Page 385 of The Black Trilogy

WE’D BEEN ON Lorelei Cay for four days when Nate emailed me. Four glorious days of sea, sun, and sand. Black hadn’t managed to leave his control freakish ways behind entirely, but the punishments for ignoring all his orders had suddenly got a lot more entertaining.

Anyhow, after Nate got over his initial snit at us taking off, he promised not to disturb us unless it couldn’t be helped. So when the message popped up, I saw the attachment and groaned. What was more important than the three S’s?

Black put his book down and glanced over at me. I’d like to say he was relaxing with some trashy novel, but he never did that. No, he was reading a well-thumbed copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. He liked to refresh his memory every so often.

“What’s up?”

“Nate.” I waved my iPad at him.

“Turn it off.”

“I can’t. It might be something important.”

“Up to you.” He looked at his watch. “But don’t get too distracted. Lunch is in an hour.”

“I wouldn’t miss Marcie’s coconut cream pie for the world.”

I grinned at Black and lay back on the sun lounger, then opened up the message and began to read.

Ems,

We finally managed to break through the encryption on the memory stick Akari gave you. Took Mack and Luke two days, and they were banging their heads off the desk at one point.

It’s full of the good stuff—all the Ramos family’s dealings for the last decade. The DEA are gonna wet themselves over it. Thousands of files, but one was addressed to Black. I didn’t want to open it—that’s for him to do, not me—but I’ve scanned it for viruses and it’s safe.

I’m sending it to you because I don’t know what frame of mind he’s in. If you think he’s up to it, can you tell him?

Nate.

P.S. Don’t worry about us. We’re only working 24/7 dealing with all the stuff you left behind. You carry on enjoying yourselves.

I looked over at Black. He’d shifted slightly to keep the sun off his face, and now he was watching me from behind his sunglasses. I might not have been able to see his eyes, but I could feel them.

“The temperature on this section of beach just dropped ten degrees,” he said. “Bad news?”

“I’m not sure.”

He gave me space to think. He always did. It was just one of the many reasons I loved him.

And the question was, would he want to know? We hadn’t spoken much about Carlos or his time as a prisoner out in Colombia, which didn’t surprise me. I was the one who talked about my problems. Black, now more than ever, locked them up inside. Should I add to his burden? I was kind of tempted to open the file so I knew what it said, but Nate was right. It was for Black to read, not us.

A bird flew past on the horizon, and for a moment I envied its freedom. No difficult decisions to make, no impossible missions to plan. Just hour after hour, day after day, soaring on the breeze and planning what to poop on next. But I didn’t have that luxury. After turning things over in my head for a few minutes, I decided to tell Black. Whenever we’d been on jobs in the past, he’d always liked to have all the information available to him, even if it wasn’t what he’d hoped to hear. This may not have been work, but I applied the same principles.

“Nate forwarded me a document. It’s for you, from Carlos. If you don’t want to read it, then you don’t have to, but at least you know it’s there now.”

Now it was his turn to mull things over, and he wasn’t happy about the news. I could see it from the tension in his muscles, the way his hands formed into fists at his sides. I reached over and uncurled the fingers closest to me then brought them to my lips. At least that got me a hint of a smile.

He sat up, one leg either side of his sun lounger, hands on his thighs and his head hanging low. What was he thinking?

“Open it,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t want to know, but at the same time, I need to.”

Silently, I called up the file. It looked like a letter, from the quick glimpse I got before I handed it over. Black took the iPad but patted the seat in front of him. He wanted me there.

“You read it too. No secrets.”

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