Quicksilver

by Elise Noble

  “I’d suggest just yanking it quickly.”

  “Joder.”

  “Don’t be such a coward. Women wax all the time.”

  He took a deep breath and tugged. The tape peeled off to his waist, leaving mostly smooth skin behind, now covered in little red dots. Holy hell, the man had abs. Emmy totally shouldn’t have been looking, but hey, she wasn’t blind. Perhaps she needed a new nickname? La asaltacunas, maybe?

  “How old are you?” she asked. “Twenty-five?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  Mierda.

  The situation deteriorated further when Emmy remembered she’d cut off his underwear too. At that point, she’d been more concerned about fastening him down securely than what he looked like naked, and besides, she hadn’t expected him to get up again.

  “Fia, can you see if Alaric has any stretchy shorts in his closet?”

  Alaric wasn’t small, not at all, but he was still six inches shorter than Rafael and quite a bit narrower. They’d need to find new clothes from somewhere. Black’s would fit, but they were at Nate’s condo in Miami.

  Rafael turned his back and carried on peeling. That ass. Emmy sucked in a breath. Pointing out that when Rafael pissed himself, the urine might have loosened the tape probably wasn’t the kind of optimism he was looking for right now. Yeah, he’d need a shower too.

  Emmy nudged Ana. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Huh?”

  At least Emmy wasn’t the only one staring. So Ana was human after all.

  “The bathroom?”

  “Upstairs, second door on the left.”

  “Silver, did you hear that?”

  He turned back around, one massive hand covering most of the good bits.

  “Got it.”

  He jogged up the basement stairs, footsteps light on the wood. Mercurio looked like Goliath and moved like a cat. Ten seconds later, Fia appeared, fanning herself.

  “I gave him the shorts, but I’m not sure they’ll fit. Shit. I feel like such a cougar.”

  “Join the club.”

  “I mean, holy fuck, that guy’s built. And Black’s gonna shit bricks.”

  “What do we do now?” Ana asked.

  “I’ve got to call him. I mean, I can hardly keep this to myself. Fuck. I need a drink.”

  “We used up all the vodka.”

  “No, not alcohol. Water or juice or something. My mouth’s drier than Black’s sense of humour.”

  They climbed the stairs slowly, and Emmy opened a carton of pineapple juice. Pineapple was fine as long as it didn’t come on a pizza. She needed to talk to people. Blackwood’s Miami office. Mack. Dan. Alaric. Her contacts at the FBI. The DEA, the ATF, the DOJ. But most of all, she needed to call Black and pray he didn’t tie her to the bed for a month. Granted, that wouldn’t normally be a bad thing, but this week…

  Shit. Two missing girls.

  “Have either of you had much involvement with the Mafia?” she asked the others.

  “Only Bratva,” Ana said. “Russian Mafia.”

  “I’ve killed five…” Fia counted up on her fingers. “No, six, but they were all from New York and Chicago. Plus there was Raul in Atlanta, but he was plain ol’ organised crime.”

  And Emmy usually butted heads with terrorists rather than the mob. Well, Black had always told her to try new things.

  Speaking of Black… She might as well get it over with. His phone rang once, twice, and then a shadow darkened the doorway.

  “Trying to call me, Diamond?”

  Alaric stood behind him, holding a bag from Ace Hardware. “Sorry,” he mouthed.

  “Uh, I can explain.”

  “You promised you wouldn’t go off on a crazy, half-baked crusade.”

  “I didn’t. This was a fully baked crusade, and you’re not gonna believe the story we’ve got to tell you.”

  “Where’s the sicario?” Alaric asked. “Tell me we don’t have a body to dispose of? The 49ers are playing the Dolphins tonight, and I didn’t buy a spade.”

  “Good news—there’s no body. The bad news is that we’ve got more important things to do than watch football.”

  “What’s this ‘we’ business? I agreed to play cab driver and turn a blind eye to whatever you’re doing in my basement. That’s it.”

  Black had finally had enough of waiting, and his voice rose. “Would somebody tell me what the hell is happening?”

