Readers Club

Welcome to the last in this mini-series of Till You Die posts. We’ve reached the final part of the story. Is Joanna going to get her happy ending after all? I’ve said before that I really enjoyed creating the character of Joanna. Do you think she would find a place in the Darker Minds series – maybe in an alternative and novelised version of this story? Let me know if you do!

Darker Minds: Dark minds are at work. Sometimes it takes a darker one to stop them…

Anyway, on to the last part of story, and a quick mention that you can still get the full e-book as the welcome gift when you join my Readers’ Club – at the moment. More of that later.

Enjoy the last part of Till You Die.

Happy reading! 😊

---

Till You Die (Final Part)

That first few weeks at home together whisked by in a haze of happiness for Joanna. Whenever Joseph fell asleep, Craig held her and kissed her, and he made her plates of food. She struggled to move around for the first couple of weeks, and hated that Craig had to do everything for all of them. She hated most of all that she found it too difficult to change Joseph, and it upset her. But she did manage to feed him, and she used this as her way of bonding with her baby. The scar would heal, the pain would subside, and she would be off the iron tablets before long, she hoped. She had everything she’d ever wanted: her own family, a beautiful house, and plenty of money so that they never had to worry about anything, ever.

***

One day, about three weeks after they’d bought Joseph home, they were eating lunch, and Joanna was just finishing feeding a hiccupy baby, when Craig’s mobile rang. It was lying on the table, and he snatched it up like lightning. Joanna looked up at Craig’s face but he had already turned himself to face the window.

‘Oh, hi…wait a mo.’

That feeling of billowing sickness Joanna had had before returned with a vengeance. She heard the door of the utility room close behind Craig. It had always clunked when Gran had lived there, and it was freezing in that tiny cubby hole. No one went in it unnecessarily. What was necessary now? Who was so necessary now?

Joanna knew she shouldn’t listen to his mobile calls. Everyone has a right to their privacy, she thought. But in the midst of all her new-found happiness, that little man with the walnut head that glowed green in the reflection of the glass appeared at the back of her eyes. And he wouldn’t go away, even as she held tiny Joseph tightly to her.

She took the baby into the bedroom and laid him down in his Moses basket. Then she took off her slippers and, in bare feet, crept noiselessly back down the stairs, clinging to the handrail with one hand, to her scar with the other. She eyed each step warily – they had so nearly been her undoing.

The utility room door was closed but there was a gap near the middle hinge where at the door had bowed once, when it had been taken off, painted, and left to dry at an angle against a wall. Craig’s voice muffled its way through this crack. Putting her ear right to the opening, she could hear the words.

‘No, OK, so it didn’t quite go according to plan. But it’ll all work out, I promise… She’s very weak… Yes, of course I want us to be together…’

Joanna’s heart began to pound in her chest. She knew that if she was capable of running upstairs to Joseph’s room and looked at the watch ball, that it would be glowing as it had been that night – that night Craig had tried to kill her. There! She had finally admitted it out loud to her own mind. It couldn’t have been any other way. She’d thought it would be all over, as soon as Craig knew that everything was all right – with the baby. She had thought they would get back to normal, be a happy family, and she could forget her silliness and her paranoia and put it down to the pregnancy.

The fuzziness that had been with her throughout the last nine months had gone now, and she was seeing things as clearly as she used to, before Craig had got his hooks into her heart, and her money. That little man – he had known.

She reared herself up. Weak, was she? Not as weak as Craig seemed to think. She laid one hand against her caesarean scar and shut her eyes as she placed the other against the door. The time had come to confront him, once and for all. If he didn’t want her, then he could leave her and Joseph, but she would ensure that he got nothing from her. None of her money. He wouldn’t get the chance to hurt her again. Her head whirred with what she would do and tears welled up across her eyelashes.

Craig’s voice filled her ears. That soft, soothing voice he had when they first met, in that solicitor’s office, when she’d been with Gran who wanted to leave Joanna the house and half her money.

‘Look, you can come over and stay any time you like, Mum. I just thought it would be better for Joanna if she felt more up to it first. I know I’ve been an idiot recently, but I’m just trying to look after my family.’

