Page 348 of The Black Trilogy

There was only one thing for it.

“I’ll go back.”

Black didn’t answer.

“You know I have to. We can’t ask Jane to walk far. It’s seven miles to the Ramos place, eight to the nearest civilisation, and there’s nothing else around.”

“I could go,” Black said, but his tone suggested he was offering more out of obligation than anything else.

“How much running have you done recently?”

“Not a lot.” A beat of silence. “Okay, none.”

So it had to be me, then. Seven miles, fifty minutes in this terrain. There was that other rust-bucket of a truck back at the compound, clinging onto the last of its mechanical life, and I’d have to fetch it.

“You need to stay and take care of Jane,” I told Black.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

He gave her that smile again, and hurt crackled through me before I locked it away and pasted on a mask of my own.

Together, we pushed the pickup down the incline at the edge of the track and into the undergrowth. Luckily, despite being a prisoner for so long, Black had kept some of his strength, because the monster of a thing weighed a ton and the cloying mud didn’t help. We shoved it until the bumper hit a tree, and although it wasn’t completely hidden, nobody would spot it from a quick glance after we’d arranged a tangle of vines over the top.

Before I left, I shed my excess kit—there was no sense in being weighed down by Hector’s paperwork. I gave Black my backup gun, keeping my favourite Walther P88 on my right thigh and a couple of spare magazines in the small of my back.

I was about to start running when Black called me over. “Diamond, do me a favour? Don’t die.”

Don’t die? Did he have that little faith in me? “I wasn’t planning on it.”

On my trek back, I tried to put Black out of my head. And Jane. I didn’t want to think of the relationship going on there. Or who the father of Jane’s baby was. From the size of her, she had to be at least eight months pregnant, and how long had Black been gone? Almost nine. Yep, a toddler could have done the maths. I felt sick.

Black was my husband. Mine. Yes, I know we’d never had that kind of relationship, but it would kill me if he’d fathered a baby with someone else. Still, I’d let him down so badly I didn’t have the right to expect anything from him anymore.

Mind swirling, I tried to refocus my emotions. Alex had taught me that trick when I needed to fight him in training and my head wasn’t in the right place. Instead of worrying about Black, I switched my attention to Diego. Where was he? I hated loose ends, and we needed to take him out before he got to us. I hoped Nate had been sensible enough to put Eduardo’s people on high alert in case anyone realised the connection. Who was I kidding? Of course Nate would have done that. He thought of everything. It was just me who kept screwing things up.

Once I settled into my stride, I made it back to the compound in forty-eight minutes. Not bad considering I was wearing boots and running through mud. Now I needed to get the other truck and return for Black and... Nope, still didn’t want to think about it. Or rather, her.

Sweat dripped from every part of me as I jogged past the still-smoking guard hut and cut left to the trees, keeping my fingers crossed that Hector’s men had been as lax with the keys in the second vehicle. I didn’t want more delays while I coaxed the flipping thing into life. I was sick of this place—the sticky heat, the squadrons of bitey things, the men with automatic weapons.

As I darted from one shadow to the next, I felt a prickle on the back of my neck. Another mosquito? No, something was up. I’d barely had time to process that when I heard the snick of a gun being cocked behind me.

F…fiddlesticks. I stopped and turned around, raising my hands above my head as I did so.

Well, the good news was I’d found Diego.

The bad news was he had a pistol pointed straight at my head. Not only that, two caffeinated gorillas flanked him, and they both held guns as well. Big ones. Oh, rats. I hated being in this position.

Recognition flitted across his face. “You were with Sebastien Garcia the other week.”

“Yes.” Wonderful, now I’d managed to bring the Garcias into this for sure. Well, I might as well admit who I was to try and take some of the heat off them. “Emerson Black. And when I said it was a pleasure to meet you, I lied.”

His eyes narrowed. “You killed my father, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know why you’re so upset. You killed Carlos.”

“That was an accident. It was supposed to be your husband, not my stupid stepbrother.”

Accident? Stepbrother? They weren’t full siblings? This circus got crazier by the minute.

---