  Emmy opened her mouth to speak, but the silent appearance of Rafael behind her husband made her jaw drop all the way. Hot damn. He’d squeezed himself into the shorts, and they bulged at every seam. Droplets of water glistened on his chest, and damp hair curled over his forehead in a manner reminiscent of the man-totty in a perfume ad.

  Black turned slowly, and for a rare moment, he looked adorably confused.

  “What the…?”

  “Rafael, meet Charles Black. Black, meet Rafael da Silva. Your nephew.”

  CHAPTER 23 - BLACK

  “MY WHAT?”

  WHY did Black get the feeling he’d walked through Alaric’s front door and ended up on a whole other planet?

  Alaric’s business dealings were more tangled than a spiderweb in a hurricane, but while Mack sifted through various filings, Dan recalled Alaric phoning her a few weeks back. The phone was turned off now, and tracing historic calls was nothing like in the movies—in reality, they could narrow the location down to thirty square miles, not thirty square feet—but Nate had hacked into the phone company’s network and traced a bunch of calls made around this area. Black had headed over to await further information, spotted Alaric driving away from a hardware store, and followed the man right to his home address. Business must have been good because it wasn’t a bad house. Big lot, triple garage, a swimming pool to the side.

  And a reasonably competent assassin wearing a pair of overly tight shorts in the kitchen. Blood seeped down his arm from what looked like a bullet wound. Floriana’s handiwork?

  “Your nephew,” Emmy said. “I told you I’d get answers.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Have you lost your mind? Oh, my mistake. You did that when you practically kidnapped a suspected killer out of police custody. They’re out there searching for your body, you know. I still haven’t worked out what to tell them.”

  “Just say he dumped me at the side of the road and I can’t remember anything.”

  Deep breaths. “Emmy, he killed a Mafia thug. Why is he standing half-naked in Alaric’s kitchen?”

  Sofia put down her glass of juice. “He’s actually three-quarters naked.”

  “Seven-eighths,” Ana countered.

  “And he’s bleeding everywhere,” Alaric said. He didn’t seem happy about Emmy’s antics either. McLain actually agreeing with Black on something—that was a truly momentous occasion.

  “Do you have a first aid kit?” Emmy asked. “Fia can stitch up that hole again.”

  “Diamond, what the fuck is going on?”

  Emmy’s gaze flicked towards Alaric. “It’s a very interesting story.”

  And she was asking him if he wanted Alaric there to hear it. Good question. Black and Alaric had gotten on fine before Alaric started sleeping with Emmy, but afterwards? Messy. On the surface at least, Black had supported Alaric through the Office of Professional Responsibility’s investigation, and in the years since, Alaric had kept Black’s secrets and he’d reciprocated. Knowing Alaric, his interest had been piqued enough by Rafael’s presence that he’d start digging for his own amusement, and Black wouldn’t have been surprised if the entire house was wired for sound anyway.

  “Better start telling it, then.”

  “Okay, it’s also kind of long, but bear with me, because there are some really good bits. It all started in Valento…”

  Mercurio sat at the kitchen table, unflinching as Sofia stitched up the wound sustained when he broke into Eduardo’s home. Black prided himself on his self-control, but as Emmy told her tale, occasionally interrupted by the man now reveal
ed to be Rafael, Black’s insides rode a roller coaster.

  His mother was alive?

  For over two decades, Black had believed his only relative was an aunt he hated; then, two and a half years ago, he found out he’d had a brother who died before they could meet. He’d processed that. Dealt with it. But now his world had been flipped on its head again with these new revelations—some tragic, some miraculous.

  Yes, there would need to be DNA tests to confirm everything, but now he saw Mercurio up close, there were definite similarities between them. And every detail of his story fitted with what Black already knew.

  He had a nephew. A mother. And a niece who was missing in the country he called home. And since one set of his grandparents had been missionaries from England, that made him half-British just like his wife. Once again, what he thought he knew about his heritage had been shifted on its axis.

