Diego: (Brighton Bad Boys 3)

by Tilly Delane

  Zoltan was the opposite. Built for his seventeen years, with a classic v-shaped body, light brown hair, intelligent green eyes, cheekbones that remind me a little of Silas and Sheena and thick eyebrows with a distinct kink in them and with a scar running through the one above his left eye.

  I’ve spoken to Konstantin about it and though he keeps telling me to hang in there as long as Piotr’s parents are willing to pay and that something will give eventually. I’m not so sure. It’s never taken me this long to crack a case. Konstantin reckons I had a lucky streak before this and that I’m only just starting to see what our work is really like. But I think that’s bull. Five years of a honeymoon period seems a bit long.

  No, something is fundamentally different this time, but I don’t know what. Logic tells me that I need to split the two up in my head and concentrate on Piotr. But weirdly, the single only thing I am absolutely convinced about to do with this case, which feels stone-cold most days, is that the two of them somehow belong together. Even if they disappeared months apart.

  It drives me nuts.

  I open my laptop and push the on button, before I go down to the kitchen to make myself some fresh coffee and hunt around for some biscuits.

  I feel a bit lost. Sheena rang a little while back to let me know she’s spending another night in London, and to ask if I could feed the cats, since Silas and Grace are not going to be back until tomorrow either. I’m stunned. I’ve never known her to take more than one day off at a time since I got here. I’m pleased for her. She deserves some fun. But the house feels unnaturally empty without everyone.

  So while I wait for the kettle to boil, I allow myself to acknowledge how grateful I really am that Diego is taking me out to dinner again tonight.

  Though this time I’m going to make sure I’m paying. It shouldn’t matter what he thinks of Kalina, but when in years to come when he looks back at the summer he had a hot affair with a language student he never saw again, I want him to remember her as an equal, not as someone who let him pay her in meals for getting laid. And I want him to remember lots of getting laid, I realise, grinning to myself. Because much as I needed the break from him earlier, it’s been barely over an hour and I already kind of miss him.

  I fill the cafetière with ground coffee and top it up with boiling water then select two custard creams and two chocolate bourbons from the biscuit tin and put them on the counter. I’m about to push the plunger down on the coffee grinds when it hits me full force.

  After nearly six months of absolutely nothing, the feeling hits me in the gut like a sucker punch.

  Diego

  “So, how come we didn’t know he was coming out? And what the fuck kind of sentence is nine months for running over a kid?”

  I know I haven’t got my voice under control when I hear Isla snarl at me. She does it really quietly and without lifting her head off her paws, while she is lying by Julian’s feet, but I know if I were anyone else taking that tone with Julian, she’d be right in my face showing me her full set of teeth.

  “You know the drill, Diego,” Julian answers levelly. “He’s served half his sentence, he’s out on licence. I don’t know how O’Brien rigged it, but there was no indication Callum was going to get released before the first of September. Maybe it’s nothing to do with the old man. Maybe the authorities wanted to ensure the family of that boy don’t go after him. They still don’t know if the kid’s ever going to be able to talk or walk again, you know. If you think about it, he’s been in rehab for nearly two years now. That’s a long-arse time.”

  “Do we know where Callum is now?”

  “No. Apparently they chucked him out of Lewes on Thursday. We would have known sooner if my guy’s daughter hadn’t been getting married on Wednesday. He’d taken a couple of days off and when he got back to work, Callum had been released. But my guess is Callum will turn up at Fight or Flight soon enough. I’ve sent a couple of guys over to Cecil’s house, but as far as they can tell he’s not there. I can dig around and find out who his parole officer is. Maybe they put him in a halfway house or something.”

  I ponder that. Julian is right. Cecil O’Brien’s eldest son will show up at their family gym eventually, and since almost all my guys train there, we’ll know when he does. But I’m almost certain I already know where he is.

  “Chances are, he’s holed up with the next in line of O’Brien’s bastards,” I explain to Julian.

  Julian cocks his head slightly and waits for me to elaborate. Julian didn’t grow up with all of us. He’s a Londoner originally, and didn’t set foot in Brighton until about four years ago, when he decided he was going to go into the security business by the seaside.