She pushed open the door. There was Craig, leant with his back against the radiator, mobile dangling from one hand, the other running through his beautiful dark crop of hair, just like his son’s.

‘I think I’ve upset Mum.’ Craig blew a huge sigh over Joanna’s shoulder as she rushed to him, burying her guilty, relieved face in his chest. ‘You know what she’s like – she reckons we don’t want her to help, so she’s being all funny.’

She smiled up at him. ‘Thanks, love. I’d like us to get to grips with our baby before anyone else starts telling us what to do. I’ve got enough with the midwife coming round all the time.’ She sighed.  ‘I’ll make you a cuppa in a few minutes.’

Then she padded back upstairs and leant forward into the Moses basket. Joseph – their beautiful, perfect baby – dribbled as he noticed her. She wiped his mouth and put out her finger. He clutched it, staring at her with those stunning emerald eyes he had inherited from his father. She knew she had everything she wanted here, in this house. The paranoia, the worrying, started by that little man in that weird little shop – was over. Her imagination had done its bit to try and destroy her life, just like her Gran’s has done to hers. They were a family. And nothing – not even Craig’s mother with her constant phone calls – would prevent it now.

Almost instinctively, she reached for the watch ball, sitting so patiently on guard near the window. She thought, just for a split second, about staring into its depths. Instead, sighing, she wriggled her captured finger free from little Joseph’s tiny, strong grasp. And, without the sick feeling or the raised heartbeat or the stinging eyes, she opened the bottom drawer where she kept the baby towels, and placed it underneath the bottom-most of the mound.

‘Time to live,’ she said. Then she made soft circles on the forehead of her green-eyed baby until he fell asleep. ‘Magic eyes,’ she said softly to herself as she stroked the black fluff of Joseph’s hair. ‘Magic all round.’

Joanna heard the vicious rumblings of the kettle downstairs as it boiled a full body of water.

‘He must have got tired of waiting,’ she smiled to herself.

***

Did the old man know? From behind his counter in that quirky little shop, could he tell that Joanna had pulled through, almost unscathed? How strong were his senses? Did he know that she stared at the last little piece of her family jigsaw while the kettle boiled downstairs, drowning out all other noises? Did he know that, as the kettle boiled, Craig spoke softly into his mobile, and his voice came through, soft and sweet, to the one on the other end who was waiting for magic to happen?

‘I’ll make a new plan. There’s the kid now, but Mum will deal with him. He takes after me, she’ll see that. I’ll have the money. And you’ve got all yours, too, now that husband of yours has finally been declared legally dead. And soon, I promise, I’ll have you. I love you, more than I’ve loved anyone. I’ll love you until you die…’

And the old man – could he sense that, under those pure white baby towels, the glass bauble, once known as a watch ball, glowed with all its might, in the hope that Joanna would see?

---

Take a look at Show Me Dead, the first novel in the Darker Minds series, here.

We’re getting close to the end of Till You Die now. There’s just one more part to go after today’s one. How is everything panning out, after what happened to Julia at the end of the last part? Read on and find out…

Happy reading! 😊

---

Joanna’s tiny baby was motherless. At least, for a few days he was. Joanna was mortified when she regained consciousness and realised that she had missed the first few days of her baby’s life. The hospital put her in the picture. Her contractions had been strong by the time she had been brought to the hospital. Her fall had been quite horrific, they said, and the head injuries she’d sustained had rendered her unconscious and unable to deliver the baby, so they’d performed a caesarean.

But, through her tears, there in the hospital bed, she also realised that there was Craig. Her entire insides pounded. All her thoughts, fears – everything – of recent months converged on that chair where the man who she was convinced was trying to kill her now sat with their baby in his arms, smiling with the hospital staff, giving a bottle to the baby. One movement from her in the bed, and he was looking up and grinning at her. He blew her a kiss, then concentrated on the task of feeding. All her emotions turned into tears. She forgave him for not coming over to her bedside. She forgave him for all those moments in her own imaginings when she’d turned him into a raving psychopath. Guilt and stupidity and sheer love overwhelmed her. Finally, Craig responded to his son.

