Diego: (Brighton Bad Boys 3)

by Tilly Delane

  “If you ever, ever, set foot in my place again without an invitation,” I say coolly, “the two of you are dead. If you ever break into my or my girlfriend’s computer again, you’re dead. If you ever go behind my back...”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Rowan interjects. “We get it, they’re dead. Personally, I’d shoot them right now and adopt the dog. Come have a look at this.”

  I turn around.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  The resoluteness in his voice and the concerned look on his face propels me forward.

  “So, I’ve clicked through most of this, while you two had your little heart to heart there. Most of her notes and emails are in German, addressed to a guy called Konstantin. I’m guessing that’s her boss. And then there’s an email in French to some woman named Janka,” Rowan explains as he clicks through some documents. “I can’t see the email addresses because I guess they got autofilled and I’m guessing the thing they put on her computer literally tracks the buttons on the keyboard being pushed, right?” he asks Lila, and she nods. “There is nothing there that makes me suspicious, though,” he carries on. “She doesn’t once mention any of us, or you, or the club or anything. Unless we have code names, and I can’t read German. But it doesn’t feel like it’s about us. Sounds stupid I know. Call it a gut feeling. I think the only reason those two muppets thought Kalina was snooping on you was because she typed in ‘CCTV Callum O’Brien’ a million times and that would have got her here each time.”

  He’s brought up an internet browser and mimicked her search while he was talking, and now clicks on a link that takes us to the CCTV footage of Callum mowing down Daniel Mantas. I know it well, along with just about everybody in Brighton, and half the country. We saw it plenty often at the time. It was played on the news back then for days on end, for shock value.

  “Okay,” I say hesitantly.

  “But other than that, it’s all about those boys she mentioned, they come up all the time. Zoltan whatever and Piotr so-and-so. It’s all about them. And the rest of her search history makes me think she was trawling through missing persons databases. I guess she was trying to see if...” His voice trails off, and a deep furrow appears between his brows before he continues, deep in thought, “...if there were any other disappearances around the same time. And maybe...”

  “Maybe what?” I ask impatiently.

  He goes back to run the video footage of Callum and Daniel again. Then looks up, and back and forth between me, Julian and Lila but really deep in thought.

  “Maybe she wasn’t looking at that footage because it’s connected to you at all, but maybe because it falls into the same timeline.”

  A weird feeling crawls up my spine when he says it, that thing that people call ‘as if someone is walking over my grave’.

  “What are you saying? You think Callum is somehow connected to Kalina’s case?”

  He shrugs.

  “I dunno. Or maybe she’s just sticking her oar into your shit because she ain’t getting anywhere with her own shit and that’s what couples do. Nose around in each other’s business. Point being, are you sure these fuckers here haven’t got a tracker on your computer?”

  Both Julian and Lila raise their hands defensively at that, and I laugh.

  “I doubt it,” I say to Rowan. “Using something that tracks the keys on my keyboard will tell you that I push the dictate button a million times a day but nothing else.”

  Rowan looks at me as if I’m stupid.

  I turn back to Julian and Lila.

  “You been recording me?”

  “No!” they both shout, but I realise we have a problem.

  “I believe you,” I say slowly. “But I don’t trust you anymore. You broke my trust. I’m sorry.” I sigh deeply and rub over the wound on my thigh. “Wipe that shit,” I say, pointing at the computer in front of me. “Wipe it clean. Do not keep any records of any of it, anywhere. You,” I single out Lila, “will come back upstairs now and remove whatever device you put on Kalina’s computer. We’ll see this weekend through, and then on Monday the three of us will sit down and talk about that severance package.”

  Julian looks crestfallen.

  “You’re choosing some girl over us?”

  “It’s not about that Julian. It’s about betrayal. But yes, I’d choose Kalina over you.”

  “Her name is not even Kalina,” Julian shouts in frustration.

  “I know,” I yell back at him.

