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  Impossible to concentrate. She could barely breathe, but regardless, she had to stay sharp on figuring out who her captor was.

  Once he finished wiping down her torso, he spread her legs wide.

  Her ears pounded. Powerless, she hollered. No noise came from her silenced lips, so she prayed. Draw near unto me and I will draw near unto you…

  Sirens outside sounded close by. They came closer. The NYPD was on its way!

  For a few seconds, he sat there doing nothing but breathing—slowly, loudly.

  The sirens blasted right outside the building.

  Drawing her knees back together, she felt his hungry eyes staring—wanting her.

  Whatever the emergency noises were from, they faded out. They zipped right by them.

  Again, he parted her legs. The wet sponge ran up the inside of the right one.

  Seek me diligently and ye shall find me….

  His hand inched closer to her.

  Her pulse skittered.

  Footsteps quickened.

  “No!” the second voice, the one who’d brought her the water, shouted.

  “Yes, dude.” Her panties were soaked. He must’ve squeezed the sponge over her.

  Whack!

  Was the guy hit? Brushing against her, he sprung to his feet. The chair seemed to have toppled over.

  Vibrations from the floor intensified thunderously. They struggled. Pushing one another, they must be. Noises to the effect of feet scurrying, grunts, cursing at one another, and then a loud thud. Had one of them punched the other?

  “Arsehole!”

  Where do I know that voice from?

  One of them marched over to her. It was the second one. He smelled different than the first, more musky and expensive. He covered her breasts with what could be a blanket. It itched. Then he untied the knot at the back of her head.

  The gag fell around her neck. Shaking her head, she tasted blood and realized she must’ve been tied up for several hours. “Why…are you doing this?” Not letting the tears choke her, she spat. “Somebody help!” Emotions spun out of control. Unable to stop screaming until his hands nearly slapped her mouth into silence.

  “Kiki!”

  Her name? He knew it.

  Disturbed, she bit him hard in hopes he’d get his hands away from her face before hysterically pleading, “Take the tape off my eyes. Let me see you.”

  “Quiet!” Dragging his hand over her lips, he brought his fingers up to her eye. His thumb ran over the arch of her brow. Then he pulled the tape down slowly, delicately—almost as if he cared for her and didn’t want to pull a lash.

  With his shirtsleeve, he wiped her lids, more elegantly than when he’d removed the tape.

  Opening her eyes, she blinked several times, ‘til the face of the first man came into focus.

  All of the air in the room felt sucked out. Gravity faded, and she felt dizzy. This wasn’t the normal she knew.

  “You!” Raw grief overwhelmed her, but she had to know. “How can you do this…to us? You’re ruining everything we wanted. It’ll all be gone.” Wishing they’d killed her, she didn’t want to live anymore. Either way, her life was over.

  From a shadowed corner, the second man stepped forward.

  “Ohhh, my fucking God!” A sensation of intense despair shattered her fragile heart into a million itsy pieces when she caught sight of his face. This, right here, isn’t real. “No fucking way!” If her legs were loose, she’d kick him. Instead, she spit in his direction, “Fuck you, you cocky bastard.” And if her hands were free, she’d certainly slap the other one. “And fuuuck you, too. You perverted fucktard. Fuck you both.” For the first time in Kiki’s twenty-three years, she took the Lord’s name in vain and said the F-word six times, all in one stride.

  Feeling worse than when she’d been shot, worse than when Dejon had called off the wedding, her mind collapsed in anxious misery.

  She passed out.

  Manhattan Hospital, Lenox Hill

  Taddy

  “Excuse me!” Taddy Brill clenched her jaw. Her anger could no longer be controlled. “What the flip do you mean I can’t see him?”

  She’d nearly paced the heels off her Manolo Blahniks. Her limo had followed the ambulance carrying her lover, Warner Truman. Paramedics wouldn’t let her ride with him. No one was telling her anything. The NYPD had come and gone, taking her statement with them. Kiki was still missing. Over two hours of tick-tock around the clock, and she’d gotten zilch with the staff at the front desk.

  “Are you Mr. Truman’s wife?” The nurse scanned Taddy’s left hand, possibly searching for a wedding ring before asking, “Or a sister?”

