Diego: (Brighton Bad Boys 3)

by Tilly Delane

  As I jump up and clear the room in a few hasty steps to take her from Silas, who thankfully caught her as she blacked out, I realise I don’t actually give a shit who or what she is. And it dawns on me that I’ve known for ages that something was off.

  We all did.

  We just didn’t want to know. Because we like her.

  I like her. I trust her.

  I have no idea what her deal is, but I trust in what is between us. I trust in the magic we make when we’re together. I trust in the way she just fits.

  By the time I get to Silas, he’s got her securely in his arms, carrying her like a groom carries his bride. I hold out my arms, my heart pounding in my throat with fear, and he wordlessly transfers her across to me.

  Rowan comes back, talking as he enters the room.

  “Sorry that took so long. I can’t believe you don’t have an actual icepack. Those points for the Hobnobs you scored? I’m taken them away again for making me...oh shit,” he says when he sees Kalina’s limp body.

  I carry her back to the bedroom and put her on my, our, bed.

  Silas, Rowan and Julian all follow me in. Rowan hands me a satchel of ice cubes wrapped in a kitchen towel. I gently press them against Kalina’s cheek.

  “You should get her to Doctor Morten,” Julian says solemnly, breaking our silence.

  Morten is the doc we take fighters to if shit goes really bad. We try to avoid him because he costs you a kidney to scan your kidney but included in that price is a state-of-the-art MRI scanner, in a private clinic that holds no records and has no witnesses.

  “No doctor,” Kalina mumbles as her eyes flutter open.

  She smiles at me weakly and her hand comes up to cradle mine. She gently pries the ice satchel from me and presses it to her cheek herself while she shuffles into a half upright position.

  “I’m okay. I just need some sugar,” she mutters.

  Silas silently dashes away and returns with the open roll of Hobnobs and my coffee.

  “Here,” he hands both to me but looks at her, critically. “I don’t know, Kalina. You might have a concussion. He hit you pretty hard.”

  I hand her a biscuit, after I’ve dunked it for her, and she starts nibbling on the soggy edge.

  “Don’t be stupid. If you have a concussion you blackout immediately. Not half an hour and an orgasm later,” she retorts. “It’s just shock.”

  “Yeah, or a really good performance,” Julian says sarcastically.

  We all turn to him, but it’s Rowan who speaks.

  “Right, enough, soldier boy. One more word and I’ll deck you just for the fun of it.”

  He goes toe to toe with Julian to illustrate the point. The point being that Julian might be ex-army, but Rowan is a descendant of giants on one side and a Japanese martial arts master on the other, or so the story goes, and the most lethal bare-knuckle fighter in all of the land. Rowan glares at him until Julian backs down.

  Kalina meanwhile finishes her Hobnob and drinks half my coffee, all the while holding my gaze.

  She’s pleading with me not to hate her. She’s telling me to lose the guy she doesn’t know, and who doesn’t trust her. I lean in and kiss the tip of her nose.

  “Julian?” I call out and reluctantly take my eyes off her to look at the guy in question.

  “Yes, boss?”

  “Go downstairs, check on your wife. Tell her she doesn’t have to take you off the conference rota after all. Callum and Cormac can wait.”

  I hear him take in a sharp breath. He doesn’t like being dismissed, but he’s too much of an order follower to argue. It’s why our meeting was serendipitous for him not just on a lifesaving and dog-saving level but on a business level, too. He might have had fantasies about running his own security business, but he would never have made company director material. And he knows it, too. Which is why he is happy with how it is and why he doesn’t argue now. He gives me a sharp nod and retreats out of the bedroom. Rowan stalks him part of the way, undoubtedly to watch him step into the lift. He returns a few beats later with a big grin on his face.

  “He’s gone,” he informs us, and Kalina visibly relaxes.

  “Right,” I say gently, running my hand through her short hair and cradling her good cheek. “Who are you? Why are you here?”

  She grins, turning her face in my palm and kissing the tip of my thumb.

  “Ask me how old I am, first,” she teases.

