VALERIA
They call me the Black Diamond.
I have thirty days in a city that never gets warm, a face nobody remembers, and one job. Get inside the Russian's house. Find what he took from us. Then put him in the ground quietly, the way I have put down better men than him.
The cover is easy. I read stones for a living, and he has a dead father's collection and nobody left who can price it.
The problem is that he opened the door before I knocked.
He gives me a vault. He gives me the truth. He never once asks me a single question about myself, and after eleven years of being useful to a man who saved my life, I did not know that being wanted was a different building altogether.
I came here to kill Aleksandr Zolotov.
I have twenty-six days left and I have stopped being able to look at the word.
ALEK
I knew her name before she landed.
Six years I have been waiting for a woman from Culiacán to walk up my step in a coat too good for this city, and when she finally does it she checks the exits before she checks my face, and she is smaller than the file, and the file is worthless.
She thinks the collection is her way in. Let her.
She thinks I do not know what is sewn into her coat, or who is paying her, or what the last day of this month means. Let her think that too.
I have buried my father, my patience and every man who came for this house, and I have never once wanted anything I could not simply take.
Then she puts her hand under mine to turn a stone four degrees, and she counts four seconds before she pulls it away.
She has until the thirty-first.
So do I.
This is the first book in The Black Diamond Series. Reading order:
Diamonds and Blood.
Diamonds and Bullets.
Diamonds and Graves.