  Resisting the urge to punch her, she held a breath and then replied, “My name is Taddy Brill. Warner isn’t married. I’m his girlfriend. I’ve gone through this with your staff about ninety-nine times already. I want your supervisor.”

  Warner had proposed marriage, but Taddy never saw the need for it, ‘til now. She didn’t believe in the institutional idea. Not after growing up with parents who’d humiliated each other, flashing their affairs all over town as the season’s new thing.

  “Only immediate family is allowed back.”

  “Well, I’ve been sucking his cock every day for the last three years! How more immediate do you people need me to get?”

  Onlookers gawked at her. She was going out of her mind.

  “Miss Brill.” Another nurse, not as spent as the others she’d been arguing with, came from around the computer. She motioned Taddy over to a quieter area in the waiting room, next to the vending machines. “Your boyfriend is still in surgery. The doctors are doing everything they can to save him. He’s lost a lot of blood.”

  “What if they can’t—” Tears poured as she broke down. Warner was in bad shape. He’d died in her arms. In the parking lot, the paramedics had shocked his chest with a defibrillator, trying to jumpstart his heart. “Please, I’ll give anything. I’ll make a donation to the hospital. How much?” She went for her checkbook.

  The nurse waved a hand for Taddy to stop.

  Her throat burned with a suffocating feeling of defeat. “You must let me in that room to be with him.”

  “That’s the hospital’s policy. I must follow it. Tell you what…. I just started my night shift. I’ll keep an eye on Mr. Truman. The second the doctors come out of surgery, I’ll ask if one can talk to you.”

  “Thank you.” Unfamiliar with being told no, she hesitated before taking a seat.

  “Miss Brill, you may be here a while. If you can, call a friend to come sit with you.” The nurse walked back to her station.

  Who could she reach out to?

  Lex Easton, her lifelong friend, was back on bed-rest. Her second pregnancy had been high-risk from the start. The stress from her recent wedding had been hard on her, and everyone involved.

  Viveca Farnworth, her best galpal, was in rehab, three hours away at Hampton Horizons on some tomato farm.

  Blake Morgan, her gay bestie and agency’s co-founder, had gone to Connecticut with his partner, Miguel Santana. They were introducing his parents to their newly adopted son.

  A flash of despair stabbed at her. There was no one to call.

  Rubbing her palms over her face, she rested her head against the wall behind her. In lonely silence, she glanced up at the TV.

  The headline of the night’s events flashed across the screen. Images of her on Warner’s arm from earlier that night having fun followed by the horrific aftermath pictures. Kiki’s headshot with the word ‘Taken’ under it closed the montage. Then the loop of photos repeated.

  Jumping up, she smacked the Off button on the monitor. Her reflection in the mirrored vending machine caught her by surprise.

  “Jesus!” Her white fox fur bolero jacket was splattered in Warner’s blood. “Christ.” She slinked the jacket off, letting it fall to her feet as she sobbed.

  A man stood, facing her when she sat.

  Not catching his profile, she snapped, “D
on’t turn on that damn TV.” She reached in her Birkin for tissues.

  Hesitating, he stepped closer, almost as if unsure to approach.

  First, she spotted the wingtip shoes. They reminded her of someone she’d known years before, as a little girl. He’d worn similar footwear. Taddy used to polish them, while he’d rehearse his lectures on the most fascinating subjects.

  She dug faster though her purse, dumping her cosmetics on the side chair. Where in the hell are my Kleenexes?

  “Tabitha Adelaide?” Then she heard him.

  No one addressed Taddy by her given name, not anymore. She’d legally changed it almost a decade and a half back. That was the year she’d graduated from Avon Porter and posed for Playboy, to pay for college. No other options had presented themselves.

  Her eyes met his. Was she seeing things? Had the night’s stress caused her to hallucinate, imagining a man she’d emancipated from as a kid? A father who’d denounced her from the royal Brillford family when she’d turned thirteen, leaving her penniless, all because biologically, she wasn’t his daughter.

  Shaking her head, she shut her eyes. Three, counting back, two, she opened them, one.

  There, Josef Graf Brillford stood. Same handsome face she’d loved as a child. Hair thinner and greyer than she’d ever thought possible.

