Page 223 of The Black Trilogy

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!”

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