Chapter 27
CHAPTER 27
I MET DAN six months after I got married. I’d started making decent money by that point, and I wanted to donate some of it to people who hadn’t been given the chances Black offered me. One dreary Saturday, I took a trip into Richmond to visit a homeless shelter. I’d met with the people who ran it the previous month, and their ability to do so much with so little funding impressed me. What could they do with a bit more cash?
Two cheques crinkled in my pocket. I’d written the first, and back then, those ten thousand dollars were a lot to me. Although we charged a bomb for my work, my income was sporadic as we ploughed all our profits back into Blackwood’s expansion rather than paying ourselves inflated salaries.
The second cheque came from Black. When he heard my plans, he’d offered to help.
“It’s a good cause, Diamond,” he said, as he ripped it out of his chequebook. “I’ll always match whatever you want to give.”
The staff had been wiping their eyes when I left the shelter. That was the first time I’d ever made someone cry in a good way, and it gave me a warm glow inside. Rainbows and sunshine, but sadly the weather outside didn’t agree. I paused in the foyer and groaned at the sheets of rain. Did I bring an umbrella? I rummaged through my bag, but all I found was an extra knife and two kinds of pepper spray.
“ Oof . What the—”
I stumbled backwards as someone ran into me, then remembered Black’s training. Manners, Emmy .
“I’m sorry…” I started, looking up to find a dark-haired girl in front of me. Tears soaked her cheeks as she held her hands up to ward me off. Her swollen belly protruded from a coat too thin for the time of year and blood trickled from her nose.
“Hey, what happened?”
She shook her head then doubled up in pain, clutching her stomach.
“You need to get to a hospital.”
“I can’t.” She shook her head again. “I don’t have any insurance.”
“It’s an emergency. They have to treat you.”
“He’ll find me there.”
“I’ll sort it out. Just get in the car.” Whoever “he” was, I hoped he did turn up because I wanted a word with him for leaving her in that state. The girl doubled over in pain again, but she let me guide her into the passenger seat of the Ford pickup I drove back then, and I put my foot down as soon as I leapt behind the wheel. Her pale face scared me, and she gripped the seatbelt as her breath came in short pants. Was she about to have a baby? Even the cop who pulled me over for speeding took one look at her and waved us on our way. If only it were that easy every time I got stopped.
In the ER, I paced up and down as the doctors worked. I didn’t even know the girl’s name, and nobody would tell me anything because I wasn’t a relative. But I couldn’t leave her there on her own. Finally, I overheard one nurse whispering to another that Daniela di Grassi’s son had been stillborn, and my heart sank. That had to be her, right? And she’d lost the baby?
I paced the waiting room until shift change then told the new receptionist I was Daniela’s sister. I’d got my American accent down to a tee by then, and even though the woman gave me a dubious look because I was blonde and Dan had dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin, they still let me through to see her.
“Hey.”
She dragged her gaze in my direction, blinking tears away. Now what? I didn’t deal well with emotions.
“He’s gone,” she whispered. “I named him Caleb after my grandfather, and he’s gone.”
Turned out I did know what to do. I gripped Dan’s hand as she wept into her pillow and stayed by her side until the doctors kicked me out.
But I came back the next day, when the doctor told Dan she’d never have children, and the next, and the next. Even though Dan barely spoke, just stared at the wall, I wanted to be there for her. Black didn’t protest, even when I skipped workouts and meetings. He may have been cold on the outside, but he had a vein of compassion lurking deep under the surface that others rarely saw.
Finally, the doctor said Dan could leave, and she slid off the bed with the reluctant demeanour of a condemned woman.
“I can drive you wherever you want,” I told her. “Do you have family nearby?” She’d refused to talk about it so far.
“The shelter. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“But you need to rest, for six weeks at least.” I’d been listening to the doctors, even if she hadn’t.
She shrugged, then winced as something inside her tore. “I don’t have any choice.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll take you there.”
But I didn’t. I took her to Riverley instead. Not just because she’d had major surgery but because she’d been reduced to a shell of a person, and she wasn’t going to heal sitting by herself in a ten-by-eight box. She needed to talk. Black still had fifteen spare bedrooms—he’d barely even notice her.