  “Dad?” she questioned uneasily.

  He nodded.

  Sweet Baby Jesus in crazy Heaven, you are royally tripping me way outta my Candy Land today.

  The Twin Screw

  Sierra Leone, West Coast of Africa

  Dash

  Three Months Ago

  Nicknamed “Dash” when he was a toddler, due to his ability to bolt from a room without a spanking, Siak Turay stood in the Tokeh Beach mansion he and his twin were born in twenty-two years before. With palm-fringed coastlines, and out-of-this-world Atlantic Ocean views, he could see why his father, Sir Banja, had never left. Inhaling the smell of drying crayfish, Dash knew this palace by the sea wasn’t what had kept him there, though.

  Diamonds! Fancy, intense, pink-colored, princess or pear cut, flawless, and in every size imaginable had been his father’s reason for staying in Africa. But in recent weeks, Banja had taken ill and called Dash and his brother home one last time.

  “This place hasn’t changed one bit,” he noted to his brother Dejon, who studied a gaudily framed oil painting on the wall. The portrait was of their late older sister, Kamara.

  Against their mother’s wishes, Kamara had stayed behind with Banja. She’d worked for gender equality and to put an end to the sale of conflict gems until killed by police at the Koido Mine while organizing a pay strike.

  “Apparently not. It’s bloody wicked.” Dejon’s British education caused him to speak with a slight Daniel Craig accent, pronouncing his words crisper than his native Sierra Leone. Dash had figured his voice must’ve sounded the same. Everything on them was a mirror image of one another. Well…except for one thing. “How old were we when we left here?”

  “You don’t remember when Mum took us?” Appalled, he gave his brother a sidelong glance. Dejon’s skin coloring was the same as his, latte. At least, that’s how one girl they’d shared had described them.

  “Such tall hot lattes you blokes are,” she’d purred provocatively in his ear right before he’d fucked her from the front while Dejon simultaneously had taken her from behind. They’d coined that position ‘The Twin Screw.’

  He and Dejon’s latte look didn’t exactly fit in with the black natives of West Africa. Easy to spot in a group photo back in Notting Hill, they weren’t as fair-skinned as their British buds, either. Some blokes referred to them as biracial or mixed. Dash preferred the term ‘sexy beast!’

  “Let me think how old we were….” Dejon’s almond-shaped eyes blinked. They were framed by lashes so thick their mother, Jilly Bissé, had joked she’d cut them off while they’d slept.

  Jilly, who’d once starred on the TV show British Blondes before marrying Banja, had claimed her own lashes didn’t accentuate her Nordic features well enough for the camera to see their true magnificence.

  “It was right before the civil war ended.” His mother’s stories about where they’d come from slipped through his thoughts.

  His grandfather had become prominent by starting an artesian diamond mining family. In the 1960s, he’d merged the business with Global Diamond Corporation (GDC). Banja, his son and the twins’ father, had finished his Oxford studies, married Jilly, and moved to West Africa to be closer to his family while they started their own. After the birth of Kamara, he became chief executive officer at GDC. That was until recently, when he’d taken to his bed.

  “Nine?” Dejon guessed.

  “We’d just turned seven.”

  “Right. We were nine when the…experiments had started.” Dejon frowned.

  Unable to appoint a tutor to school the boys due to months of riots and half the city being vandalized, Dash never forgot how their mother had fled, taking them in the middle of the night to a rice farm in Freetown where they’d boarded her friend’s private jet to London.

  “I still remember the pattern on the jim-jams we’d worn to bed.” Dash smiled at his brother. He didn’t want to talk about what he could see preoccupying Dejon’s mind.

  “Mum didn’t let us get changed. She was a drama queen, even back then.” Dejon’s square jaw flexed. “It was a Harlem Globetrotters cartoon. I recall some things, you arsehole.”

  The double doors opened. A short black woman, wearing a bright orange lapa skirt tied at her waist, said in Krio, “Sir Banja will see you now.”

  Trying not to make his shock obvious, Dash took in his father’s appearance. He didn’t resemble the strong movie star, ‘Samuel L. Jackson leading man’ type he’d seen in photo albums while growing up. Propped up by bleached-white pillows, Banja looked…dead. “It’s us, Dad. We came.”