‘Is he… perfect, Craig? Is he perfect for you?’ She felt the drip of tears on her cheeks. Without looking up at her, eyes on the baby, he replied.

‘There was nothing to worry about. Mum will adore him. We’ll call him Joseph.’

Joanna had no intention of arguing. Her husband, her baby – and she – were together. That was the only thing that mattered. So that had been it, had it? He’d been worried about what his mum might think. How she would react to anything – a baby – out of the ordinary. She never had really liked his mum. She was a bit too pushy for her liking.

Joanna sighed at herself. She must have been mad before, believing in witch or watch balls and mumbo jumbo, and letting the words of that weird little man drive her nearly insane. She’d had enough to deal with in her head as it was: the amniocentesis, Gran dying, her own health issues. The phone calls… no, she would put that out of her mind now. She shuddered. Maybe he was a spiteful man with nothing better to do than to spot a weakness in her and to take a kind of sadistic pleasure in putting ideas in her head.

***

Joanna thought about the walnut-headed man again, days later, on the way home from the hospital, as she sat in the back of the car, next to her tiny infant who was dribbling away contentedly in his car seat. Maybe, in a weird sort of way, though, the old man had been right in what he’d said. Joseph was male – the old man’s ‘he’ – and then there had been the contractions, the fall; the possibility of harm coming to her. She shivered. She could have died, if she’d actually been on her own in the house. But no, Craig had been there, hadn’t he? And she’d rung Mark, too. He’d been the one she was convinced she could trust. He would have made sure his sister had gone to the hospital.

Just for a moment, she wondered who had rung the ambulance.

Craig got the baby out of the car when they pulled up in the driveway. Joanna hobbled to unlock the door, still intensely sore from the operation. Unable to help herself, she turned and headed slowly, painfully, back to her husband and her child. ‘Are we going to be all right?’ She slid her fingers into the hand that wasn’t laden with a baby car seat. ‘We’re a family now, aren’t we – the three of us?’

Craig looked down at her with those amazing green eyes, and in his voice she heard the old early tones, and they rang back music to her ears.

‘Everything’s going to be fine. Look at him. He’s beautiful.’ Craig peered into the car seat in which Joseph was fast asleep. Joanna felt the warmth of his palm as he put his hand under her chin and lifted her head to meet his eyes. ‘I’ve been… stupid recently. I want to put it right. I’ve always told you, Joanna – I’ll love you till you die.’

---

Have you pre-ordered your copy of Show Me Dead? Take a look and pre-order here.

Welcome to Part 5 of my serialisation of Till You Die.

I’m starting to really feel that the launch date for the first Darker Minds novel, Show Me Dead, is creeping ever closer, and the time when I retire the full e-book of Till You Die as my Readers’ club welcome gift and replace it with Beneath the Flesh, a novella from the Darker Minds series, is much closer still.

All details for how you’ll be able to get hold of Beneath the Flesh for FREE, if you become a member of my Readers’ Club are at the bottom of this post.

In the meantime, the nightmare Joanna is is begins to become a reality… Enjoy Part 5 of Till You Die.

Happy reading! 😊

---

With three days to go until her due date, she let Craig in after work in silence. She ate her tea without a word, her heart banging in her chest and her stomach feeling on fire every time Craig looked at her. She couldn’t wait for it to get dark, so she could go to bed.

‘I’m feeling very tired,’ she murmured, her hand over her belly and keeping her back to the wall as she left the room.

Craig smirked and his green eyes glared, like a cat’s. ‘There’s not much time left now, is there? Not long.’

Joanna bolted, as best she could, out of the room.

Alone in the nursery, the furniture casting shadows upon the moonlit walls, and with only the watch ball for company Joanna laid, shaking, her eyes wide open. She had no intention of sleeping. Her blood pressure must be through the roof. She just stared; watched for movement on the door handle. The upstairs phone was in her hand, sweat making the plastic clammy. She held it to her face as she heard Craig come upstairs to bed. She swallowed over and over, as the slit of light under the door vanished with the click of a switch and everything became silent.

