Red After Dark (Blackwood Security #13) - Elise Noble Page 0,102
a monster.”
“Look, you have a jealousy problem, I get it, and I’ll take some of the responsibility for how far things went.” My knuckles were a tiny bit bruised too. “You’re not a monster. A fool, maybe, but not a monster. I’m more concerned with the past. Why did you do it? Why did you ruin Alaric’s whole life? Did you plan it? Did you sit down and map the entire fucking path of his destruction?”
Black had always been a planner. A plotter. A schemer. But the thought of him jotting notes and calculating probabilities and working out timings made me sick to my stomach.
“I didn’t plan it at all. I just…snapped.”
“You snapped? And somehow happened to pull off the perfect fucking crime? Oh, and nearly got us both killed in the process?”
Black’s worried expression turned to absolute horror. “I swear I didn’t know you were going with him to the drop! If I had, I’d never have done it.”
“So it was okay for Alaric to get killed? Just not me?”
“I didn’t think he’d get on the damn boat. I figured he’d open up the case to check everything before he left here.”
Because Black would have done exactly that. Check, check, and check again. He was meticulous whereas Alaric was more of a one-and-done guy. He did things once, and he did them carefully.
“So he’d only have lost his job, lost the painting, and possibly gone to jail?”
“I fucked up. Like yesterday, I wasn’t thinking straight, and I panicked. I was…scared.”
He whispered the word as if it were an intruder. A trespasser that had no place in his psyche.
“Scared of what?”
“That you’d leave me.”
“I wouldn’t have.”
“You were looking at houses. He bought you a ring.”
The first part I was well aware of, but the second part? That was news.
“A ring?”
“A fifteen-thousand-dollar white gold and purple sapphire solitaire ring. There’s only one reason a man buys a woman jewellery like that.”
“Shit.”
The word slipped out, much the same way as it would have if Alaric had asked me to marry him all those years ago. Then the rest of my brain caught up.
“What were you doing? Monitoring his credit card statements? His email?”
Black’s silence told me that was precisely what he’d been doing.
“For the love of fuck! Why didn’t you just talk to me? Ask me how I felt? Yes, I liked Alaric a lot, but I didn’t want to marry him.” I closed my eyes and sucked in a ragged breath. “Not when it would have meant divorcing you. I couldn’t have done it. Even after you coldly informed me our one and only kiss was a mistake, I still wanted you. If you felt the same, why didn’t you just tell me?”
“I came home that evening to do exactly that. The job finished early, and I got a ride back—”
“With Pale?”
Black nodded.
“That lying cretin.”
“I asked him to lie. He told me I was an idiot.”
“He was right.”
“I know.”
“So, you came home…”
“I jumped out of the plane. I hadn’t skydived for a while, so I figured it was a good opportunity to fit in some practice. Originally, I planned to land on the lawn, but a gust of wind blew me towards the guest house. I was going to correct, but then I recalled the security system had been partially deactivated and thought why not surprise you? So I landed on the roof and nearly broke my tibia.”
Quinn wasn’t alone, then.
“And you came through the tunnel?”
Another nod. “I saw the briefcase first. In the living room. And then I went upstairs and I heard you in the bedroom, both of you, and something in me broke.”
“You switched the pay-off.”
“Yes.”
“How did you open the briefcase?”
“Trial and error. There were a thousand possible combinations, and Alaric picked five-one-five so I only had to go halfway.”
Five-fifteen. May fifteenth. My pretend birthday, the one the whole world knew. The significance wasn’t lost on me, and it probably hadn’t been lost on Black either.
“Where did you get the counterfeit money? The fake diamonds?”
“I’d confiscated the money from a forger years before. Didn’t quite know what to do with it at the time, so I kept it around for a rainy day. The cubic zirconias came from Bradley’s craft room. I think he was using them to decorate lampshades or something.”
“And the next day? You snuck away and got Pale to bring you back again?”
“Nothing that complicated. I hid in the woods next to the airstrip and just got him to land the plane. When I walked