  Emotions battled inside his head, the desire to fly to Colombia and meet the woman he’d been stolen from forty-one years previously fighting against the need to find Corazon. In the end, logic prevailed. Marisol da Silva was safe in Medellín, whereas Corazon was very much in danger. She had to take priority.

  From what Black had seen so far, Rafael was talented but raw. There was no point in asking him what he needed in the way of help because he simply wouldn’t know. Time to take charge.

  “We have an empty property twenty miles from here, and we’ll use that as a base of operations. I’ll call our Florida office and get them to reassign staff. Sofia, you finish fixing Rafael’s arm. Ana, try not to kill anyone—yet. Alaric…” Dammit. This could get awkward. “What do you know about an FBI agent named Merrick Childs?”

  “He’s a dick.”

  “Beyond that?”

  “Thirty-seven years old. Ambitious. Determined to climb to the top, doesn’t care who he tramples on the way there, but in terms of talent, he’s mediocre at best. Got accused of harassment by a female agent five years ago, but he claimed he just misread the signals and got away with it.”

  “What does your schedule look like at the moment?”

  “Free tomorrow, then I’m flying to Nevada for a job.”

  “Merrick Childs was running some kind of surveillance on the warehouse where Corazon was being held. He turned up in the observation room while Emmy was plotting her hare-brained scheme, and he got into an argument with the police captain.”

  “Sounds about right. And I suppose you want me to find out what he was doing?”

  Much as Black hated to admit it, Alaric’s FBI contacts in Florida were probably better than his. While many of Alaric’s former colleagues had publicly disowned him, a select few believed his side of the sordid tale that cost him his job.

  “We’ll pay your day rate.”

  Alaric sighed. “Okay. The 49ers haven’t been playing so well anyway.”

  “And Rafael…” Black walked towards the back door and beckoned for the younger man to follow. “While Sofia finds a dressing to go over the top of that wound, we need to talk.”

  Outside, Black leaned against one post of the pergola beside the pool. The sun was dropping, casting long shadows over the garden.

  “So…” he started. What did a man say in this situation? “This wasn’t how I’d expected today to turn out.”

  “No.”

  “Did the girls hurt you badly?”

  “No offence, but your wife’s a bitch.”

  Black had to laugh at that. “She’d take that as a compliment. Would you have talked otherwise?”

  “To the police? No.”

  “In that case, she did the right thing.”

  “I guess she did. But she’s angry at me for shooting Eduardo Garcia. Is he still alive?”

  “Yes, but barely. He’s in a coma and it could go either way. Ultimately, she wants the person who hired you, and you’ll have to give her that name.”

  “Yes. But not now. Now, we focus on my sister and Isabella.”

  Black couldn’t argue with that, because in Rafael’s position, he’d say exactly the same.

  “Tell me one thing. Are you still on the hook for the job? Or is your client likely to hire someone else?”

  Rafael took a barely perceptible breath as he considered his answer. “Garcia is still in danger. Keep security tight. Put somebody inside the room.”

  “We’ve already done that.”

  “Then we have some time.”

  “If Corazon manages to escape, does she have a way of contacting you?”

  “She’ll call Grandma. But I need to get a new phone so Grandma can call me.”

  Black pulled his own phone out of his pocket. “Give her my number for now. I’ll have my assistant organise clothes and a phone and whatever else you need.”

  “I need a gun. I flew commercial.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Anything.”

  “By preference?”

  “A Sig Sauer P226.”

  “Good choice. I’d offer you mine, but you don’t have anywhere to put it.”

  Rafael grinned for a second, then took the phone. Without being asked, he put it on speaker after he dialled, and a moment later, Black heard Marisol da Silva’s voice for the first time.

  “Sí?”

  “It’s me.”

  “What happened?”

  “Cora was being held at a warehouse, but the police came while I was there looking for Isabella. Not for me, but because there were drugs.”

  “And?”

  “I got arrested, but I’m free again now.”

  And alive, which was a bonus after an angry Emmy had gotten involved. Black had to be thankful for that.

  “And Cora?”

  “We’ll find her. Isabella wasn’t there. Did you tell Dores the full story?”