It was dark. She lay still. She must have been like that for hours. Exhaustion pummelled her bones. Her baby battered her ribs. The only thing she could hear was the slight creaking of the springs in the mattress as Craig rolled over in bed. At least, she assumed he was rolling over. Hoped that he was. She gripped tightly to the phone.

She felt sick; her head was fuzzy. Joanna dialled Mark’s number. Someone she could trust.

A fuzzy, sleepy voice came down the line. ‘Hello? Sis? Are you okay?’

Joanna’s words poured from her mouth. ‘Mark, please, come over – come over now. I can’t stand it I…’ She broke down. Tears fell down her face as she sat herself up in the dark. But it was no longer dark, and she didn’t realise why at first, until she looked towards the chest of drawers to see the watch ball glowing bright, casting spinning shadows everywhere, beginning to illuminate the room.

‘Mark, quick!’ she squealed. ‘Help me!’

She threw down the phone. In the bedroom she heard the springs creak, then there was the sound of the floorboards, and the gentle, deadly motion of feet running across the floor towards the bedroom door.

Joanna began to scream. She scrabbled to her feet and ran from the nursery, clutching her belly as she heard Craig’s voice through the door.

‘Joanna, Joanna.’

She reached the top of the stairs. They were so narrow and steep, especially in the dark, and she couldn’t see past her bump. Tears streamed down her face and still she screamed as Craig’s voice got closer behind her. If she could get to the front door, then she would be safe.

‘Joanna, come here, Joanna.’ Craig’s breath felt as if it was on her neck, he was so close. At the front door, the street lamp outside illuminated a shadow of someone standing at the glass.

‘Mark!’

Mark banged on the door. ‘Sis, where are you? Are you all right? Let me in, Joanna.’

She was ready to fly down the stairs, as Craig’s words appeared in her ear. ‘Joanna. Come here. Joanna.’

She put her foot on the step. If she could only get to the front door. Then she felt something… the pain… her foot fell off the step… then, the blackness, while outside, by the lamplight, Mark continued to hammer on the front door.

---

Well… poor Joanna! There are two more parts to go – and I’m sure you’ve got your theories as to how the story is going to end.

Show Me Dead launches on 14th January 2022. If you want to ensure it lands on your device as soon it’s released, you can pre-order from Amazon here.

Welcome to the blog, and to Till You Die, Part 4.

This is the story that is retiring as the FREE e-book that you get when you sign up to my Readers’ Club. It’s free to read in serialised parts here, but no longer as a freebie for my Readers’ Club members. There’s a brand new FREE novella from my Darker Minds crime and suspense series, which I am giving away to anyone who signs up to my Readers’ Club. More details at the bottom of this post.

If you’d like to catch up on any parts of Till You Die that you’ve missed, here are Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Things are beginning to grow into a nightmare for our poor Joanna. I’ll let you find out how…

Happy reading! 😊

---

Joanna’s next few days were taken up with trying to listen in on every phone conversation Craig had. Her nerves were on edge, her breath felt shallow and often she found her hands shaking. She hid it from everyone, especially her brother, Mark. She didn’t want to have a conversation about Craig with him. When he’d brought her a Danish pastry and a bag of cheese straws from the bakery, he’d sat there with a cup of tea, and said, ‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there, sis? Don’t try and kid me. Is it the baby?’ She’d shaken her head and smiled, but her lips felt wobbly, and she’d cried on Mark’s chest while he’d growled, ‘It’d better not be that bloody husband of yours who’s upsetting you.’

And she began to convince herself – in fact she was sure – that the watch ball appeared, to her eyes at least, to be changing. Whenever she went into the nursery, she noticed that the threads inside emitted a vivid shimmer, until they combined in the middle to form a kind of glitter, similar to descriptions she’d read on the Internet. It made the glass looked rather like a snow globe. She remembered getting a glitter ball with a resin image of a winter wonderland inside when she was a child.