Over the next few days, Dan alternately cried, sat and rocked, and stared into space. A week passed before she began to speak.
“Who did this to you?” I asked as soon as I thought she was strong enough to answer.
“My ex. He said no way was he going to spend the rest of his life paying for an accident.” More tears fell, and I passed another tissue. “But I didn’t even ask for money from him. I just hoped he’d get to know his child, but he didn’t want to be a father.”
Well, not to worry. Once I’d paid a visit to that sorry waste of space, fatherhood wasn’t ever going to be an issue for him. I’d learned from the master, you see.
As Dan recovered and found herself at a loose end, she started joining me as I trained in the mornings. Black got a gleam in his eye when we discovered she could run, jump, and shoot better than half of the men we knew, but that wasn’t where her true talents lay. In the afternoons she took to sitting in the library surrounded by Blackwood’s cold case files, and after she’d cracked four of them, it became inevitable we’d offer her a job. Seven months after I met her, she became a permanent member of the team as well as my partner in crime, sometimes quite literally.
I’d never had a proper girlfriend before, and Dan had never had any money, so for three wild months we drove Black nuts with our antics. Dan was eighteen, a year younger than my real age, but I’d made the contacts to get us fake driving licences by then so bar hopping became our new favourite thing. A little shorter in height than me and a lot shorter in her choice of hemlines, Dan brought life to any party. Looking back, I don’t know how Black put up with us.
Like the night we arrived home in the early hours and accidentally set off the alarm system. I’d lost my shoes, and Dan was still clutching a half-empty bottle of champagne. We collapsed in the hallway in a fit of giggles as Black shut off the noise and stood over us, one dark eyebrow raised.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“I can’t quite remember.” I looked at Dan, which brought on another fit of laughter.
“Me either,” she said. “There were cocktails?”
Rather than being mad, Black carried us up to bed, Dan first, then me.
“I’m sorry,” I said as he deposited me under my quilt. “I think I may have been a bit bad.”
He bent and kissed me on the forehead. “I’m glad to see you both happy. But you’re still in the gym with Alex at five thirty.”
Dan was still staying at Black’s a few months later when I did something not just bad but utterly terrible.
I’d been on one of my now-frequent excursions overseas, this time at the behest of the CIA. Those trips were seldom pleasurable—the break in Mexico with Nick had been the exception rather than the rule—but rarely did they make me sick to my stomach like this week’s did. In the course of stopping a people-trafficking operation, our joint task force had uncovered a boat hold full of rotting bodies—those poor souls promised a better life overseas who hadn’t made it.
The stench of the corpses sent me running to the side of the ship to throw up, clutching the rail as I hung my head over the ocean. The smell lined my throat and crept into every pore. Even after I’d scrubbed myself three times in the shower, I couldn’t get rid of it. Worse, we stayed on board for three awful days while we sailed out to sea to lose the rusty cargo vessel in the deepest part of the ocean so nobody found the six dead snakeheads stashed in what had been the captain’s quarters. As for the captain, we’d found the poor man stuffed in his wardrobe, a single bullet hole between his eyes. It was only after the evidence had sunk to the bottom of the ocean that a Navy vessel plucked us from our life raft and returned us stateside.
Riverley stood silent as I arrived home. I left my car in the garage with the windows open to get rid of the smell, which had ingrained itself everywhere not least in my mind. Inside, a mess of pizza boxes covered the coffee table in the lounge, and I knew who’d left them there. Nick. Because Nick was a slob and no amount of nagging got him to change. Black would at least have carried them through to the kitchen and piled them up ready to go out in the trash the next morning.
I crept upstairs, avoiding the squeaky thirteenth step that might announce my presence. Nick lay in my bed, his steady breathing telling me he was fast asleep. He barely stirred as I crawled in beside him. Home, sweet home. Exhausted from the past week, I nodded off quickly.
And found myself back on the boat again.
