Pitch Black: A Romantic Thriller (Blackwood Security Book 1) Read Online Free PDF

front of looked fittingly desolate for the situation, the front door hanging off its hinges and the porch sagging under years of neglect.
    My legs shook as I climbed out of the car and started pacing, desperately trying to gather my thoughts together. They rebelled against order, a jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces fitted.
    I’d very much suspected my husband’s death was arranged by someone who bore a grudge against him, or maybe me, and now that had been confirmed. The men who pulled the trigger were dead, but they were only hired help. The fucker who ordered the hit was still out there, toasting his success and racking up his phone bill.
    I should have been furious, I knew that, but the anger wouldn’t come. The place where it should be was numb, like the rest of me. I wished it was different. I’d rather have felt anything but nothing.
    Now I had a decision to make. Did I carry on with a search that had proved fruitless so far, or back off? My friends’ lives were at stake, and I couldn’t face another funeral. Not when it might be Nick or Dan, or someone else I was close to.
    Dammit, why couldn’t I concentrate? Every thought I tried to think got sucked into a black hole of oblivion before it was fully formed.
    If I told the team, I knew they’d want to carry on regardless. I could hear Nick’s voice now.
    “We’re trained professionals. We’ll be okay.”
    That’s what he’d say. And Dan, all of them. But what if they weren’t?
    We may have hit a nerve with our questions so far, but whose was far from clear. We’d put out so many feelers, who knew which one caused the killer to react? Narrowing it down would take time, more questions, and possibly more deaths. The bastard had already proven he didn’t mess around.
    Short of locking everyone I cared about into a nuclear bunker for the foreseeable future while I tripped around chasing leads on my own, I had no way of keeping them safe. I didn’t even have a nuclear bunker so that option was out anyway.
    In the end, I gave up and let my heart make the decision. I couldn’t risk anybody else getting hurt. I’d already lost my soul mate, and the thought of the others getting picked off one by one was something I couldn’t entertain.
    I had to shut this down, but how?
    My head pounded and I rubbed at my temples, trying to relieve the pressure. The events of the last fortnight were sucking me down like quicksand. I hadn’t felt so out of control of my own mind and body since I was a teenager. Back then, my husband taught me to take the anger and fear and channel it into whatever was necessary to fix the problem, but this time I couldn’t see a solution. I made myself take deep breaths, counting to five on each inhale and exhale, but the weight on my chest only got heavier.
    My husband’s voice echoed in my head, deep and gravelly, always so calm. He’d know what to do. He always did.
    “It’s like a fire, Diamond. First you get it under control, then you put it out.” That was something he’d told me more than once.
    I couldn’t extinguish it, not yet. To do that, I’d have to take out the source, and I didn’t have it in me to do it. But I could stop fanning the flames.
    How? By stopping the investigation, at least until I got my head straight and came up with a game plan that gave us a reasonable shot at winning.
    I thought of what waited for me at home—the cops, the pity, and worst of all, the constant reminders of my husband. He was everywhere in that place. I wasn’t going to get the space I needed to think things through there.
    Soaked through from the rain, which was no longer a drizzle but a steady downpour, I got back into the car. Out of habit I had my iPad in my handbag, and it only took a few minutes to log onto the server at work and use my administrator privileges to clear out the files relating to the investigation. That would put the brakes on things. They could stay in my personal cloud storage until my sanity