Dying for Christmas Read Online Free PDF

I could just find my bag with my phone …
    ‘I’ll just pop to the loo.’ I’d never to my knowledge used ‘pop’ as a verb before.
    ‘Sure,’ he called, as I made my way across the floor on trembling legs. ‘Help yourself.’
    Once in the inner hallway, my fingers closed around the knob of the door closest to the bathroom, even as my heart threatened to punch its way clear out of my chest. I turned it, hoping against hope there would be no noise.
    There was no noise.
    And no movement.
    The door was locked. Likewise the one next to it.
    In the furthest top corner of the hallway the red light of an alarm sensor winked.
    In contrast to the other two rooms, the bathroom door had no lock. After I pulled the door shut, I slumped against it, shaking. I needed the toilet but it was on the other side of the room, beyond the distance where you could sit down and hold the door closed. I glanced around the room in a futile search for a cupboard where there might be hidden razor blades or nail scissors or mega-strength sleeping pills I could add to his champagne when he wasn’t looking. There was another alarm sensor in here too. I couldn’t remember ever seeing one in a bathroom before.
    There were footsteps in the hallway outside.
    ‘Is everything OK, Jessica?’
    Could he tell I was just the other side of the door, two inches of wood separating his breath from mine, crouching on trembling legs that threatened to give way? I prayed he wouldn’t try the handle, wouldn’t try to push his way in.
    Springing across the room, I pushed the steel button for the flush, catching my breath at the sudden explosion of water shooting through the bowl. I ran the tap in the sink, trying to avoid looking into my own frightened eyes in the mirror.
    He was waiting outside the door.
    ‘You look scared, sweetheart. You’re not scared of me, are you?’
    I shrugged instead of answering straight away. ‘The situation is quite challenging,’ I replied eventually.
    I turned it round so that I wasn’t commenting on him. I was commenting on the situation – not what he was doing but how it was making me feel, just as I’d learned in therapy. Sonia Rubenstein would have been proud.
    On our way back through the living area of the apartment, Dominic paused and plunged a hand deep into the pocket of his jeans. He withdrew a huge bunch of keys, all with a different-coloured fob. ‘Purple, I think,’ he said. He walked over to the massive metal front door and turned that key. ‘There,’ he said, with a smile that cracked his face open like a coconut. ‘Now we’re safely locked away from the rest of the world. And you know what would make it even cosier?’
    I shook my head.
    ‘If we get rid of our phones as well.’
    Now I saw he’d laid out two phones on the dining-room table – one black, that must be his, and my own white one, in its pink leather case. Without stopping to think I lunged forward to grab it.
    The pain came out of nowhere, a sharp stinging on my scalp that pulled me up short. I tried to turn my head, crying out when I realized he had a hank of my hair wound around his fist.
    ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
    With his free hand, he reached out and picked up the phones, then, still pulling me by the hair, he led the way over to the windows. At the glass door, he finally let go. While I rubbed my sore scalp, he turned the handle and, before I knew what was happening, he’d taken both phones and hurled them towards the river. The darkness swallowed them one after the other. Closing and locking the door in one fluid movement, Dominic turned back to me and smiled.
    ‘Where are my manners? Let’s eat. You must be starving.’
    ‘I’m not hungry.’
    The thought of food made me nauseous. I was hardly able to breathe, let alone chew and swallow.
    But his face had tightened, like it was threaded through with invisible wire and someone was pulling on it. Hard.
    ‘Do you want to hurt my feelings?’
    I shook my head. He