  We built Santos-Benson Security together, after a chance encounter.

  He’s forever filed in my brain simultaneously under ‘best decision to pull a finger out of my arse I ever made’ and ‘worst decision to pull a finger out of my arse I ever made’.

  I met him one morning, shortly after he relocated here, around half past five. I’d just shut shop on the club and the bar, and I decided to take a stroll by the sea before heading to Woodland Drive. I did that a lot back then. I was twenty-one, I was already running this massive operation, and I often felt fucking overwhelmed by it all. I went down to the beach and there was this guy playing with his puppy. All happy. Until a wave came and dragged the puppy out. Stupid guy went in after the puppy and before I knew it, I had a drowning dog and a drowning man on my hands. Inlanders just don’t fucking understand the sea. So I did what all decent Brightonians do ─ I took my shoes and my socks off and ruined a perfectly good pair of suit pants saving this guy’s arse and his dog’s on top. It’s why I get special treatment from Isla and why, despite the fact I haven’t known him since year dot, I trust Julian with my life. He owes me his dog’s.

  That’s a pretty strong bind.

  But there is a difference between trusting someone with your life and trusting them with your shit.

  So, just in case he ever gets any ideas, I also have enough dirt on him to get him sent away until his wife’s eggs have shrivelled up and the baby they are trying for isn’t even a remote possibility any longer.

  Not long after we went into business together, I found out that no matter how controlled he is on a job, civilian Julian has a temper. Especially if someone touches up his wife. There is a guy in a vegetative state in a care home in Haywards Heath, whose attacker the police still haven’t found. I have proof, and Julian’s got previous, so they wouldn’t go lightly. And one of the beauties of the English justice system is, you can’t make deals like they can in America. He could never sell me out to save his own skin. We can just sell each other out and take the consequences.

  So we just have to trust we don’t.

  Aside from being a liability at times, though, I really value his opinion.

  Because Julian is a fresh pair of eyes on our murky Brighton soup. Because he’s not embroiled in Brighton the way Silas and I are. But sometimes it means he needs stuff explained to him that’s just common knowledge between the rest of us. So I explain.

  “Callum and his bastard brother Cormac are only a couple of months apart in age and they’ve always had a special bond. I’m not sure if the mothers literally shared Cecil in bed, but it’s all a bit icky. They’ve always been thick as thieves those two. It’s quite something because none of the other O’Brien children get on with each other. Like, they’ve hospitalised each other, revenge-shagged each other’s husbands and wives, the lot. It’s regular EastEnders, that family. Point being, I’m pretty sure Callum is at Cormac’s house as we speak. So we station a man out there. Twenty-four seven. Got to be somebody who’s dead good at camo, though. It’s right out in the sticks, middle of the Downs. There are only two properties up there. A working farm and Cormac’s patch. Was a smallholding once, too. Cecil bought it for the land, thinking he could develop it. Turns out it’s in the middle of National Trust land. Nada developing. Grazing only. So he gave the house
and yard to Cormac to live there and rents the pasture out to the local sheep farmer. So tell our guy he can’t just rock up there in a car and sit outside. He’s gonna have to be a bit more creative. But I want to know everything Callum does. Anything he does that can get him back inside, we fucking grass him up immediately.”

  Julian’s eyebrows shoot up at that.

  “Really? The police? That’s not your normal style, Diego.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  I blow out a long breath.

  “Look,” Julian says slowly. “You know I’ll happily go along with whatever you say, but just out of curiosity, I know you hate the O’Briens, other than Silas─“

  “Silas is not an O’Brien,” I interrupt him sharply, earning me another snarl from Isla. “He just carries the name. He’s not Cecil’s son.”

  Julian makes an appeasing gesture.

  “Yes, I know. Sorry, my mistake. Anyway, I know you can’t stand that family, but what’s this thing with Callum? What makes him so extra special that you’re willing to put yourself on the police’s radar? ‘Cause you know that’s what you’re doing if you drop him in, right?”

