The Thief (Black Dagger Brotherhood #16)(2)

Assail’s eyes had been like that, silver with a deep purple rim.

And she guessed they still were, assuming he was alive—although with the kind of life he was leading? Drug lords were in risk pools over and above the generic ones like cancer and heart disease.

Not that she had judged him for his choice of business—come on, her profession as a burglar was how she’d ended up in that trunk.

Such odd, hypnotizing eyes he’d had. Like nothing she had ever seen, and no, that was not romanticizing on her part. As with his strange name, and the accent that she couldn’t quite place—was it German? French? Romanian?—and the mystery that surrounded him, he had been what other men had never come close to: irresistible. With hair so black, she’d assumed it had been dyed, and a widow’s peak on that high, autocratic forehead, and his powerful body and sex drive, she had often felt that he was a figment from some other world.

A deadly presence.

A gorgeous predator.

An animal in human skin.

Between one blink and the next, she saw him the night he had come to rescue her from that camp—but not as he had approached her with open arms and a calm voice just as she had run out of that steel door, all wounded and disorientated. No, she remembered him a short time later, when he had somehow met her at a rest stop some twenty miles down the highway.

She had never understood how it was possible that he had stayed behind as his cousins had driven off with her—and yet Assail had caught up with them as if he could fly.

And then there was what he’d looked like. His mouth had been covered with blood as if he had bitten someone. And those silver and purple eyes had shone brighter than this moon in this southern sky with the light in them so unholy, it had seemed the stuff of exorcism.

Yet she had not been afraid of him—and she had also known at that moment that Benloise, her captor, had not lived. Assail had somehow killed her kidnapper, and in all likelihood, his brother, Eduardo.

It was the way of the business they had all been in. And the way of the life she had been determined to leave after she had healed.

After all, when you were held by madmen and prayed to God to see your grandmother again, and that actually happened? Only a fool didn’t keep their end of the bargain.

Hello, Miami.

Sola pushed her fingertips into her forehead and tried to get her brain off the well-worn path it seemed determine to process and re-process—even though it was a year later, for godsakes. She couldn’t believe she was so fixated on a sound decision that she had made with her own survival at the forefront.

Nights were still the worst. During the day, when she was busy with such high-level endeavors as grocery shopping, and going to mass with her vovó, and constantly looking out from under the brim of a baseball cap to see if they were being followed, she managed better. But with the darkness came the haunting, the ghost of a man she never should have slept with tormenting her.

She had long been aware that she had a death wish. Her attraction to Assail was confirmation of that, and then some.

Hell, she didn’t even know his last name. For all the spying on him that she had been hired to do, and then that which she had done on her own, she knew almost nothing about him. He had a glass house on the Hudson that was owned by a real estate trust. His two closest associates were his twin cousins, and both were as mute as brick walls when it came to his personal details. He’d had no wife or children.

At least not around him, but who knew. A man like that certainly had plenty of options for companionship.

Shifting to the side, she took her old iPhone out and looked at its black screen. When she woke the thing up, there was a picture of the beach from back right after she had arrived here.

No texts, no missed calls, no voicemails.

For a long while, she had had these regular hang-ups from a restricted number.

The intermittent calls were the only reason she’d kept the phone. Who else would be reaching her on it except for Assail? Who else had the number? It wasn’t the phone she’d used with Benloise or any of her shadowy business, and the account was under an alias. He was the only one who had the digits.

She really should have left the thing up north and canceled the service. Clean cut was best. The safest.

The issue seemed to have resolved itself, however. Assuming Assail had been the one calling, he’d stopped—and maybe it wasn’t because he’d found his grave. He had probably moved on—which was what people did when they got left behind. The whole pining-away-for-a-lifetime thing only happened in Victorian novels, and then usually on the woman’s side.

Yeah, no Mr. Havisham going on up north. No way—

Another memory took her back in time, and it was one she hated. Even after Benloise had ordered her off the trail, she had followed Assail out to an estate, to what had appeared to be a caretaker’s cottage. He hadn’t gone there for a business transaction. No, it was for a dark-haired woman with a body and a half, and he’d taken her down onto a sofa like he’d done it before. Just as he’d started to have sex with her, he had looked directly at the window Sola had been watching him through—as if he were putting on the show for her.

At that point, she had decided to pull out of the surveilling and had resolved never to see him again.

Fate had had different ideas, however. And had turned her silver-eyed drug dealer into a savior.

The sad thing was, under different circumstances, she might have stayed with him in that glass house of his. But in the end, her little deal with God had superseded that kind of fantasy.