Page 64 of Hard Luck (Blackstone House)

“Tell Marcel to keep his nose out of my business.”

Priest didn’t. Instead, he nodded toward the door and said, “We need to talk.”

A shiver ran through me at his tone. Didn’t he understand that my actions in the diner had been entirely justifiable? If I hadn’t taken T-Rex out, he would have done more than squeeze my throat; he’d admitted as much.

I followed Priest to his office, and he closed the door behind us. The windows overlooked the pool, complete with its waterfall, swim-up bar, and phallic water slide installed by the estate’s former owner. You climbed up steps cut into the giant testicles, and then you slid down the dick. We’d considered remodelling or even removing the thing, but in the end, we’d decided to just own it. If people were busy looking at an enormous cock, they failed to notice the hidden cameras dotted around the place.

“There’s a problem,” he said.

“The thing in Colombia? There’s not much I can do about that right now.”

The intel had come in early this morning. A known arms dealer had been spotted at a hotel in Medellin, and we needed to find out what he was up to. He could simply be on vacation, but there had been rumours of weapons making their way to US soil from the area, and nobody wanted to take that chance.

“Not the Colombia thing. We passed that to another team.”

“What team?”

“Contractors.”

Which undoubtedly meant Blackwood Security. My annoyance was irrational, I knew that—the Choir couldn’t do everything—but we were the ones who’d gotten the intel. It was Sin’s network that had cultivated the asset who’d spotted the man.

“So why am I here?”

“Demelza.”

Priest ran our team, but Demelza held the purse strings. She sat in a dark corner of the Pentagon, and while shefought our battles in DC, she also had a tendency to see things in black and white rather than the many shades of grey our world was made up of.

“What does she want?”

“She’s concerned about you.”

“Me? Why?”

Priest waved a hand up and down. “The crutches. The stitches. The bruises.”

“That’s all in a day’s work.”

“The crutches, she was okay with. You defended yourself against a credible threat. The bar fight…” He made a face. “She wasn’t impressed. You were supposed to be on R&R.”

“Iwason R&R. It wasn’t my fault there was a drunk lunatic in the bar.”

Priest ignored that. “And then you showed up at the hospitalagain.”

“My cast was faulty.”

“You told Doc Martinsson it broke when it collided with a man’s face.”

“And it should have been able to withstand that kind of pressure.”

“The radiographer who performed your CT scan reported you were covered in bruises. You look as if someone tried to strangle you.”

“That was incidental.”

“It still went on your medical report.”

In some ways, my life was incredibly private. I lived on the edge of society, I had few friends and a dozen identities, and if any mention of me popped up online, Echo scrubbed it. Working for Uncle Sam meant I could slip in and out of the country unnoticed, and I had enough money to cover my tracks should I wish to disappear completely.

But for the moment, thanks to my job, I was stuck with Demelza.

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