But she wasn’t living in a wonderland. She was living through a nightmare. It didn’t escape her notice that the only time the watch ball looked different was when Craig was in the house. The rest of the time, when she held it up to the light as she had done in the shop, it looked just like a harmless and beautiful glass ornament. She knew she shouldn’t be uneasy – scared – of her own husband, but that was just how she was beginning to feel. It was stupid, basing her every waking moment on craziness like this, but she couldn’t help it. Something was going on. She knew it.

Joanna should have been making her final preparations for the baby’s arrival – all those things she wrote on her list and stuck on the inside of the wardrobe door when she’d been for her twenty-week scan. But only her suitcase was packed. She watched, elephant-like and helpless, whenever Craig moved. If she’d seen the watch ball glow, she’d examine every expression, every flash of those magic eyes, every smile (was it a smile or a grimace at being with her?). She’d invent ideas about what Craig was thinking, and it left her with awful, disturbing dreams whenever she dozed off in the chair. And she couldn’t shake that feeling which had begun to engulf her in every waking moment that he was watching, waiting, biding his time to do – she didn’t know what. She was beginning to be petrified to be in a room with him. She jumped if he touched her.

‘My God, Joanna, you’re a wreck.’ Craig stood there, shaking his head, as she screamed when he entered the bedroom. She watched his green eyes glow as he continued, ‘What’s on earth’s the matter with you? You’ll end up with a shrink if you carry on.’

Maybe that was what he was trying to do – send her mad, so he could do as he liked while she suffered from a breakdown. And he would be in her Gran’s house, with her money. Stories of Victorian women who had been incarcerated by their husbands filled her fantasies. At night, she imagined scraping her nails on brick walls in the darkness, screaming where no one cared.

Other times, between the bouts of indigestion she dreamt of Craig, hiding in the shadows, waiting round corners, sometimes with a knife in his hand or sometimes, as she came through the door, he just grabbed her by the mouth. She would wake up sweating and the baby would be kicking as if it was trying to get out. All of this was why Joanna began sleeping in the nursery. She told Craig it was better for her back, which was beginning to really ache, and that he would get more sleep without her tossing and turning next to him, seeing as he had to drive to work in the morning. And every time he left the house, she turned the key and left it in the lock the moment his foot was off the doorstep. He couldn’t get back in unless she opened the door. She was sure he couldn’t.

---

I really hope you’re enjoying this story, and the darker turn that it’s taken!

And if you’d like to take a look at Show Me Dead, the first novel I’ve written in the Darker Minds series, you can find that here.

Welcome to Part 3 of Till You Die. Things are beginning to take a turn into suspicion territory for our Joanna. But I shan’t say any more – I’ll let you read it for yourself!

If you’ve missed parts 1 and 2 of this short story, you can find them here:

Part 1

Part 2

Happy reading! 😊

---

Joanna decided not to relay the details of her conversation in the shop, as they drove home. She did throw in, ‘Wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been a bit longer in that shop, seeing as you were on the phone.’

Craig rolled his eyes. ‘Longer? Seriously?’ Then he shrugged. ‘Just someone from work, wanting to know if I wanted to go out tonight. I said I’d see.’

‘See what?’ She knew she was getting wound up about nothing, really. But she watched Craig’s face intently, waiting for a reply.

‘See if you’re feeling all right for me to leave you on your own.’ He squeezed her knee. ‘You’re looking a bit peaky. I wouldn’t dream of going anywhere if you’re not feeling well.’

‘Maybe it was all that walking about.’ The walnut head hovered in Joanna’s mind and refused to budge. ‘Maybe I just overdid things a bit. That’s all.’

‘Well, I did say so, didn’t I?’ The words sounded a bit abrasive, so Joanna stayed almost silent the rest of the way home, using the excuse of the burger Craig bought her from the drive-thru to keep words to a minimum.

Once they were safely indoors, Craig offered to cook, and she took him up like lightning on the idea. The baby had started playing football on her bladder, so she took the opportunity to sit down with her laptop and trawl the Internet in search of information on watch balls, or witch balls, or whatever they were called. All the time the food was cooking, Joanna was down a research rabbit-hole. She was fascinated by the images she found. The pictures she found of different designs were so beautiful – like hers. She discovered that the Victorians hung them near windows to ward off evil spirits. Then she found a website that said how strongly people used to believe that if the ball changed colour and emitted light, real evil was nearby. A bristle of something strange ran up her spine as she recalled the way the ball had glowed in the shop. She read it again. It was just old-fashioned superstition, she told herself.

