Black On Black (Quentin Black Mystery #3) (30 page)

I bit my lip, nodding.

Still kneeling next to where Nick leaned against the wide stone pedestal, I quickly searched him for more bullet wounds, worrying I’d missed something. If I had, I couldn’t find it. Shrugging off my coat, then pulling off the outer shirt I wore, I ripped a strip of the fabric off the bottom, then another.

I started tying them around the bullet wound in his shoulder.

“...One o’clock. From the statue, not us.” I spoke low now that the firing had stopped, more to distract both of us. “Some kind of sloped ramp on this floor. I don’t think he can get above us. He couldn’t get high enough for a clear shot at Angel, so we should be okay here for a few minutes at least...
 
unless that door’s accessible.”

I nodded towards the fire escape door to my right.

Hesitating, I looked at his face. “You okay? Hit anywhere else?”

Nick shook his head, grimacing as I knotted the second cloth around his arm.

He motioned for me to help him up.

Black just stood there now, holding onto the stone base with both hands, gasping where he leaned against it. I could barely see for the pain coming off him, and it wasn’t even mine. Even so, he took the time to glare at Nick as I helped him to his feet. I felt the irrationality behind the anger there, and his confusion since Nick just helped him out.

I could also feel that a lot of Black’s hostility stemmed purely from the fact I was touching Nick, regardless of context. The fact that Black was the one to tell me to take care of Nick seemed to not fully register with the part of him that was angry.

Black’s stare was blatant enough that when Nick looked over, he stiffened.

“You want to aim that bullshit somewhere else, Black?” Nick said. “I just took a bullet for you, you piece of shit.”

Black’s jaw hardened. “It might not be the last one you take because of me, Tanaka.”

“Are you
threatening
me right now, you mutant fuckwad?”

“You’re lucky I didn’t tell her to leave you out there.”

“Am I?” Nick let out a disbelieving laugh. “Do tell, Black. Tell me how someone I’ve been in
combat
with, who I’ve known for decades and who spends holidays at my house every year would leave me to die at
your
say-so.”

Black’s gold eyes grew colder. “You think she wouldn’t tell me what you did?”

There was a silence. Then a harder anger came off Nick in a dense cloud. I couldn’t avoid that either, standing so close to him.

“What
I
did?” Nick glanced at me, his jaw clenching before he looked back at Black. “Maybe you need to talk to your girlfriend about who started that, Black. In fact, maybe you shouldn’t go on such long trips. Maybe things aren’t as secure at home as you seem to think––”

I didn’t see it coming, not until it already happened.

Black swung––hard––moving so fast I barely tracked it with my eyes.

He hit Nick in the face, not once but twice, a hook followed by a sharp cross.

They weren’t love taps, either. Black hit him hard enough to knock him down. I’m pretty sure he
would
have knocked him down if Nick hadn’t fallen into the stone pedestal and grabbed hold of it to keep himself upright. Given that Nick had spent over twenty years training in martial arts and spent a
lot
of time at the gym, it was no mean feat, even with him wounded.

I stepped between them without thought, holding up both of my hands to Black.

“Whoa! What the fuck?” I stared up at him, at a loss. “What are you doing?”

Black didn’t look at me. He glared past me at Nick, his gold eyes as cold as glass.

I followed his eyes. Nick touched his face and his temple, staring down at his fingers like he couldn’t believe what just happened. He wasn’t bleeding, but one or both of the hits obviously hurt him. I could see a bruise already rising on his cheek. I knew hitting him must have hurt Black too, given the twin holes in his side, but he didn’t seem to care.

His voice was an open threat.

“Touch her again, and I’ll fucking kill you.”

I jumped, looking up at him, alarmed.

Black’s gold eyes didn’t so much as flicker.

Nick let out a humorless laugh, looking at me. “Yeah. Really fucking healthy, Miri. He’s definitely a keeper...”

“Nick,” I said, giving him a warning look. “You were
trying
to provoke him.”

“It wasn’t exactly hard,” Nick retorted. “I barely breathed on him and he flipped out. What the hell is he going to do if you
really
do something he doesn’t like?”

Black took a step towards him and, feeling the wave of threat there, I immediately inserted myself between them, pushing on his chest. Black talked over my shoulder, glaring at Nick.

“Are you seriously accusing me of intending her harm?” he growled.

“I’m accusing you of being a narcissistic sociopath. Does that count?”

“At least I’m not trying to manipulate her into a goddamned relationship!”

Nick startled me when his voice came back as angry as Black’s. “The
fuck
you’re not! You’ve been screwing with her head from day one! With all of this psychic, mumbo-jumbo, ‘you’re just like me’ bullshit. All this
crap
about wanting her to work for you...
 
about needing her ‘services’ as a profiler when you really just wanted her servicing you in bed...”

I winced, glaring at Nick, but he didn’t even glance at me.

“...You’ve been trying to mindfuck her since that first day in the interrogation room...
 
and don’t think for a goddamned
second
I don’t know it. Hell, you were probably reading
me
in there, trying to figure out how to get into her goddamned pants...”

“And that just pisses you off, doesn’t it?” Black’s voice grew dangerously soft, soft enough to make me nervous. “Gods know you didn’t want me getting there if you hadn’t been there first.”

“You’re not
good enough
for her!” Nick snarled.

I flinched, staring at him in disbelief.