  I blanch at that and lift the hand off her to run it through my hair.

  “Oh fuck. Please tell me you’re legal,” I groan.

  She nods, her grin widening.

  “Totally. I’m actually only a year younger than you.”

  I see Rowan’s eyebrows shoot up at that in the periphery of my vision.

  “No fucking way!” he exclaims.

  But she doesn’t look at him, she still looks only at me.

  I feel a mix of annoyance and relief. Annoyance for all that time I spent, agonising over lusting after a barely legal girl. And relief, because no nineteen-year-old should be that experienced between the sheets. I sure as shit wasn’t at that age and only now do I realise that it was bothering me. Fragile male ego and all that. I’m a dick.

  She holds her hand out for another biscuit and I give it to her.

  “I’m gonna fill you guys in,” she says and takes a deep breath then huffs it out in a series of rapid little puffs. “I’m not going to tell you my real name, though,” she states. “Not because I don’t want you to know, or because I don’t trust you, but because it means that if the police ever interrogate you about me, you can honestly say you knew me only as Kalina Jasinski.”

  I hear all the implications of ‘knew me’, and it slices through my heart like a dagger. She never had any intention of sticking around. But I push it aside for now. Right here, right now, she’s in the palm of my hand.

  “You wanted?” I ask.

  She shakes her head.

  “No. But I should be,” she answers.

  “You’re a criminal?”

  She shakes her head again.

  “No. But not all my business practices are strictly legal, so I use a cover identity.”

  “And what is this business that you practise?” I ask in a slightly ribbing tone that’s supposed to cover up my nervousness.

  “I’m a private investigator.”

  Kalina

  I was saved by the bell. Literally. Before Diego, Silas and Rowan could react in any way to my little revelation, the doorbell rang, followed by pings on both Silas’ and Rowan’s phones, announcing that Grace and Raven were downstairs.

  So right now I’m alone in the bedroom with Raven, who’s thrown everyone else out of the room, and I’ve got a torch shining directly into my left eye.

  I don’t really know Raven ─ after all, we only spent a week together in the same house before she and Rowan left for America ─ but I like her. She is competent, no-bullshit but also kind of darkly edgy, the same way Rowan is. They belong.

  She also has the coolest tattoo on her back I’ve ever seen in real life, dresses like a fifties pin up, petticoats and all, and has taught me how to do victory rolls on Grace like a pro. I was half in love with her already just for that when she and Rowan left, but right now I appreciate her on a whole different level.

  There is something about being checked over by a medical professional that makes you feel like a child getting a hug after a tumble.

  Reassurance.

  Safety in the knowledge you’re in good hands.

  Raven gives off all of that.

  She switches the torch off then asks me to get up and runs me through a few exercises that remind me of the way American cops check out if somebody is drunk.

  I have to walk in a straight line, touch my finger to my nose with my eyes closed and do a few more coordination tests. She asks me some memory questions, and then we’re done. I clamber back onto the bed and Raven examines my face one more time before she shrugs.

  “I t
hink you’ll be fine. You’ll look like shit tomorrow, but your brain’s okay so far. To be on the safe side, rest for forty-eight hours, preferably in bed. Get Diego to keep an eye on you. If you develop a headache, or your vision goes blurry, go to the hospital. Like, right that second. But it’s unlikely to happen. It’s rare to get a concussion or brain swelling from injuries to the face. It kinda acts like a crash zone in a car. It would be a whole different story if he’d hit you directly in the forehead or, worse, around the side or the back of the skull.”

  There is something in the way she says it that makes me suspect she has firsthand experience of this, not just as a nurse. But we don’t know each other anywhere near enough for me to ask her about it. So I just nod gratefully. Which hurts. Every little movement of my head hurts now. The power of the ibuprofen didn’t last long.

  She watches me wince and nods sagely.

  “You need something stronger than over the counter painkillers?” she asks.

  “Diego already offered me morphine,” I answer, and her eyebrows lift. “But I don’t want any. I don’t like opiates. They make me fuzzy in the head.”

