“My phone was off,” she said. “I just listened to them now.” It was the truth. She had listened to them while walking back from the Holiday Inn. He’d left several of them, each asking her to call him. None of them specified that there was anything wrong, but the tone in each had been progressively more worried. She felt a tinge of guilt for not having picked up the phone and for having been out of contact for so long, but fought that feeling down. After all, Cormack was known to disappear for days at a time as well. What was good for the goose …

“I was worried!” Cormack was almost shouting, and it caught Diamond off guard. She couldn’t remember a time when she had ever seen him lose his temper. She looked at him, and her shock deepened.

“Oh my God!” she blurted out. “What happened to your face?” There was a bandage across his nose, and dark scabs covered his cheeks. The dark bruises under his eyes made it look like he’d lost a heavyweight title fight.

“I had an accident,” Cormack said, looking down.

“Mack, that’s not an accident,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m not stupid.”

He pried his eyes from the floor to meet hers. She could see the pain and fear in them more clearly than she’d seen it since her mother died. It wasn’t a fear for himself, she knew; it was a fear for her. It was the fear, she supposed, that all parents feel when contemplating their child’s future, and their own inadequacy in protecting them from all the evils of the world. Her hand went unconsciously to her abdomen.

“You’re right,” Cormack said. “You’re not stupid. Far from it.” The way he said the words sent shivers through her. She’d always known that her father’s business wasn’t entirely legitimate. There were too many people who showed him too much respect, and too many others who regarded him with palpable fear for him to operate entirely within the confines of the law. She realized that she’d always known that he wasn’t just involved in the corruption that ran throughout the harbor; he ran the corruption. She’d just never wanted to admit it to herself. She loved him too much to think about him in that way. And yet, now, as she allowed herself to acknowledge what she had always known deep down, she still loved him.

“Are you in danger?”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing I can’t deal with.”

She looked down at the phone in her hand and thought about the messages he had left for her, each one successively more desperate in tone. “Am I in danger?”

He shook his head. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

She could feel a tear running down her cheek. “What’s going on?”