“I knew Alaric was here,” I admitted. No matter how many lies I told other people, I never lied to Black, not outright. “He asked me to help out for a few hours, and I could hardly turn him down. I don’t care what everyone says—he didn’t take that money, and if he can get Emerald back, it might go some way to restoring his reputation.”
Alaric jointly ran a private intelligence agency now, but there were still a lot of people who didn’t trust him, and trust was everything in our business. It was the difference between landing contracts with government agencies and skulking around in the shadows. At the moment, Alaric’s involvement in Sirius was mostly a secret, even though he owned a quarter of the company. One of his business partners fronted the operation while he did what he did best—collected secrets and ferreted out information. He was good, but Emerald had been his nemesis for eight years now, and I was beginning to believe his claim that the damn painting was jinxed.
I touched my nose gingerly. Another victim of the curse? I’d felt the fucking thing crunch when Sky slammed her head into it. Blackwood had an arrangement with a London doctor who’d treat our people without asking questions, and she’d checked out the damage after I got back. The verdict? A fracture in the bridge. Hopefully, it should heal without needing further treatment, but in the meantime, I had a face like a clown, an economy-sized packet of ibuprofen, and an upset husband.
“You don’t know for sure that Alaric didn’t take the contents of that briefcase,” Black said.
“Oh, please. Firstly, he had no motive. He wasn’t exactly hurting for money thanks to his parents. And if he had nicked it, he’d have got straight on a plane to the nearest non-extradition country, not hopped on a yacht and sailed out into the middle of nowhere to get shot at.”
Alaric knew how to disappear. I’d found that out first-hand. The aftermath of the shooting had been brutal, weeks of questioning and a fruitless search for cash, diamonds, and a painting that had vanished from the face of the earth. In the chaos of the battle, I’d gotten a fleeting glimpse of Dyson off the stern of the scalloper in the Zodiac boat, but Alaric’s colleagues had been too busy panicking to track him. After the way Hooper behaved, I’d been tempted to shoot him myself, motor back to shore, and use my own helicopter to give chase, but Alaric overruled me and insisted on taking the former marine to the hospital. The prick had made a good recovery, and the last I heard, he was working as a mall cop, which as far as I was concerned was too much responsibility for a man with the impulse control of a toddler. Actually, that was unfair to toddlers.
Black had helped with the investigation, but grudgingly. I got the impression he was more annoyed at Alaric for dragging me into the case than at the various thieves. And his suggestion that the cash and diamonds might have been swapped before the pay-off left FBI headquarters hadn’t gone down well with the brass, although they didn’t have any better ideas. At one point, they’d fingered me as a suspect, and I thought Black was gonna take the director’s head off in that meeting. To say the atmosphere had been strained was an understatement.
Anyhow, after a month of daily interrogations and with his termination from the FBI imminent, Alaric had simply vanished. Gone. Poof! Believe me, I’d looked for him. At first, I’d been terrified he’d done something stupid, worried that the next call from an unidentified number would be news of a body. Eleven months had passed before the first pair of shoes arrived. Just cheap things, more like embroidered slippers really, but there was a clock drawn onto the box with the hands pointing to midnight, and I knew who they were from. Over the years, slippers and doodles turned into birthday cards with Louboutins, and I figured Alaric was doing okay.
But I’d almost given up hope of seeing him again until he’d materialised in the quarantine unit where I was busy cheating death, and I couldn’t even kill him for abandoning me because there was a glass wall between us.
And now? Now here we were, dancing around each other, whatever relationship we had still kind of awkward and off limits for discussion. Turning back the clock wasn’t an option because Black and I were a thing now, but I didn’t want to lose Alaric as a friend. Not again.
Which meant I had to deal with Black’s jealousy.
“Alaric nearly got you killed,” he griped. “And today, he got you hurt.”
“Bullshit. What happened on the boat was unfortunate, but I’m trained for that. You trained me. Are you doubting your abilities?”
Silence.
“And today was my fault. I let my guard down and underestimated the opposition. Does that remind you of anyone else we know?”
More silence.
I’d met Black seventeen and a half years ago on a dark night in London, a night when I’d stolen his wallet and broken his nose. He’d miscalculated my abilities back then, although there had been a certain amount of luck involved too.
“Well, enjoy Belize. I’ll see you back in Virginia.”
I hung up, and when he tried to call again, I shut the lid of my laptop and left the room to lick my wounds. Let him think about things for a while. I sure needed to.
Upstairs, I had my “thinking window,” a glass oval above a window seat at the far end of a second-floor hallway. Bulletproof glass, of course. Black had insisted, although he swore he wasn’t paranoid, just careful.
The spot overlooked the garden, and I watched a flock of sparrows attacking the bird feeder as I considered my next move. A lot would depend on how Alaric and Sky got on in Richmond. How long had it been? Four hours? So far, there’d been no news, but I knew better than to interrupt Alaric in the middle of a job. He’d call when he was ready. Either that or he’d fuck off to Outer Mongolia or somewhere again, which would sting like hell but would actually make my life easier.
“Hey.”
I whipped around to find Alaric standing at the other end of the hallway, hands in his pockets.
“How did you get in?”
“Ruth.”
Ruth was our London housekeeper.
“I sent her home.”
“Yeah, she said you did, but she also said you looked miserable so she’s making you dinner.”
Alaric appeared thoroughly cheesed off too.
“What happened in Richmond?”
“Got any wine?”
“That bad?”
“On second thought, I might start with whisky. How’s your nose?”
“Less painful than the chat I had with Black.”
“Empathy isn’t exactly his middle name.”
“It was partly my fault. I might have forgotten to mention I was meeting you here.”
Alaric snorted. “Ever ask yourself why you didn’t tell him?”
“We’re not having this conversation, okay? Richmond? I half thought you might’ve brought Sky back with you.”
She seemed to like Alaric. More than she liked me, at any rate.
“Maybe I would have if she hadn’t done a disappearing act.”
“She ran out on you?”
That revelation annoyed me more than I let on. Sky interested me. And I hadn’t sent her out with Alaric because I was incapable of going myself—I’d battled through more than a broken nose in the past—I’d sent her because I wanted to see how she coped. To hear she’d bugged out was…disappointing. Sure, I could find her again by staking out the squat she called home, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to.