Page 39 of Gold Mine (The Diamond Trilogy 2)
I nestle down into the corner, feeling a strange kind of comfort. When you’ve lived long enough in the dark, it begins to feel like home. “Why did you shoot him?”
“I was his mentor, once. His friend. Then I became indebted to dangerous men. Powerful men. And he became a pawn to his lieutenant colonel. We were soldiers, each of us, on opposite sides of a secret war being waged.”
“In other words, he got in your way.”
That musical laugh again. “Yes, he got in my way. In my own manner I was trying to help him. Put him out of commission, out of the game. It wasn’t a lethal wound.”
“Neither was yours, it seems.”
“No, apparently our friend has a strong sense of symmetry.”
My chest constricts. He said he’ll make demands of us tomorrow. “How far do you think he’ll go to maintain that symmetry? Do you think he would make us… kiss?”
“I have come to regret those games,” he says. “They weren’t respectful.”
Anger wells in my heart. “You play the games. He plays the games. And always, I’m in the middle of them. Why? I’m just a regular girl.”
“I chose you before because you were the one thing he wanted but couldn’t have.”
“But I’m nothing to you.”
“Nothing? No. I’ve come to care about what happens to you, but you aren’t my lost love. That’s where he broke the symmetry. If he’d wanted to pick the one thing I wanted but couldn’t have, there would be someone else sitting in this cell with me.”
Because we’re whispering confidences, I ask, “Who?”
“Someone you know,” he surprises me by saying. “Someone you love.”
My forehead knits. “But who—”
“It does not matter. What matters is that clearly he plans to exact his revenge tomorrow. We had better rest and get some sleep.”
“I’m not going to sleep,” I say. “Now tell me who this person is. We barely know the same people. I can’t think of anyone who—No. Not London.”
“Is it so hard to believe? I imagine many men fall in love with her every day. The irony is that I have Elijah to thank for meeting her. If he hadn’t slipped her the diamonds, I would never have met her.”
“You’re the one who helped her,” I realize. “The one who helped me escape Paris.”
“Yes.”
“Because you wanted her to love you back?”
“God, no. She has no business being with someone like me. In the same way you have no business being with someone like Elijah North. When men like us sell our souls to the devil, there’s nothing left to give to a woman.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Elijah
Of course I don’t go to sleep.
There are infrared cameras set up in the basement, and I seat myself on one of the pews. The pulpit is quiet and dark. Even this many years later there’s the faint scent of incense. It’s embedded in the wood and thin wool carpet.
The church has been abandoned for a few years now. I bought the property under a shell company for twenty thousand dollars at a public auction.
It makes a good safe house.
Even my brothers don’t know about it.
Thinking of them makes my jaw clench. There’s no going back now. They would never accept me again after what I’ve done, but this is who I am. It was always a false front that they welcomed into their fold. They thought I was like them. I’m not.
I’m like our father.
I pull up the camera, and of course, of course, they’re talking.
Adam is always fucking talking, and Holly is too curious for her own good. It pisses me off, even as I acknowledge that I created this situation. Maybe I even created it to force them to talk, because I’m a perverse son of a bitch.
“When men like us sell our souls to the devil, there’s nothing left to give to a woman.” Damn the man for telling the truth. There’s nothing left in my soul but darkness and violence. That’s what I’m showing her by taking her captive. She left because I couldn’t give her empty promises—now I’m showing her exactly why they would have been empty.
“Bullshit,” she says, her voice calm and clear over the speaker. “That’s an excuse men like you use to keep from feeling anything, because emotions are more scary than bullets.”
Soft laughter. “I see why Elijah likes you so much.”
“Yes,” she says, her voice dry. “He likes me so much he kidnapped me.”
“He’s trying to prove a point.”
“What point?”
“That he doesn’t deserve you.”
That’s the problem with making an enemy of a man you once called a friend. He knows me too well. Of course I don’t deserve Holly. Now she’ll finally see that.
They grow quiet after that.
Holly wanders the edges of her prison in much the same way she wandered the edges of the crypt under the French church. She’s a woman who always needs to test her boundaries. That’s one of the things I admire. And it’s one of the reasons we can never be together.