Joanna took the ball out of her bag after they’d eaten, and wandered with it up to the room they’d chosen for a nursery. Or, she’d chosen, really. Craig had just gone along with whatever she said.

‘It’s a bit weird. I don’t like it much,’ Craig said when Joanna showed it to him. It was nothing less than she expected, really. He hadn’t wanted her to spend the money on it, after all.

‘Oh, well,’ she sighed, ‘I’ll keep it in here, on the nursery window sill.’ She looked at him, hoping there would be a flicker of emotion at the word ‘nursery’. There was nothing. Her bottom lip quivered as she continued, ‘You won’t see it much in here.’

Craig pursed his lips, but he said nothing about the baby. She hadn’t expected that he would – not really, even though he was painting the walls primrose yellow at her request. Paint spotted on his shirt, and he tutted as he said, ‘You ought to be careful with that ball, here by yourself all day. You could end up in a fire.’

Joanna frowned as she tried to focus on the paintbrush going up and down the wall, instead of Craig’s words. She felt the beginnings of a panic attack; her chest tightened and she began to sweat, but she took in deep breaths and let them go slowly, like the doctor had said, and it calmed down. ‘What do you mean – fire? I don’t want a fire. That’s why we’ve had all the electrics rewired.’

‘Oh, I just meant – can’t sunlight shine through glass and cause fires, sometimes? It magnifies or something. And the wires would have been perfectly fine. But, whatever.’ Craig smiled. Joanna felt sick.

‘This room doesn’t get full sunlight,’ she muttered. But her heart had begun to thump and she moved the ball off the window sill and onto a nearby chest of drawers. She had just put it down when she groaned and clutched the wall.

‘What’s the matter?’ Craig spun round and through her pain, she grinned. At last, some reaction.

‘I’m fine. It’s just Braxton Hicks contractions – I think. You know they come a few weeks before the birth. I’ve had them before.’

‘Really?’ he asked, as he turned and continued with the painting.

She stared at his back while she waited for the pain to subside. When would he show some interest? Would he ever show any? She only had a couple of weeks to go but he just blanked it all out whenever he had the chance. She wondered if he discussed it with others – his mum, perhaps, or someone at work?

Craig’s mobile rang. Joanna watched how he jumped, flung down the brush and looked frantically around for something to wipe his hand on. ‘Damn. Keep ringing.’

‘Want me to answer it?’

‘No. I’ll do it.’ He flung down the brush.

‘Want me to get it out of your pocket, then?’

‘No, it’s fine.’ He thrust his hand inside his jeans, leaving paint on the pocket.

‘Hello?’ Joanna watched him stifle a smile, then he spoke very deliberately, clearly for her benefit. ‘Hello, Mum. What’s up?’ He turned to Joanna. ‘I could do with a cuppa. And it would get you out of these paint fumes.’

Joanna said nothing. She glanced at the watch ball. Its colours shone out from the tangle of threads, beautiful and bright, just as it had when the old man had given it to her. She left the room. Craig wouldn’t have noticed the welling tears stinging her eyelids.

Joanna picked up the phone on the kitchen worktop. She rang a familiar number.

‘Hello?’ queried Craig’s mum at the end of the line.

---

I really hope you’re enjoying the story so far, and especially the character of Joanna. I have to say that I very much enjoyed writing about her. Expect to see her appear in a Darker Minds book sometime in the foreseeable future.

If you’ve read the other parts to the story, you’ll know that I’ve written a new novella, Beneath the Flesh, which is the welcome FREE gift for new members of my Readers’ Club.

My Readers’ Club members get all the latest, exclusive updates on my upcoming books, other exclusive behind the scenes info, news of any offers I may have from time to time, and also the chance to become a part of my Advance Reader Team for new books. There’s other exclusive fun stuff, too.

Fancy joining? Just click the button or image below to head to the signup page.