Black’s voice grew even colder. “And you’re the one to decide that, is that right...
 
Nick?
You’re the one who’s going to keep her safe? When it took you...
 
what? A whole week after she’d been
raped
to try and fuck her?”

Nick paled, looking at me.

His expression twisted in fury as he stared up at Black.

“Not good enough by a
hundred fucking miles
.” Nick’s hands curled into fists. “Or did you think I wouldn’t look into what you’ve been doing over here for the past few months, Black? You sick, merc fuck. You think I don’t
know
you’ve been performing hits? Or what you did in Iraq a few years back? We could talk about Columbia, Black. Or how about Buenos Aires? I heard there are some juicy fucking tales of your exploits there...”

I stared between the two of them, caught between disbelief and a growing alarm.

Nick had been looking into Black’s sealed military records? And what the fuck was going on with Black himself right now? Did he really just threaten Nick’s life because I drunk-kissed him one night? I thought we’d gotten past all that.

When the silence stretched, I moved again, trying to insert myself further between them. To
 
get one of them to look at me, at least.

When neither of them spoke, I faced Black.

“Seriously?” I kept my voice soft, but I know he heard the lower thread of concern. “You’re doing this now, Black? With Ian out there?”

He finally looked at me.

A cloud of pain came off him once he met my gaze, forcing me to suck in a breath. When my vision cleared, he’d already looked away. Even in that brief contact, I could feel his anger at Nick was real––real enough that it vibrated off him in an erratic-feeling pulse. Real enough that his hands were clenched at his sides, his jaw hard.

Real enough that I knew his threat just now hadn’t been wholly idle.

“Black,” I said, softer. I laid my hands on his chest. “Calm down. You need to calm down...
 
all right? It’s okay.”

That time, his whole face tightened. He closed his eyes, shielding those gold irises longer than a blink. When he opened them, he still wouldn’t meet my gaze, but I could feel my words had reached him. Moreover, he was wholly focused on me now, not Nick.

Then Nick spoke up from behind me. I turned my head at once, scowling at him for calling attention to himself again, only to find him glaring right back at me.

“Let me call Jean,” he said. “He can have the
Gendarmerie
here in minutes. I told him we might need them, so he’s on call with––”

“No,” Black cut in. “Absolutely not.”

Nick glared at him. “Excuse me, I wasn’t aware you were in charge. You got a problem with
all
cops, Black? And here I thought it was just me.”

“Apparently you dislike your friends significantly more than I do.” Black took a breath, leaning some of his weight back on the stone base of the statue, his expression hard. Even so, I felt him leaning on me more now, and not only physically. I also felt him acutely conscious of my hand rubbing his chest.

“...You call them here and they’ll be cut down like animals,” he said, his voice subdued, but also holding a thread of pain. “You’d be signing their death warrants, Tanaka, so I wouldn’t advise it.”

Nick looked at me, then back at Black. His voice turned incredulous.

“Ian’s
one guy,
Black. You can’t seriously think––”

“He’s ‘one guy’ who can control human thoughts.” Pausing a beat to let that sink in, Black faced him, his eyes hard. “The only reason he hasn’t taken ahold of your puny human mind and turned you into his personal dancing monkey already, Tanaka, is that I’m currently
shielding
you and Angel to keep that from that happening...” Black’s stare grew colder still. “Otherwise you likely would have
shot
Miriam by now...
 
and me...
 
and probably eaten a bullet yourself once you’d finished.” He jerked his chin towards Angel.

“...Well. After you killed her.”

Nick followed Black’s jerked chin to Angel, his expression stunned. I saw the wheels turning in his mind as he looked up at Black.

Then he turned that stare on me.

“Human,
Miri?” His voice held something between disbelief and triumph. He turned on Black again. “Did you just say
human,
you psychopathic douchebag?”

Black glanced at me. “I thought you told him?”

I gritted my teeth. “I told him we were
psychic
.”

Black frowned back. “Well, how in the gods am I supposed to know that?”

More shots went off overhead, that time from a different angle.

Black, Nick and I all ducked. Angel, who still sat at the base of the statue to our right, was already out of range. She motioned for us to join her.

We slid around the base of the statue, getting on the other side of her while Angel herself continued to sit there, panting, a hand clamped over her ear and part of her neck. Once I was close enough, I got her to move her fingers long enough for me to look at the wound. I grimaced when I saw the bullet had taken a chunk of her ear. When she put her hand back over the severed part to try and staunch the bleeding, she gave me a weak smile.

“I’m still pretty though, right, doc?” she said.

Shrugging, I gave her a faint smile. “Well, since you’re not carrying an armful of alcohol right now, I honestly can’t tell,” I said, my voice deadpan.

She laughed, then grimaced when the movement caused her pain.

“Well,” she said to me, glancing up at Black and Nick. “We can’t just sit here and let the menfolk bicker. If your boyfriend’s right, we need a plan B.”

That pretty much answered my question about whether or not Angel heard Black’s remark about him and Ian not being human.

More to the point, I knew she was right.

I found myself thinking about the grenade I had in my boot. I didn’t want to waste it though, and I honestly wasn’t sure it would be enough to get us out of there, not with us pinned against the statue and at least one of us seriously wounded. Black wouldn’t be able to move very fast, no matter what we did. Moreover, the whole idea of setting off a grenade in the middle of the Louvre made me pause, I admit. It just felt like some kind of sacrilege.