark gestures holding his hands up to the grandeur of the house. ‘And I’m here to take it all from you. I’m here to make you suffer, just like she did.’
Mark is pacing the floor directly in front of her now, enjoying her obvious discomfort as he sits down in the chair opposite her.
His eyes never leaving hers, he slowly drinks her in.
And Rebecca is sitting so still now, as if she’s made herself go small.
She’s scared. And so she should be.
Fight or flight. The only two options you have when you’re faced with real danger. He’s glad Alex realises the severity of the situation, because she’s in great danger now.
She’s not fighting yet, but he’d give her time.
Because the old Alex was still in there somewhere, he’s convinced of that. Despite the pathetic act she was putting on. Despite the disguise she’d put on.
One thing he’d learned a long time ago was that Alex was always full of surprises. She always knew how to put on an act.
‘I lived in squalor. Not that you care.’ He shrugs. ‘I slept on the streets. Huddled in a sleeping bag in some damp, stinking doorway of whatever vacant shop doorway I could find that would offer me some shelter.’ He stares at her, his gaze cutting right through her. His eyes icy cold. ‘That’s where I slept the night of Jessica’s funeral. The night of my own funeral.’ He laughs. The sound harsh, all humour absent as he cleared his throat then.
‘I remember lying there and not even being able to cry. Because there was nothing left inside me. No feelings, no emotions, nothing. And I had nothing left to live for. My beautiful, sweet Jessica was gone. She was all alone, without me, buried down there in the dirt.’ He shook his head, still tormented by vision of her lying alone in her cold coffin. ‘I almost drank myself to death that night. Fuck, I wish I actually had. I remember slipping in and out of consciousness, and each time my eyes flickered opened again, and I caught a glimpse of the hazy night sky, I begged for my life to be taken too.’ Ruefully, he shook his head. Incensed at having wanted something so much, to have prayed for his own death, yet life always seemed to have a way of making its own plans and rules. He hadn’t been shown any mercy on the night he wanted to die. Nor any since.