  “But don’t you wanna know what it is?” Rowan asks with a grin in his voice.

  I spin back to him.

  “No! Yes! But from her. Argh. How do you know anyway?”

  “Well, she doesn’t sign emails to her boss with a fake name, does she?”

  “Okay, stop! Enough! Let’s go.”

  “Shame,” Rowan mutters behind me as he and Lila follow me out. “If I had a Kristina, I’d want to know.”

  He can’t see my face.

  So he doesn’t know I heard.

  Or that I’m smiling from ear to ear.

  Kalina

  I wake up the next day in an empty bed, groggy, with wool in my head, nauseous and thirsty. My face hurts again, but it’s bearable.

  I sit up gingerly, and steady myself on the mattress for a minute before I make my way to the en suite.

  I go to the toilet, wash my hands and drink some water straight from the tap then open the medicine cupboard to pull down some paracetamol. No more morphine for me, I decide. No pain relief is worth this feeling. Only after I’ve downed two pills do I dare to take a long hard look in the mirror. Half my face is bruised, my nose is still swollen, and I won’t win any beauty contests, but I’m not as puffed up as I was last night, and on the whole it’s not as bad as I feared.

  I very carefully brush my teeth and then walk back into the bedroom, where the curtains in front of the open French doors are billowing from the sea breeze. It’s nice.

  I draw them back, squint at the sunlight and step out onto the balcony to look across the sea, shielding my eyes with one hand. It’s such a clear day, you can see France on the horizon. It’s absolutely beautiful. I take a lungful of the salty air and a funny feeling blooms inside me. Home.

  I sense his presence before I hear him.

  “Good morning, beautiful,” he says, stepping through the door behind me. “I thought I heard you were up.”

  He slings his arms around me and holds me lightly against him, his soft linen slacks fluttering around the back of my naked legs.

  “You weren’t there,” I say.

  “I was making coffee. I brought you some. It’s on the nightstand. How are you feeling today?”

  “Better. I’ve taken some paracetamol.”

  “You need Raven to give you some more morphine? They’re going to be here in half an hour anyway to check on you.”

  “No, I feel fuzzy. I don’t like it.”

  He bends down and kisses the side of my neck.

  “Okay.”

  “What happened last night?” I ask. “You left to talk to Julian, but you didn’t come back.”

  “I did. You don’t remember?”

  I search my memory. There is a jumble of pictures and snippets of conversation.

  “No, I do. Kind of. Did you, did you come back with Lila?”

  “Yeah,” he answers, and I sense he’s holding his breath.

  “Did she, did she do something to my laptop?”

  He sighs.

  “She undid something to your computer,” he says heavily, and I spin around in his arms so fast, it makes my face throb again.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t know, Kalina, I swear. She and Julian bugged your laptop a few days ago. Not like broke into your system, but they have transcripts of what you’ve typed since. They thought you were after me. I’ve already told them we’re done.”

  “Whoa,” I say, taking a step back. “Slow down. So how much do they know about me?”

 
“Not a lot. Not more than you’d already told us. And...”

  “And what?”

  He grins.

  “And I don’t know if I should stick with calling you Kalina, baby girl, or Krissie.”

  I look him straight in the eye.

  “You call me Krissie and I’ll cut off your balls. If you absolutely have to, it’s Kristina. Not Kris, not Krissie, not Tina. You call me Tina and you lose both, your balls and your dick. But, actually, I never liked any of it. It’s a yearlong reminder that I was short-changed on a birthday,” I say, and he frowns inquisitively at me. “My birthday is on Christmas Day,” I explain. “Honestly, I like being Kalina a whole load better. I like having my birthday in the summer. I like having an actual birthday, full stop. Can’t I just be Kalina?”

  He steps up to me and cradles the good part of my face in the palm of his hands, searching my eyes, making my heart beat faster.

  “You can be whoever you want to be when you’re with me,” he says softly then angles his face, so the gentle kiss he presses to my lips won’t hurt me.