  She laughs at that, which from what I already know of her is a rare occurrence.

  “Respect,” she says. “But, you know, we have these drugs for a reason. Don’t be a martyr. If it gets too hard to cope, don’t be too proud to take something stronger. I’d rather we got it the legal way, but I think where these guys are concerned, resistance is futile. Whatever you take, though, just be careful so you don’t end up liking it too much.”

  “I hear you,” I reassure her.

  Raven’s spent the last half a dozen or so years as a rehab nurse, so I know she’s not being flippant. She holds my gaze for a second and then turns to the closed door, satisfied.

  “You can come back in now!”

  On her shout it immediately opens and Grace falls in first, followed by Diego, Silas and Rowan. Grace comes over to me and shunts Raven out of the way, making her shuffle along so she can lean in and give me a hug. She keeps it so light it’s more like a brush of air around me and of all the things that have happened today it’s that what finally makes me cry.

  But not for too long.

  Diego was right.

  The tears hurt like a bitch on the inside of my nose.

  Diego steps around the others to the other side of the bed and climbs up to stretch out next to me, offering me his arm to lean into. I snuggle into him, inhaling the scent of his skin as the shirt he threw on after the bathroom but never buttoned up falls open and allows my cheek to use his bare chest as a pillow. I feel immediately more settled. And a little turned on. Again.

  Grace sits down on the edge of the bed, next to Raven. Silas clears the only chair in the room of clothes by dumping them on the floor and draws it up to the foot end. Rowan sits down on the floor, opposite Raven and Grace, with his back against the wall and one knee drawn up.

  Once everyone is settled, there is a moment of silence, bursting at the seams with their curiosity.

  Grace is the one who pops the bubble.

  “Spill, girl!” She laughs. “Private fucking eye?”

  “What?” Raven asks, unsure of what’s going on.

  The guys hadn’t got to that part in their retelling of the afternoon, when she threw them out to examine me. I guess they filled Grace in while Raven was inspecting the damage. I decide Raven is the least betrayed person in the room, so probably safest for me to hold eye contact with for now and concentrate on her.

  “I’m a private detective, I specialize in finding remains of missing children. I’ve been working undercover in Brighton for the last seven months, investigating the disappearance of two teenage boys two years ago, Piotr Schmidt-Danczyk and Zoltan Salak. They disappeared within three months from one another, and they both were here as students of Babeltowers International before they vanished. It was the only connection they shared, so I went in as a language student to investigate.”

  Raven nods, taking the new info in with a neutral expression, but in the periphery of my vision, I see Grace’s eyes growing bigger with every word I speak.

  Grace is an innocent in a round of shady characters. Raven’s not exactly a criminal either, but she seems to take the type of life Rowan led until recently much more in her stride than your regular goodie-two-shoes. Grace may not be super prim and proper but compared to the rest of us, she lived a pretty regular existence before she came to England and met Silas. I know from some of her late-night-over-ice-cream confessions that she often still feels like she’s living in a movie right now, where she’s bagged the least bad of the bad boys, but a bad boy nonetheless.

  “And?” asks said least bad boy from his chair right now, while my own one is absently running a hand up and down my arm.

  Though I remain plastered to Diego’s side, I shuffle into a more upright position before I answer Silas. I take a moment to brace myself then face up to his hazel stare. Despite my ever-growing feelings for the man by my side who’s making me feel better just by holding me, I feel like I owe Silas my explanation the most. And I’m most terrified of his disappointment in me. It comes with the territory of having lived in his house for seven months, I guess. Of all the people in this room, I have known Silas the longest and shared the most food with him. Most of which, he cooked. That counts for something.

  “And nothing.” I sigh. “I’m in a, what do you call it, cul de sac.”

  “Dead end. You are at a dead end,” Rowan corrects me from the floor and pulls his phone out of his pocket.