  “My boys….” Banja’s heavy eyelids opened and he started to choke on his tears. His attempt to reach for Dash then Dejon failed as his arms dropped by his lap. “I didn’t think you’d make it…in time.”

  He leaned on the left side of the full-size bed, Dejon sat at the right. Frail and cold, they each held Banja’s hands.

  This was it. Banja was dying.

  “Your twins are here to be with you.” Dash started with small talk about their flight from London Heathrow, then about their lives in Europe. Dejon, the romantic, dated some girl long-distance. His brother called her Kiki and mentioned she lived in Manhattan. Dash, the independent, kept many women, but nothing serious. He hadn’t found the right one yet.

  “I live in Notting Hill and run Mum’s jewelry store.” Located in Portobella Road Market, Jilly’s Jewels specialized in antique and estate pieces. Never returning to acting, their mother had retired as a British TV icon, sticking with what the Turays did best—gems, but notably only conflict-free ones, of course.

  “Silly Jilly,” Banja huffed. Then he drifted off, almost as if unconscious. Maybe it was the mention of his estranged wife that caused his body to nearly quit. Jilly had that effect on people.

  “Daddy, I left the university early. I spin music and travel.” Vying for his attention, Dejon pulled out a disc from his pocket. “I brought you trance tunes to listen to. It’s from my recent Berlin show—”

  Banja didn’t hear him.

  In an agonized expression, Dejon’s brows drew together. The sensitive one of the two, he couldn’t get Banja to listen. Overwhelmed, he stared at Dash, pleading to wake him up. He leaned toward the end of the bed, asking, “Is he…?”

  “Give Dad a minute.” Dash soothed his brother’s fear, realizing Banja would come to. He hoped, anyway, at least for Dejon’s sake.

  A mess, Dejon hadn’t talked much on the flight over, but Dash felt his brother’s sadness. In times like these, it was hard not to drown in Dejon’s emotions. They were too real for Dash, almost his own.

  The bond he shared with his twin in many ways felt extrasensory. Hou
rs could pass without talking but always saying so much. Convinced they were telepathy-prone, Jilly had enrolled them at The Telepathic Institute at the start of puberty. Intended to be low frequency and safe, The Hanzfeld Experiments on thought transference, while they’d slept, were actually cruel and abusive. German scientists under pressure to prove their findings, for more funding, had positioned the Turay Twins as their prime cash cow. They’d gone to any lengths necessary to succeed.

  The nocturnal extrasensory perception studies had only a negative impact on them. They’d given Dash a heightened threshold for pain, and intensified Dejon’s empathy for others. This often led Dejon to have anxiety when in a dark room or while in bed.

  Nothing conclusive came from the tests, other than Jilly’s remorse. She had no idea what they’d gone through. Years later, at the age of thirteen, Jilly had put Dejon and him in separate bedrooms. They’d needed more space. It was only then that his brother admitted he couldn’t sleep without Dash at his side.

  “You okay?” Dejon searched his face for an answer. Saying goodbye was happening a lot faster than he’d anticipated.

  “I’m fine.” After all these years, seeing Banja right then, Dash didn’t know what he’d feel, if anything at all. Unable to be as empathetic as Dejon was toward their father, he did feel regret—not for Banja, but his sister. She’d be alive if they’d come to London. But the past was behind him, as it should stay.

  Suddenly awake, Banja grunted, seeming uncomfortable in his own body. “Time. I don’t have. I must tell….”

  “Dad, you’re trying to say something. We’ll stay for as long as you need us.” Dash pushed the anger he had toward his father to the back of his mind, giving Dejon an encouraging smile.

  Before he went back to England, Dash had promised his mother he’d find a way to forgive Banja for putting the diamonds ahead of his family. He had to.

  “Boys. One thing you must do…before I go.”

  “Anything,” Dash replied as Dejon dried his eyes, telling Banja not to talk as if he lay dying.

  “Cath’s Certification Process…is a scam.”

  “What?” He couldn’t believe his ears. His father had dedicated his career to getting the United Diamond Congress (UDC) off the ground. This certification program insured that all stones coming from their homeland were mined fairly.