  And it’s that exact moment I understand why they call it ‘falling’ in love.

  Because I fall.

  All the way.

  Diego

  I take her back to the bedroom to cuddle and drink coffee, but we keep it chaste for a change because we don’t have much time left before the others arrive.

  They rang me at ten this morning, eager to come back, Rowan hinting that he had news.

  We never finished what we’d started last night because Kalina had almost completely zoned out by the time Lila, Rowan and I came up from the office.

  I got Lila to debug Kalina’s laptop ─ by peeling off what just looked like nothing more than an innocuous black sticker ─ and sent her off, before I carried Kalina to bed. Raven examined and dressed my dog bite, which is mostly bruise and one small nip, went to check on Kalina’s vitals one last time and then the others all left.

  I’m tired today, because I held her all night, waking with a start every half hour or so to check on her breathing.

  She feels good in my arms now, sipping her coffee and telling me a little more about herself. I still don’t know her real surname, and I don’t ask. But she tells me freely about her brothers, both of whom are much younger than her, and still living with her parents. There is a little bit of bitterness in her voice because it sounds like while she was shipped out to boarding school, they always kept her brothers with them. She tells me about the school and the people there, the girl she had a hot liaison with, and how her mother and father hated her career choice so much they practically disowned her. I can’t say I blame them. She lives a dangerous life.

  I feel like she’s finally letting me in, and it’s an amazing feeling. The way I imagine it would feel if I looked at a page of writing and it finally all fell into place.

  She tells me all of this while she lets her hand wander over my abs and chest, tracing the lines and ridges with her fingers, and I’d be lying if I said she wasn’t making me hard. She’s making me super hard, but some of the permanent urgency has gone between us and I like it. My phone pings by our bedside and I lean across to pick it up. It’s Silas telling me they’re downstairs.

  I shuffle up and she rolls off me to let me get up.

  “The others are here,” I say, and lean down to brush a careful kiss over her lips. “I want to revisit those stories later. Especially the ones around Lauren Watson.”

  She laughs at that and reaches over to give my cock a quick stroke through my linen slacks.

  “You like the idea of me kissing girls, huh?”

  I growl at her touch.

  “I like the idea of you, full stop,” I reply and use all my willpower to leave her.

  “Cheesy line,” she calls after me.

  “Truth!” I shout back, and go to let our friends in.

  Kalina

  I get up and throw on a pair of shorts and a new skin-tight t-shirt then pad after him into the living room, arriving just in time to greet the others as they step out of the lift.

  “Morning, guys.”

  I wave at them and then realise that Diego has laid a breakfast out on the coffee table for everyone. There’s more coffee in a thermos, sugar and milk, juice, jam and butter. Silas and Grace pile out first, carrying bakery bags.

  “I brought croissants,” Silas says. “But if that’s still too hard for you to chew, I can make some scrambled eggs for you, Kalina. We bought some eggs yesterday.”

  Raven comes out next, marching past them to make a beeline for me. She comes to a halt in front of me and checks out my bruising with soft fingertips.

  “Hmm,” she says. “Looking good. You need some more morphine?”

  I shake my head.

  “No, thank you. I’m good. I took some paracetamol earlier. They’re doing the job.”

  She beams at that, her indigo eyes sparkling with joy.

  “Atta girl,” she says. “Good job on the not getting hooked. You know about alternating paracetamol and ibuprofen?”

  I nod.

  “Of course, you do,” she says on a laugh. “You’re the original badass.”

  Then she turns to the others to help Silas and Grace unpack the bakery products.

  They haven’t just brought croissants. They’ve brought pastries and pizza whirls and bagels and soft cheese and smoked salmon.

  Tears well up in my eyes and I gingerly wipe them away before they can spill over. Silas catches the movement as he looks up from the table and winks at me with a smile.