  I nod heavily.

  “Yup. But, trust me, we’ve been in their viewfinder for a long time anyway and hopefully it won’t matter soon, because soon we’ll be fully legit. I’ve practically closed the deal on the league with Collier and once that’s out of the way, I’m going to talk to the ladies upstairs.”

  I sigh heavily when I think about clearing out the working girls. I worry about them. The Brick is one of the very few places in town where they can work safely without a pimp. They pay extra rent for the protection we offer, but they’re not ‘mine’. I don’t lay claim on them and I don’t let anyone else either. They are totally free agents, yet they have our bouncers’ back up at the touch of a button. It’s a sweet deal they will not find elsewhere.

  While I’m tormented about their future, I have no qualms selling the fight club league to the Eastbourne crowd. At the end of the day, it’s nothing but a list of contacts that is worth around a mill. And Collier, the guy I’m selling to, is not a complete cunt like some of the people who were interested. He’s also come up with a watertight cover story for what I’m officially selling him, so that’s a bonus. At the moment, he and I are still haggling over a small number of details, but I’m sure we’ll iron it out eventually.

  Dad and Cecil O’Brien will be livid when they find out I’m letting the league leave town, but I don’t give a fuck. Dad will be all ‘I gave you this thing and you’re tossing it away’ which is utter bollocks because he gave me a set up of semi-organised local brawls and I turned that into a proper south coast league with big money flying around. O’Brien will be fucked off because he has delusions that he’s somehow important and needs to be consulted about these things. When all he really is is an idiot whose personal idiocy is in love with my dad’s personal idiocy. And vice versa. Peas in a pod, those two.

  “Diego?” Julian prompts me when I still haven’t answered. “What’s the deal with Callum? What did he do to deserve your wrath?”

  Is that what this is?

  Wrath?

  I don’t know.

  Maybe.

  All I know is that I don’t want Callum fucking O’Brien roaming the streets of my town. Or any other town for that matter.

  I look Julian square in the eye when I finally answer his question.

  “He killed my cat.”

  Kalina

  I completely lose myself in Piotr’s and Zoltan’s files for the rest of the afternoon, churning everything over again with fresh drive, riding high on the wave of the feeling.

  But I don’t really see things that I didn’t see before.

  Both boys liked sports. No surprise there. Most male teens do, unless they’re already too busy smoking dope and fucking. Piotr played tennis, like his parents. Zoltan played football and had started dabbling in amateur boxing before he came to England. Something his mother wasn’t terribly happy with.

  Both boys liked to read. Actual books. Piotr was heavily into classic sci-fi. Zelazny, Asimov, Lem. The kind of stuff my brothers are into. Zoltan read a whole load of stuff I’d never heard of and haven’t got the time for. Literature. I don’t do literature. In any language. Give me a good biography or a pulpy horror and I’m happy.

  Both boys volunteered to work in charity shops while they were here, which is something the language school kind of pushes on their students. It’s a good way of keeping them entertained and it has its merits in terms of having to converse with the locals. But they didn’t work in the same shop. I’ve done a bit in each of the shops they worked in, and I doubt there is a connection there. It’s all mildewy clothes, slightly deranged women over fifty, socially awkward older gents and being treated like an idiot because you’re a foreigner. But it’s a totally malice-free environment.

  By the time eight o’clock comes around and there is a knock on the door, I’ve made absolutely no progress and I’m starving again, for food ─ and for the man who’s come to take me out.

  Problem is, I haven’t got ready. I’m still sitting on my bed in my dungarees, unchanged from earlier in the day, with no makeup and no real desire to go anywhere. I shut my laptop, run down the stairs and open the door.

  Just like he predicted, the man standing outside is very much Diego, in his standard tan-coloured three-piece suit and his fancy Italian leather shoes. Although he clearly still hasn’t had time to shave and the stubble gives him a new edge. I swallow hard when I look at him because he is so fucking handsome, it hurts. I look down at myself then back into his storm grey eyes and shrug apologetically as I step aside to let him through the door.

  “I’m sorry, I got caught up in work, I haven’t changed yet.”

