Page 344 of The Black Trilogy

I hesitated at the top of the stairs, not knowing what to expect, but she urged me on.

“It’s all right. It is only him down here.”

Acrid smoke was swirling in the cellar already. There must have been another entrance from the south wing where the fire was worse. We didn’t have much time. The woman led me along a narrow passage, dark and dank-smelling, slippery underfoot. Our steps echoed on the stone floor until we got to a dead end. A single metal door blocked the way, solid except for a panel of bars at the top and a narrow hatch in the middle, big enough to slide a tray through.

A prison cell.

She pointed at it. “Carlos.”

Carlos was in there? What the…?

It was black inside. I peered through the bars and smoke, and as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw a man crouched at the back, holding a cloth over his face. When he felt my gaze, he straightened slightly and turned his head.

If I’d been surprised earlier, it was nothing compared to what I felt now as dark eyes stared at me from under a floppy fringe.

The woman had been telling the truth. It darn well was Carlos.

Wasn’t it?

CHAPTER 17

THE MAN WAS hazy through the smoke. Hair curled around his shoulders, a grimy layer of filth coated his skin, and a pair of tattered, too-big trousers hung around his waist. He lowered the cloth from his face as he walked towards me.

“Took your sweet time, Diamond.”

My heart stuttered.

Was it Carlos? Or was it...

“Black?” I whispered, squinting through the gloom.

“Who else would it be?”

How was I supposed to answer him? Logic told me it was Carlos playing some kind of elaborate trick. But most would say I’d left logic behind in Virginia, perhaps even in London fourteen years ago. Had a miracle happened and Black was standing here before me?

Or was I dreaming? Was this my subconscious, taking cruelty to a new level? I pinched myself hard.

Well, that hurt.

How could this be happening?

Because if it was Black in front of me, then who died in the taxi in Richmond? It could only have been Carlos, surely? Someone got incinerated, and that someone had shared Black’s DNA.

Unless there was a third brother. No, that didn’t bear thinking about.

I must have spent too long considering because he cleared his throat and interrupted me. “Will you stop zoning out and get the door open?”

The man looked like Black, and he sure sounded like Black. But I had to be positive before I un-caged him. It was Black himself who’d trained me to think first and act later. I needed a proof of life question, something only the two of us would know the answer to.

“What was I wearing when we met?”

Apart from Jimmy, nobody, not even our closest friends, knew I’d been a stripper when Black and I first crossed paths. I’d only admitted to stealing his wallet.

“Have you gone completely out of your mind?”

Probably. “Just answer the freaking question, will you?” I gripped the bars, my knuckles turning white as I waited for his reply.

“Fine.” He bent over and retched, then straightened up. “A schoolgirl outfit and running shoes.”

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