Four of the snakeheads came at me, three with guns and one with a wicked-looking machete. I shouted for my team and shot two of the targets. They dropped to the deck, but when I turned after knocking a third out, they were getting up again. Why wouldn’t they die? I killed them again, with the same result. Again, again, again. I was stuck in my own personal horror film. Sweat dripped down my forehead as the traffickers kept coming. My team—where were they?
Panic kicked in as another man grabbed me from behind. I lashed out, feeling his nose give way before he pulled me backwards, kicking and screaming in a bear hug. Black’s words played on repeat in my head: Get them before they get you . I twisted, going first for the solar plexus then for the xiphoid process—that fragile piece of bone which, if you get the right angle, can be driven through a person’s liver.
Thank goodness I didn’t get the right angle. Because the next thing I knew, I was being pulled off Nick, who curled up on the floor groaning as blood poured from his face.
Tears streaked Dan’s cheeks as she rushed over to help him, while Black threw me on the floor and held me down.
“What are you doing, Emmy?” he yelled.
I couldn’t speak, firstly because my face was smushed into the carpet, and secondly because I didn’t know what to say. I had no clue what I was doing.
Nick spluttered behind me, wheezing as he struggled to speak.
“She was asleep. She was asleep!”
The pressure on my back eased slightly as Black took some of his weight off me.
“Are you awake now?” he asked me.
“Yes!” I gasped.
He dragged me over to the wall and propped me against it. “Stay there. I need to deal with Nick.”
I watched from the corner, arms wrapped around my knees, as Dan and Black stemmed the bleeding from Nick’s nose then helped him onto the bed. Except it wasn’t me watching. No, I was a stranger. Because this couldn’t be happening, not to Nick, not in my bedroom. What had I done?
“One broken nose, gouges from her nails, a couple of cracked ribs, a bunch of bruises on your calves, and a black eye,” Black assessed. “And you need to get that cheekbone X-rayed.”
“That it?” Nick asked, still sarcastic even though he must have been in agony.
“Count yourself lucky, buddy. When she broke my nose, she got me in the balls too, and I couldn’t walk properly for a week.”
Dan helped Nick to get dressed then fetched a car to take him to the hospital. As he shuffled out of the bedroom, I struggled to my feet and stumbled towards him.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Nick.”
He paused and squeezed my hand. “It’s okay, baby. I know you didn’t mean it.”
Black wrapped a blanket around me, and I realised I was still naked. Just great. Nick bent to kiss my cheek before trailing Dan out into the hallway. At least he didn’t seem to hate me, although how, I wasn’t sure.
I certainly hated myself.
Their footsteps receded, leaving me alone, and I slid down the wall with my head in my hands. I’d sleepwalked in the past, but this… This was a whole other category of messed up. Usually, I just woke up somewhere else in the house and went back to bed with bruised shins from walking into things. My eyes prickled as I thought of Nick’s mangled face, and I cursed my training. Over the past couple of years, I’d become a machine, taught to react automatically to any sort of threat, and my subconscious had done exactly that.
Black came back and lifted me up, his face impassive as he carried me through to his bathroom and lowered me into his swimming-pool-sized tub. The heat of the water stung, but I didn’t care. I deserved the pain. It was nothing compared to what I’d inflicted on Nick.
“You okay?” he asked.
“No.”
“Physically?”
“I’m fine.”
He washed Nick’s blood off me, the water turning pale pink with the evidence of my crime. Despite my claim to be okay, he checked me over, and when he didn’t find any damage, he bundled me into a robe. I expected him to lead me back to my room, but he picked me up again and tucked me into his bed.
“Sleep, Diamond.” He leaned over and touched his lips to my forehead. “I’m going to check on Nick then I’ll come back and take the couch.”
“You shouldn’t be in a room with me. What if I hurt you too?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll bring a Taser.” My darling husband, ever the practical one. “I want to keep an eye on you tonight.”
It was all very well him telling me to sleep. As I lay still, watching the full moon hanging in the sky over Black’s balcony, I wasn’t sure I’d ever sleep again.
Soft footsteps and the squeak of a spring signalled Black’s return. On any normal day, he’d have told me to suck it up and get on with things, but tonight he somehow knew I needed sweet, and he gave it to me.
See? He wasn’t always a monster.
That was me.