Page 119 of Hard Luck (Blackstone House)

“Chill, it isn’t mine.” She wasn’t looking at him. No, she was scanning her surroundings. The cells, the hallway, the ceiling above. “I did break a nail though.”

“Bella, what the hell is going on?”

“At a guess? A gang of criminals is making use of a deserted prison, and they don’t want anyone else to find out.” Bella picked up the gun Jeron had dropped, grimaced, and ejected the magazine. Then she crouched and began checking the dead man’s pockets. “It isn’t safe here.”

“No fucking kidding. And when I asked what was going on, I meant with you. You’re…you’re…” So calm. Bella wasn’t scared; she was confident. And she definitely wasn’t the woman he’d gotten to know over the past month. “You’re not you anymore.”

“This is exactly who I am. And this is exactly why I don’t do relationships.” Bella slid a phone out of Jeron’s pocket and powered it on. “You need to be somewhere safer. Somewhere that you’re less of a sitting duck.”

“Bella, you’re making me really fucking nervous.”

“You shouldn’t be scared. I won’t hurt you. But there’s another one of these assholes out there”—she poked Jeron with a toe—“and he won’t be feeling quite so benevolent.”

“There were six men on that boat. There are four men still out there.”

“No, there’s one.”

“You said you shot two.”

“Yes, I did.”

Since Uncle Mike died, Cole’s life had turned into one nightmare after another. Every time he thought he saw a chink of daylight, midnight fell again.

“Bella, what happened to the other three men?”

“I think you’d be happier not knowing the answer to that question.”

“You killed them?”

“It was them or us.” She glanced at Jeron’s phone. “Fuck, this uses facial recognition.” Suddenly, she stiffened. “Get down and stay down.”

“What? What do you mean?”

Then the gunshots came.

CHAPTER 42

JEZEBEL

These fucking fuckers. Everything had been under control. Until they showed up, Cole just thought I was a competent swimmer who did well under pressure, but now? Now, there was blood everywhere, bodies everywhere, the remains of my shattered heart everywhere. I’d had to shoot a man in front of him, for fuck’s sake.

Thank fuck Marcel wasn’t here to witness the demolition of my life, or the swear bucket would be overflowing.

While I was trying to decide whether to let Cole out of his cell or not, I caught a metallicclinkthat sounded out of place. There was no way Six hadn’t heard the gunshots. Folks in Dreadhaven probably heard the gunshots, and I suspected he’d also noticed one or two of his buddies were missing. These men weren’t organised enough to carry radios, and I’d tucked the bodies out of sight, but when a place was devoid of human life, you felt it.

I saw movement in my peripheral vision and dove to the side just before Six began shooting.

He was upstairs.

Oh, joy. There must have been two rifles on the boat. If I’d been in the movies, I would have shot through the grated walkway that ran in front of the upper row of cells. But this wasn’t a movie, and I didn’t want to kill myself with a ricochet. Six didn’t have any such qualms, and he kept firing as I scrambled into the cell opposite Cole’s. Then I heard a yelp and smiled. Stupid motherfucker.

But Six was still alive and moving, a dark shadow lit by bright overhead lights, and I was still trapped. Cole was cowering at the back of his cell, terrified, and I cursed myself for getting us into this situation. Okay, so we’d be dead if we’d stayed on the sandbar, but at least he wouldn’t be looking at me with a mixture of horror and fear.

Time to think. Time to employ my deadliest weapon.

No, not my gun. My mind. I’d spent a decade learning how to be sneaky as well as deadly, and now that I’d learned a little about my father, I suspected I’d been genetically programmed that way since birth.

As well as hostage rescue and assassination, one of the Choir’s jobs was to break the security at various government institutions. Once we identified the holes, they could be filled, either with physical measures or with additional training. A couple of years ago, Spider and I had headed to San Francisco, and after we’d finagled our way into the Federal Reserve building far quicker than expected, we’d found ourselves with a spare afternoon and taken a trip to Alcatraz. I wasn’t sure which prison had been built first—Alcatraz or the one I was currently stuck in—but one had definitely taken inspiration from the other. The location, the layout, the way the cells opened not with keys but via a complex arrangement of levers located at the end of each aisle.

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