Diamonds and Bullets: Dark Mafia Romance

I married the man I was sent to Russia to kill.

There is a certificate in a drawer with both our names on it and a stamp, and it was supposed to be a piece of paper, and it stopped being one somewhere around the second week. Now his enemies are my enemies, his city is looking at me, and every table in Moscow wants to know what a Mexican girl is doing in the Zolotov house.

They can look. I have been looked at by worse.

What I cannot live with is that somebody has been building this around me since before I ever got on the aeroplane.

A fence in Petersburg. A cutter in Antwerp. A polite man in glasses with a coat over his arm, who never asks for money, who never asks for anything at all, and who has been standing in other people's kitchens for nineteen months saying my mother's name.

He does not want the diamonds.

He wants me in a room.

ALEK

I have buried one war this year and the next one arrives on a pavement in Moscow with a body on it.

I can hold a city. I have done it since I was twenty-nine. What I cannot do is hold the woman in my house, because she has spent eleven years being handled by men who loved her and decided things for her, and the only way to keep her is to stop.

So I tell her everything.

Almost everything.

And I find out, four days too late, that there is a clock on the thing she promised me.

Then somebody takes my sister off a school gate in Switzerland, and a crate with my family's name on it comes out of a bonded shed in Lithuania with an envelope taped inside the lid.

Five words on the back of it, in a hand that is not her father's.

For my daughter. If she asks.

This is the second book in The Black Diamond Series. Reading order:

Diamonds and Blood.

Diamonds and Bullets.

Diamonds and Graves.