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

returned.
    As guilt ate away at me, I replaced them with a single document:
    I have to leave. All this—I can’t deal with it right now. And I need you to put a hold on the investigation. I can’t tell you the reasons why, but I’m safe and I’ll be back to explain. I just need some time. Please. Look after each other, okay?
    It was a shitty thing to do, but at that time, I couldn’t see a better option. That’s what happens when your brain’s fucked. My friends would be upset, even more so when they couldn’t find me, but I preferred them upset to dead. I was making the best decision for them. At least that was how I saw it.
    With my heart a cold lump of lead, I turned off my red phone, started the engine and set the navigation system for the airport.
    It’s always darkest before it goes pitch black.

Chapter 5
    THE FLIGHT TO England was one of the more unpleasant ones I’ve been on. Okay, I’ll admit I’ve been spoiled over the past few years, first with business class and then my own jet, but only so I could deal with my never-ending stream of calls and emails. On the other hand, I’ve also taken military transport in some of the shittiest countries in the world, and some of those planes didn’t even have seats, let alone trolley service.
    So when I say it was bad that meant the flight sucked.
    When I booked my ticket, the only seat left was in the middle of a row of three, near the back. I spent the eight hour flight wedged between a snoring salesman with a body odour problem and a stomach the size of the national debt, and a teenager who only stopped playing computer games long enough to throw up into a paper bag.
    “Don’t worry,” he told me, after he’d puked for the third time. “It happens every time I fly.”
    Well if it always happens, I’ve got a suggestion—don’t eat a super-sized McDonald’s in the departure lounge just before you get on the bloody plane. I saw him doing exactly that.
    Between that pair, the toddler behind me who reckoned he was the new David Beckham and the bachelor party in front that managed to drink the plane dry of vodka before we got halfway over the Atlantic, I’d had enough. I was seriously regretting not having stuffed my gun into a diplomatic pouch and brought it along.
    By the time we landed, the entire cast of Riverdance was having a rehearsal in my head. As I only had hand luggage, I avoided the crush at the baggage carousel and half crawled, half sleepwalked over to the railway station to catch the Heathrow Express into West London. Morning or not, all I wanted to do was sleep, so I checked into some dive of a hotel on a back street in Bayswater.
    I slept for most of the day, but not well. Six times, the headboard in the next room banging against the adjoining wall woke me, accompanied by the wild cries of a woman faking an orgasm. Yes, all through the morning and early afternoon. It takes a special kind of desperate to pop out for a quick fuck along with your coffee and McMuffin, but I guess there’s a market for everything.
    Finding a hotel that didn’t rent its rooms out by the hour jumped to the top of my to-do list.
    By evening, I’d found a room smaller than my closet at home, having forked out an obscene amount of money for the privilege. At least I’d had lunch and stocked up on painkillers for my headache, as well as shopping for a few essentials.
    I spent the evening dying my hair, and also my eyebrows, careful not to use so much dye I ended up looking like Bert from Sesame Street. Once I was nice and mousey, I chopped the front bit into a fringe and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked bloody awful. Perfect.
    Before I drifted off to sleep, I thought about my options. Staying in London long term wasn’t one of them—I knew too many people, plus there was CCTV everywhere. It would only be a matter of time before I ran into someone who recognised me.
    I’d spent my life cultivating a long list of contacts. There was a standing joke among