  He and Grace disappear to the kitchen to get rid of the bags, and that’s when I notice that Diego and Rowan are still standing by the lift having an intense exchange at whisper volume. They both look a bit rough around the edges, but Rowan looks worse for wear. He’s carrying a black, ratty messenger bag and pads it to emphasize something he’s telling Diego.

  I catch Raven’s eye. She’s sat down on the sofa and is patting the space next to her. I go to sit down and take a soft looking custard Danish from the plate of offerings in front of me. I frown at her inquisitively while I bite into it. She shrugs.

  “He didn’t sleep much last night. Don’t be mad at him, but I think he got his teeth stuck into your missing boys. I don’t know. He came back from apologizing to that Julian guy with the cogs in his brain ticking so loudly, it was giving me a migraine. And then on the way home, he was searching up stuff on his cell and then, I don’t know, like I said, he’s been up all night. Not because of me, if you catch my drift. It’s the first time since we’ve been together, we didn’t fuck at least once, which is so not like him. I sometimes think he’d still get it up even if the house were on fire, the zombies were outside, and the apocalypse was raging. Scrap that,” she says on a laugh. “He’d get extra hard if the house were on fire, the zombies were outside, and the apocalypse was raging. But last night? Something changed after he looked at his cell. Like I said, he stayed up, and then he disappeared for a good four hours, early this morning. Alone. Didn’t even take Silas. Came back with that bag.” She nods to indicate the messenger bag that Rowan is currently taking off his shoulder. “I don’t know. The only time I’ve seen him like this was when we had Simon Rothman tied up on the bed at The Village, trying to get a confession outta him. I’ve asked him what was up, but so far I just got grunts.”

  She leans forward to grab a plate, cutlery, a croissant, jam and butter. Grace and Silas come back and drag the other sofa in the room closer to the table.

  “We should have done that last night,” Grace says with a laugh when they plonk themselves down. “Are you two going to stand there all day?” she adds in the direction of Diego and Rowan.

  They split apart and come over. Only now do I realise that Rowan looks almost distressed. I’ve not known him long, but distress is not congruent with anything I know about him. If Silas looked equally worried, I’d think something was wrong with Sheena, but he seems as happy as Silas ever does, cutting little pieces
out of all the bakery products to feed them to Grace as hors d'oeuvres.

  Diego pulls over another chair from the corner of the room, and while Rowan takes up residence in the same enormous armchair he occupied last night, Diego sits down opposite him on the new chair. Silas looks from one to the other, picking up the same vibe I am.

  Those two know something we don’t.

  And judging by their faces, it’s not good.

  Diego

  Rowan and I let them eat breakfast in peace, but as soon as everyone’s had their fill, I nod at Rowan. He clears his throat and addresses Kalina.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve got a confession to make. When we went down to the office yesterday, I saw some of the stuff you’ve researched since Lila bugged your laptop.”

  Kalina frowns at him but doesn’t interrupt.

  “You’ve been watching the clip of Daniel Mantas getting run over like a million times,” he carries on. “And Julian and Lila thought you were doing it because you were sticking your nose into Diego’s business. Is that really why?”

  It’s the first and only time I’ve seen Kalina blush. She throws me a ‘forgive me’ look before she answers.

  “Well, yes. Initially, that was true. I overheard you talk about Callum and I was curious. It’s kind of what I do, you know. Finding out stuff.”

  “But that’s not why you kept looking at it over and over, right?” Rowan enquires, almost gently, like he’s prising information loose that she doesn’t even know she has.

  He’s good at this, I realise. Interrogation. In a different life he would have made a good cop. Or psychotherapist. I want to laugh at the thought, but I suppress the impulse because I don’t want to break the spell between them.

  “No,” Kalina admits, dragging out that one syllable. “I, I don’t know. Something was wrong. In the way Daniel was running. But I couldn’t work it out. It bothered me.”

  If Rowan is surprised by her answer, he doesn’t show it.

  “So it wasn’t just the time stamp on the video?” he asks evenly.