Read Diamond for Free Online

piped up, as well. She weighed the pros and cons. Will you make it out of here alive if you cut off her fingers? That outlook was dim. Lindy made sure Nadya’s face became intimate with the wall but she didn’t struggle or fight. A woman strapped with bombs, or a bomb, had walked in and purposely tried to kill Diamond, killing herself in the process. His apprehension was warranted. Once Lindy felt she was free of harmful objects, she twisted Nadya to face front and removed her top garment, releasing her hair. The mass fell down her back in a thicket of braids. Lindy coughed. Nadya knew she smelled, but she couldn’t do anything about that. Most people nowadays smelled like something, unless they were drowning in excess Dark Water or Wave. Even then, the smell wasn’t guaranteed to leave. Nadya bent to the task of unlacing her boots until she was able to toe them off. She used her cloak to cover her feet.
    “Damn, girl. You don’t own a pair of socks?”
    No, she didn’t. Nadya glared at Lindy.
    “If I owned a pair, I’d wear them.” Lindy was getting on her nerves.
    Diamond sat in an overstuffed chair, his face hidden in shadow, his arms crossed.
    “Lindy, you can come back in ten minutes. When you do return, it’d better be to tell me the others are on their way, and the shit downstairs has been neutralized.”
    Lindy didn’t say another word; she sauntered out of his room, looked over her shoulder, and winked right before she left Nadya alone with Diamond.
    “Do you mind if I sit?”
    “Yeah, I do. You can stand. Don’t want you destroying my furniture with your filth. Tell me why you’re here?”
    “I want to work at the Quarry.”
    “Work at the Quarry doing what exactly?”
    Fucking men. So literal. Was it necessary? People only came to Diamond for two things—sex and to offer their bodies for organ trade when their organs were no longer needed—in exchange for things for their loved ones. He was enjoying his attempt at making her uncomfortable. She’d bite.
    “I wanted to work here, in the Quarry.”
    He sat forward, his face creeping out of the shadows like a nightmare. Until he smiled. When he smiled, Nadya almost stopped breathing. No one should look so lethal and refined at the same time. He had sophistication and deadly down to a science.
    “So you said.” There was sarcasm in his voice.
    Nadya made sure to maintain eye contact as she nodded. Males had it stuck in their heads that females were only good for a handful of things. She may be ignorant when it came to intimate relationships, but if you put a knife in her hand, hell, a piece of wood, she could disembowel a man in thirty seconds or less and not even bat an eye.
    “All right, tell me why you want to work at the Quarry.” He held up his hands to stop her from speaking. “No, wait, let me guess, you want a patron? Someone to take care of you because you’re lazy and don’t want to work. Or maybe your man died and left you with a brood of brats?”
    Typical.
    He thought she was incapable of caring for herself. She wasn’t without means. What she had to offer would take care of her friends. If not for them, this conversation most definitely would have gone differently.
    “No, nothing like that. I’d like a patron eventually, but I mostly want to work here because my mother is ill and I don’t want my sister going to work at the salt factory.” Technically, they weren’t family, at least not blood, but he didn’t know that.
    “Why don’t you work at the salt factory? Then your problem’s solved.”
    Was he serious? Smug bastard. Like he had all the fucking answers to life’s problems.
    “No, they’d be compounded. I’d get sick like my mother. It may not happen now, or even five or ten years from now, but if I lived long enough it’d happen. If I got ill, my sister would end up there. A never-ending cycle of sickness and death.” Though she never got sick, he didn’t need to know that. She’d tried the salt mines,