Page 5 of Diamond Desire

It was an odd question, but one I answered, anyway.

“Always.”I promised.“What do I have to complain about?”

It wasn’t like my life was hard now, even though I had the odd bit of trauma from childhood nightmares about my mama. I was rich, spoiled, smart. I was pretty and healthy and didn’t have the personality of a spoon. Sure, I may have been raised in darkness and faced more violence than most people ever would, but aside from that, I had everything.

I was happy.

I ate the soup in silence, waiting for my drink and my father to join me for food. It took a few minutes and though he wasquiet again, I could have sworn I heard his brain ticking away with ideas. It was as loud as I presumed my brain was when I was thinking of all the ways to be a menace to those in society I did not like.

“I wanted to ask a favor of you.”He handed me a boiling hot chocolate mug, the heat whirling above the rim, combating the surrounding coolness.

“Anything.”

“Not long after we return home, I am throwing an event at your nightclub, and I wonder if you will come to it with me. Officially.”He said it like it was no big deal, despite how huge it was.

I never went to anything officially. Never. Not once in my life.

“Officially?”My brows rose as I double-checked his words.“As Sapphire? Or as someone else.”

“As yourself.”He sipped his own soup, casual as anything.“As my daughter and my heir. I think it is time that our world meets you and our enemies see just how strong their damnation is.”

I wasn’t twenty one for another year and our gang and businesses had a rule – stupid and outdated from one of the many Montana’s who’d come before me – that nobody could be in charge until they were at least that age.

My tongue burned with questions, my brain racing a dozen times a second, and I had to fight the urge to voice everything I thought. But it wasn’t my place to question things. Not in a misogynistic way, as though I was a simple woman who could not speak back to her father. But more because my father was kind, and he was smart. If he was asking me to do something, then it was not only the right thing to do, but a decision he had not thought about lightly.

He may have been a Bratva man, with more blood on his hands than most book villains, but he was a wonderful dad. The best dad. I trusted him with my life, would have offered him mine, and loyalty might as well have been branded onto my flesh because I would offer it until I died.

If he said jump, I asked how high and that would never change.

“Okay.”I grinned.“I would love to attend with you. I think it would be fun to be by your side.”

My dad looked at me, his smile bright, his eyes crinkled with joy and for the tiniest moment in time I was entirely at peace. I was frozen in the moment, capturing it and saving it in the crevices of my brain for a later date, when I had to remember just how much I loved him.

A moment I hope would not come for many years yet because without my daddy I knew I would fall to the demons I had been fighting against since I’d shattered my soul by putting a bullet in my mama’s head.

Chapter One, The Day Of The Crash

Maggie Montana had always looked like an angel whenever I’d seen her. Most angels didn’t have dark hair and a gun in their hand, but this time I found her, she did. Most angels weren’t made of darkness and light in equal measure – they weren’t a teenager with long braids and pretty eyes and a voice like silken velvet.

Most angels were not saving me. They had ignored me and my cries.

“You’re okay, my love.” As she bent down to gently grab my hand, she had tears in her big blue eyes, and I wasn’t sure why. “You’re safe now. Nobody is going to hurt you. I promise I won’t hurt you.”

She was just looking at me as she whispered words over and over that I barely registered hearing. She was just existingthere in a halo of golden light that streaked through the window. Covered in her grandfather’s blood, like an avenging angel sent down by God himself, she slowly put her gun away and didn’t look anywhere else but at me.

At the bruises on my skin, the blood on my legs, and the darkness I knew had been in my eyes for ages and ages now.

“Do you have a name? My name is Maggie.” I whispered my name as I chose to not tell her that I already knew who she was and not just because I’d snuck out sometimes and spotted her.

I had seen pictures of her. My monster had mentioned her. He said she was pretty, and she was going to make a powerful man very happy once he’d convinced her daddy that love didn’t matter in a marriage, money and power did. That a marriage between her and a rich man was far better than letting her waste her time on some other man, he said was a loser from the wrong side of town.

My monster said she wasn’t as pretty as me, though, but I disagreed. She was better – she would always be better, considering she was standing there with the gun in her hand she had used to shoot out his brain the moment she saw what he had been doing to me.

What a monster he was and had been just under all of their noses.

“Do you want to take my hand?” Maggie carefully offered me hers. “We can get you out of here and find you some clothes, and toys, and food. You can get cleaned up and do something fun – what do you say?”

“What about him?”