  “I’m at a dead end,” I repeat to him then concentrate on Silas again, whose face is giving nothing away. “The language school came up empty. I spoke to Piotr’s host family, posing as his cousin, but they had nothing that wasn’t in the police report. And they have watertight alibis. Plus they are still reeling from the incident. They’re never gonna recover from having lost somebody else’s child. When people go missing, it ripples so far, you can’t imagine...” I let my voice trail off for a moment, remembering all the families and friends of the missing I’ve brought closure to over the years, before I go back to telling them about the non-event that is the most difficult case in my career so far. “On the other hand, Zoltan’s host mother barely remembered him. It was more like a youth hostel run by this single woman, who is clearly just treating these kids as a business. She has eight students at a time, packing in four per room on bunk beds. Like sardines. The kids get a locker and a mattress, cereal for breakfast and a pot of gloop for dinner. The complete opposite of what your mum does. I tracked down each of the students Zoltan bunked with. Spoke to all of them on the phone, but none of them could tell me anything much. Normally, I’d go visit them, but Zoltan’s mum isn’t the paying party in this. Piotr’s parents are bankrolling me, and other than me, nobody is convinced the two disappearances are connected. My boss thinks I’m, what’s the phrase, barking up the wrong tree but lets me follow my instincts as long as I don’t bill Piotr’s parents with any expenses spent on Zoltan.”

  “Whoa, hang on,” Diego says at this point. “You have a boss? What does he know about us?”

  I tilt my head to look at him and roll my eyes.

  “Nothing, he’s not interested in you. Deal with it.”

  It raises a chuckle from both Silas and Rowan.

  “Continue,” Silas says.

  “So I spoke to all of Zoltan’s, what shall I call them, fellow sufferers. It sounded like they didn’t have a very good time while they were here and basically tried to stay out of the house as much as they could. Having seen the house and the host, I’m not surprised. It’s filthy, it’s cramped, the woman is horrible, and it smells of towels that have been folded away before they were dry. The only thing they did tell me about Zoltan that she conveniently forgot was that he stayed out all night a few times. While they all stuck to the curfew, Zoltan didn’t come back and claimed he’d slept at the beach.”

  “So he was gay then,” Silas, Rowan and Dieg
o all say in the same breath.

  “What?” Grace, Raven and I respond, equally una voce.

  “You can’t sleep at the beach here. Coppers will come and move you on in two seconds flat,” Diego explains, his hot breath fanning over my head, before he drops a quick kiss on the crown. “So ‘sleeping at the beach’ is Brighton gay slang for hook ups, usually in one of the two main gay clubs.”

  “Both of which are at the seafront,” Silas rounds off the info.

  And suddenly I sit bolt upright, because it is something I never considered.

  Zoltan’s mum never mentioned anything about him being gay, but he might have hidden it from her. People still do. Especially in a country like Hungary, where over half the population are Catholics. Though Zoltan’s sexuality shouldn’t have any bearing on the case as such, a predilection for casual hook ups very much could. Casual sex opens cans of worms for crimes of passion, date rape and accidental killings by a complete stranger. It would also mean a connection to Piotr’s disappearance was highly unlikely. My mind is reeling at a thousand miles a second with a million new possibilities ─ all annoyingly revolving around the non-paying element in this gig ─ when Grace pipes up, brows drawn together in thought.

  “Yeah, but would a foreign student know that? And how old was this kid? Do these clubs not card you?”

  “He would, if those are the circles he’s hanging in,” Rowan points out, while I answer the other half of the question.

  “Seventeen. But he could easily have passed for older. He was built.”

  “What about the other one?” Raven asks.

  “Piotr?” I ask on a sigh and sink back down again. “He was fifteen, but he was the opposite. Like, really small for his age. Slight in built. Big, innocent eyes. Could have been one of my brothers.”

  “You have brothers?” Diego asks, a sharp reminder that he doesn’t really know me still.

  “Two,” I say. “Both younger than me.”

  “Real or imagined?” he enquires sarcastically, and I slug him in the stomach.

  “Real, you arse. And before you ask, most of what you know about me is true. I just may have left out the odd bit.”