  “I had to, and now she’s more upset than when she thought her daughter was dead. Who’s ‘we’?”

  “We?”

  “You said ‘we’ll find her.’”

  “Uh…”

  Black interrupted the conversation. “My name is Charles Black. I run a security company here in Florida, and Rafael has hired us to help find the women in question.”

  The sound of a breath being sucked in came down the line. “Rafael, are you sure about this?”

  “I needed help.”

  “Vicente can come and—”

  “No, Vicente stays with you.”

  “You can’t trust strangers.”

  “Grandma, you need to trust me. I’ll call tomorrow with an update, I promise.”

  “But—”

  “Take care of Dores.”

  Rafael hung up and passed the phone back to Black.

  “Mierda. That could have gone better.”

  “She’s smart.”

  “Yes, Marisol da Silva is smart. Too damn smart. Every time I got into trouble as a kid, she found out and had something to say about it.”

  “My parents just wrote cheques to cover the damage.”

  “You still think of them as your parents, even after what they did?”

  “How can I not? They brought me up, and they gave me a good life, even if their actions in Valento were abhorrent. They didn’t start what happened that day.”

  “No, but they ended it.”

  “We can’t argue over this. We can agree not to see eye to eye, but quarrelling over the past is futile. We need to focus on the future instead.”

  “Agreed.”

  “All of our resources are at your disposal. We’ll get Corazon back, and Isabella too.”

  “That’s what I have to believe.”

  “But it could take time, and you need to look after yourself. We work as a team, and Emmy’s lunacy notwithstanding, we prefer to avoid lone-wolf tactics. I know you’re used to working on your own, but you’ll need to learn to defer to others when their expertise in a particular area exceeds yours.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. Do you have police contacts? An expert hacker on hand? Access to real-time
satellite imagery? The ability to conduct twenty-four-hour surveillance?”

  Rafael shook his head.

  “And, like me, you’ll find undercover work difficult because your size makes you stand out too much. Better to leave that to men like Alaric. No, your primary role in this operation will be at the end, if we have to mount a rescue operation, which means you need to stay fit, eat well, train hard, and get enough sleep. Understood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Let’s go and find that bandage.”

  CHAPTER 24 - CORA

  THE PINK PALACE was a strange mix between a prison, a psychiatric unit, and a hotel. Each morning at around the same time, an ape woke us up and took us downstairs for breakfast while somebody cleaned our rooms. After breakfast, we had the choice of going to the gym, being locked up again, or watching a movie in the lounge. Everyone except Jodie, the redhead, had picked the lounge today, but I heard her pounding away on the treadmill in the next room. Two guards hovered at all times, usually seated on chairs by the door, and a grey-haired cleaner dodged around us with a feather duster.

  “If it weren’t for Netflix, I’d go crazy,” Hallie said on the morning of my fourth day in the mansion. “Even if I’ve watched all the good movies at least twice.”

  The other Colombian girl, Paloma, sat beside me. “I miss books. I asked for something to read, but all I got was three Jack Reacher novels and a copy of Vogue. The boredom’s the worst thing about this place.”

  “Apart from the nightly abuse, you mean?”

  Her cheeks coloured. “Well, of course. But you kind of get used to that.”

  Last night, a banker named Kyle shoved his finger up my ass at the end then laughed when I screamed, and the night before, Randall, whose daddy was apparently big in oil, had pushed his cock down my throat until I choked. No, I would never get used to that. In fact, my stomach still churned with an odd combination of nausea and anger that sapped my energy and left me weak.

  One of the blondes, Kristen, painted her nails by the window, and Tasha—Miss Stockholm Syndrome—chatted with a guard. The other blonde, Kelsie, sat in an armchair on the far side of the room with her knees drawn up to her chest, rocking.

  I realised everyone coped with being here in their own way. Tasha, and to a certain extent, Paloma, had normalised the ordeal, while Kristen and Jodie tried to block it out. Despite being here for so long, Hallie seemed the least institutionalised, but she was also scared of putting a foot wrong in case it brought consequences. And Kelsie? She just kept to herself.