  He doesn’t say a thing as he steps over the threshold as quickly as possible, just as everyone always does, because there is no pavement in front of Sheena’s house and if you’re not careful, a car will take the back of your legs off. What everyone else doesn’t normally do is to bend down as soon as they’re inside, sling their arms around me and nuzzle my neck to inhale my scent.

  His nose still pressed firmly to the soft skin below my jaw, his beard scratching me deliciously, as he kisses my pulse, he slides his hands down over my butt. He hooks in and lifts me up, so I have no choice but to cross my legs behind his back and hold on to his shoulders.

  I lean back a bit to smile at him and I catch a glimpse of sadness in his eyes that reminds me he’s still the guy I spent last night with, fancy clothes or not. He smiles back at me and presses a soft kiss to my lips.

  “I missed you,” he says, and I laugh.

  “It’s not even been five hours, Diego!”

  He flinches slightly when I call him that but then he grins.

  “You been counting?”

  “Maybe a little,” I admit.

  “Good,” he says, and then he pins me against the wall and kisses me in earnest.

  My heart leaps when our tongues meet, before it simply concedes defeat and wanders straight into my panties, to pulse between my legs. I can honestly say that no other person has ever had the power to turn me on this quickly. He thoroughly tongue-fucks me for a solid five minutes, pinned against the wall in Sheena’s dimly lit hallway before he withdraws, panting.

  He rests his forehead against mine.

  “I had better let you go get dressed, otherwise we’ll never make it out of here.”

  I jump off his hips when he takes a step back and look up at him.

  “Would that be a bad thing?”

  He frowns.

  “What do you mean?”

  I shrug.

  “Can’t we just stay here? I’ll order some Thai. Do you like Thai?”

  “I like Thai,” he confirms, slightly bewildered.

  “Okay. Then let’s order Thai and just pig out on Rowan’s bed in the living room.”

  He looks at me suspiciously.

  “Why Rowan’s
bed?”

  I comedy-punch him.

  “Because it’s the biggest in the house,” I giggle. “And there is nobody here. We can make a complete mess, then go to sleep in my room and clean it up tomorrow.”

  He looks at me as if I’d proposed a trip to Narnia.

  “You don’t want to go out?”

  I shake my head.

  “Not really, no.” I sling my arms around his hips and make puppy eyes at him.

  “Look, you live with your parents and staff, I live with...” My voice trails off for a moment because what do I say here? “A whole lot of people. This is the only chance we’ll ever get to have a place to ourselves again, unless you book us a hotel room somewhere.” I scrunch up my face, because I really don’t like that idea. “And that would make me feel cheap. Like a whore. Not that there is anything wrong with prostitution. A woman’s body is hers to do with whatever she wants. But I don’t want to be that woman. So let’s enjoy the opportunity. Also, it’s my turn to pay for dinner and I bet I couldn’t afford whatever you had in mind. But I can afford a Thai from the place around the corner.”

  His face breaks into the biggest, most gorgeous smile I have ever seen on him.

  “You want to buy me dinner?”

  “Yup.”

  “You want to sit on the biggest bed in Sheena’s house and eat Thai with me?”

  “Yup.”

  He toes off his fancy shoes and shucks himself out of his suit jacket at the same time.

  “You’re on, baby girl. You are so on.”

  Diego

  She won’t let me fuck her again before dinner, but she soon lets me peel her out of the dungarees, so she’s dancing around in panties and a tight t-shirt that leaves her belly button on show, while she phones the Thai place and orders for us.

  We grab plates, spoons and forks from the kitchen, but when I try to grab chop sticks, she slaps my hand and lectures me on Thai food being eaten by hand traditionally. I file that information away for later with a naughty grin. And wonder once more how come I underestimated this girl quite so much. I spent so much time over the last few months telling myself that she was too young for me and a no-go zone, that through my haze of repressed lust I didn’t see how worldly and clued in she actually is. I find it hard to believe she turned only nineteen yesterday. Between the girlie giggles and the carefree attitude there lies a competence that’s comforting, and seriously belies her age.