Deliverance by Dakota Banks

thirty-four.
    Staying with him under these conditions, she was afraid his interest would be renewed. He was no longer a naïve boy, but a handsome, worldly, and well-built man.
    Charming and sexy. Looking more irresistible by the hour. Damn, I haven’t been laid in a long time. But he’s the baby of the team. Hands off. I’ve got enough trouble in my love life. One man in hell and another one who maybe belongs there. What am I going to say to Jake when we finally get together?
    So they staged a pretend breakup. Amaro moved out and took his own accommodations. She told him to stay two or three weeks and enjoy himself. She’d seen the way the women eyed him and figured he’d have his hands full as soon as the word of the breakup got around. She really did owe him something for breaking up his cruise with Trixy.
    Maliha called Hound. He said Yanmeng had checked in from Sri Lanka, where he was staying with Buddhist monks. His wife, Eliu, was in Hawaii working on a freelance story. Maliha told him about Amaro’s situation.
    “One thing that’s still up in the air is Arnie Henshaw,” Hound said. “No living relatives, no girlfriends that I’ve been able to find. He’s dropped off the grid; so far he didn’t even leave a shadow behind. Sure you don’t want me to go to Antigua?”
    “Keep looking locally. I have a very bad feeling about this. I don’t think Arnie’s sipping drinks on the beach.”
    “Okay, but it’s going to have to be a backburner job. I have a high-priority case.”
    Hound’s work as a private investigator included secret work that he did for the government. She’d found out about that not long ago. Hound liked to joke that he got the job through Affirmative Action. For all she knew, it was true. After all, he was an African-American veteran.
    “I hope they’re paying you well,” she said.
    “More than I earn from you.” He hung up before she could respond. She didn’t pay the members of her team. They survived on perks like the credit cards, some cash bonuses, access to her condo, and her support anywhere they needed to travel. Amaro and Hound had their own outside incomes. Yanmeng didn’t, but his wife still worked.
    By choice or necessity? I’d better make sure it’s by choice. Why aren’t I paying these people for their time? Just because they’re my friends doesn’t mean they should lose money by helping me out.
    Maliha made a dignified exit from the scene, before Amaro could start playing around with the other female guests. She retrieved her jewelry from the vault, and had to suffer through Mr. Eliades’s exuberant sympathy for her romantic spat.
    He’s mourning the fact that I cut my visit—and my spending—short.
    S he joined a charter tour to Beijing and paid the guide to let her go off on her own and explain to the others that she’d taken ill and was in a medical facility. She took buses on roads that grew less maintained, and finally walked the last fifty miles to her destination, the XiChan Monastery. She hadn’t been to the area since she was twenty-six years old, yet the surroundings looked familiar. Maliha wasn’t interested in the landmark monastery.
    After pausing to set aside her warm clothing, she started up a nearby mountainside wearing thin white pants and a matching shirt, barefoot. She followed a trail that few could perceive. It was snowing by the time she neared the top.
    Maliha saw a figure standing up ahead, obscured by the snowfall. The mark on her left arm, the Chinese character shou, meaning long life, began to heat up and glow, just as it had on the day it was branded into her skin. It was the mark of her martial arts school, and it had never healed like other wounds to her Ageless body. She stopped a few feet from Master Liu. She could see him clearly now, a young bare-chested man wearing white pants as she did, in prime condition. He had a bucket in one hand. He’d been picking berries from bushes where only a few remained this late into