Page 255 of The Black Trilogy

“Look, if someone hurt my little sister, I want to know who. As her brother, I should do something about it.”

“If something needed doing, then Emmy did it. Trust me on that. And if Emmy took care of it, she’d have made sure the person who hurt Tia got the message loud and clear.”

Luke heard the pride in Mackenzie’s voice when she talked about her friend, although he wasn’t sure he shared her opinion.

“Then maybe I should ask Emmy exactly what she did. Is she here?”

Luke watched in horror as Mackenzie’s face crumpled, then she turned her back on him and began sobbing again.

“What did I say? Whatever it was, I’m sorry.” Luke sat on the couch beside her and pulled Mackenzie into his arms, trying to work out what he’d done to upset her. Why did he keep messing things up with women lately? He never used to have this problem.

Then it came to him. “It’s Emmy who’s missing, isn’t it?”

“Y-y-yes,” Mackenzie choked out between sniffles.

“Well, hey, she’ll probably come back. Last time she left, she was with me, wasn’t she? And nothing really bad happened to her that time.”

Except for when his sister got Emmy fired from her job. But Emmy had seen the good in Tia and got past that. Then Tia got kidnapped and Emmy brought in a team to hunt down the kidnapper, then she personally rescued his sister from wherever she was being held before single-handedly capturing her abductor.

Okay, so there was some good in Emmy, but she’d still cheated on him with Nick. The knife twisted in Luke’s chest every time he thought about it.

“You don’t understand,” Mackenzie said. “It was different that time. This time she disappeared during a job. Right in the middle.”

“What do you mean ‘a job?’”

“I can’t tell you. You probably know more about Emmy than most people, especially now, but I can’t discuss work.” Mackenzie looked at her watch. “I’d better make you that coffee then I can get back to the search.”

“It’s ten at night. What are you going to find at this time?”

She shrugged. “The internet never sleeps.”

“You’re going to look online?”

“It’s what I do.”

The woman was gorgeous and she loved computers? Luke was intrigued. “That’s what I do for a living too.”

“I know. We had an exchange about it back when we were looking for Tia.”

“We did?”

“Yeah, you found out I’d been in your company system and thought I had something to do with Tia’s kidnapping.”

“Wait a minute, you’re Diablo? The hacker? Of course, Emmy said your name was Mack. I just assumed I was talking to a guy.” Worse than that, Luke had pictured Mack as a two-hundred-pound dude with too much body hair who hung out in a basement and lived on pizza and energy drinks.

“People do tend to make that mistake.”

“So not only are you beautiful, you’re also ridiculously smart.”

“I don’t really know how to answer that.” Mack blushed and looked at her feet.

“You don’t have to. I was just stating a fact.” The number of women he’d met who claimed to be techno-whizzes but didn’t have a clue what to do with a command prompt was into double figures, yet here was Diablo, who he suspected knew even more about the inner workings of the world’s networks than he did. He wanted to find out what went on in her mind. Perhaps he could learn something? “Why don’t I stay and help you? Two heads are better than one, and all that.”

“It’s not so straightforward. The work Blackwood does is confidential. I can’t give a stranger access to that information.”

“I’m not a total stranger—I know Emmy.”

“But you’ve never worked with her.”

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