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“Right. Okay. What about food? Are you hungry?” His head cocked comically at the last word, and he whined and shifted excitedly from paw to paw. “Yes, you’re hungry, aren’t you? I am too. Let’s go and get some food!”
He nuzzled her hand with his big wet nose and then sat back with an expectant stare.
“Oh. No. I don’t have the food out here. But we can get some inside, can’t we?”
More staring.
“Come on, show me how you get into the house.”
This pup just wasn’t getting it. He gave Iris’s hand a sympathetic lick and she groaned in frustration. She scratched his head and wondered what to do next.
The moon disappeared again, leaving everything pitch black. The wind died down abruptly and, after a brief lull, the skies opened up.
Iris yelped as the icy deluge instantly drenched her. The dog got up and shook himself vigorously, adding some dog-scented moisture to Iris’s already soaked clothing. She sensed him moving away and Iris panicked, not wanting to lose her way into the house.
“Stay, boy,” she implored. “Come here.”
To her eternal gratitude she felt his big, furry body bump against her thigh reassuringly. He really was massive. She slid her hand up his narrow back toward his neck and lightly gripped his ruff. She didn’t want to take hold of his collar in case he considered it a prompt to stay.
“Let’s go.”
His muscles tensed and he started walking.
“I’m putting all my faith in you right now, boy,” she told him. “You could be leading me further into the woods only to abandon me there. Please don’t do that. Don’t be an arsehole like your owner. Be a better boy than him. Be the goodest boy ever.”
The dog continued to amble along lazily, seemingly unperturbed by the heavy rain. Finally, after what felt like an endless amount of walking, they rounded the huge dark house and the ground started to slope downward…
Oh God, was she going to wind up over the side of a cliff after all?
But no, the stony ground beneath her feet gave way to gravel and then paving. And just ahead of them, she could see light creeping out from beneath a shroud of darkness, possibly a garage door?
The dog trotted toward the left and to Iris’s relief a little door slid open as they approached, and the meter-by-half-meter square was more than big enough for her to crawl through. She stopped the dog, by tightening her hold on his ruff and when the mutt obediently came to a halt, Iris undid the collar and crouched to crawl through the opening. She remained close to the door so that the dog could walk through it as well. Once they were both safely inside, she refastened the collar around the dog’s neck. After blinking a few times to adjust to the brightness in the garage, she gawked at the fleet of cars standing like silent metallic sentinels in neat rows within the brightly lit space.
Gleaming, sporty cars that had to be worth millions upon millions of pounds. She gaped, awed by the staggering display of wealth and found herself wondering why no one had known about Trystan Abbott’s little bolt-hole in South Africa. Or even about his obsession with sports cars. It seemed like something that would have been revealed before in the many articles about the man. And yet, Iris hadn’t found a single reference to either.
Curious.
She shrugged it off for the moment. She had much weightier matters to consider right now. Staying out of sight for one thing. She wasn’t going to chance being kicked out into the cold again. Something told her that if he tossed her out a second time, she would not find her way back inside again. And God knew, she wouldn’t survive the night out in the elements. Well, maybe she would, but it would be unpleasant and she’d likely develop bronchial pneumonia, or something equally nasty, as a consequence.
“What next, boy? I should probably find something dry to wear… Do you think your master is asleep yet?” The dog looked up at her with a quizzical tilt of his head and a thought occurred to Iris. “What’s your name? It must be on your tag, right?”
She reached for the collar again and checked the round silver tag.
Luna.
“Oh, you’re a girl. Sorry, sweetheart. You’re so big, I naturally assumed you were a lad. Terribly gender normative of me, I know. Luna, such a pretty name for a very pretty, good girl.”
The dog’s tail lazily swept the polished concrete floor.
“How long should I stay down here before your master heads off to bed, do you think?”
The dog yawned expansively, displaying a daunting array of sharp white teeth. Iris gulped, grateful that Luna had proven to be such a darling, despite her terrifying first impression.
“And your dickhead of a master must have known I was referring to you, yet he chose to leave me out there completely petrified and expecting the absolute worse. That must have given him a nice little laugh.”
Although, she couldn’t quite imagine the bearded, hulking, formidably unsmiling man she’d encountered earlier finding anything amusing.
She wandered around the garage, inspecting the cars, and trying not to think about how very cold she was. She daren’t touch any of the vehicles for fear of setting off alarms, and she held her hands tightly clasped behind her back as she leaned over the bonnet of a metallic green Aston Martin DB12. She wouldn’t have known what it was if her brother hadn’t been salivating over a magazine spread of this exact car a few months ago.
