I felt bad for poor Tiny, accompanying us everywhere we went. He simply wasn’t used to the heat and humidity, and it was obvious that it was taking its toll on him. We tried to find him some lighter weight clothes, but oddly enough finding clothes for a six foot six, three hundred pound guy in Singapore just isn’t as easy as you might think. We did eventually manage to get him a sun hat that fit, along with a few linen shirts and some shorts, so he was fine for the time being. I resolved to make a point of doing some shopping for him in Australia, where we’d be a bit more likely to find a big and tall men’s clothing store.

Grant had no problem, wearing the most horrible Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts combo imaginable. Of course it was part of his ‘don’t look at me, I’m just some sort of idiot random part of the entourage’ persona, and that was fine. It certainly seemed to work- everyone recognized Tiny as a bodyguard and gave him a wide berth, but nobody paid any attention at all to Grant.

I guess I’d had some sort of impression that the diamond market would be a specific place, like a certain street lined with jewelry stores or maybe a building where all the dealers did their business, but that wasn’t the case at all. Emmy explained that the ‘market’ is an association, a trade group of local dealers, and they’re scattered all over. She led us all into an office tower on Hill Street, where the specific dealer she wanted to talk to had his showroom on the eighth floor.

It wasn’t the sort of place you’d just stroll in, looking for a pair of earrings or something like that. No, this was the kind of place that guards buzzed you in, and well-dressed sales associates brought out velvet-lined trays for the buyer to see the gems. They had no finished jewelry anywhere, as far as I could tell. It was gemstones, and that was it.

Emmy had clearly been in contact with the owner or manager or whatever his position actually was, because as soon as he’d seated Angela, Emmy and me at a table, his assistant came out with a tray with maybe a dozen diamonds on it, all in some shade of pink.

“Oh! They’re gorgeous!” Angela said, looking at the stones glittering in the directed lighting from the table lamp.

“I think this is the one we discussed, yes?” Emmy asked, pointing to one of the larger stones, one that was in the lighter but still distinctly pink color range.

“Yes,” the guy said, laying out a piece of velvet on the table in front of Emmy, then picking the stone up in his white-gloved hand and setting it on the exact center of the cloth for Emmy to examine.

Emmy, not seeming to care about the rituals of diamond handling, simply picked it up and and looked closely at it, then held it out in her palm for Angela to look.

“What do you think? Is this the prettiest of all of them?” she asked.

Unsure if it was O.K. or not, Angela cautiously picked up the gemstone and peered closely at it, looking through it at the light.

“I’ve never seen a diamond like this in my life,” Angela breathed, admiring the way the light sparkled through the pale pink pear-cut stone.

I glanced at the jeweler, but although he was watching carefully, he didn’t seem at all bothered by Emmy and Angela handling the diamond the way they were.

“Angie, do you think any of the others are better? Maybe a bit more pink would be more…?” Emmy prodded.

Angela took a moment to glance over the other stones still in the tray, but said, “No. This is the best of all of them. I think you should get this one.”

Emmy nodded to the man, who signaled to his assistant. The assistant took the tray away as the jeweler politely held his hand out for the stone that Angela was admiring.

She handed it back to him a bit reluctantly, before she turned to Emmy. “What are you going to do with it?” she asked.

“I am going to have it set in a pendant,” Emmy said.

“It’ll look really good on you,” Angela said, watching the jeweler use a cloth to wipe any fingerprints off, then wrap it in the black velvet cloth and place it in a small box.

“It might,” Emmy agreed. “But it will look even better on you, Angela.”

“What?” she asked, her eyes wide.

“It is for you,” Emmy confirmed. “I saw photos online and I knew that it would look better on you than anyone else, and so you must have it.”

“But Em! This is too expensive-” Angela protested.

“No, it is not,” Emmy said, putting her hand on Angela’s. “You are our queen and you deserve your crown jewels.”

Angela, overcome with emotion, couldn’t stop the tears of happiness flowing from her pretty blue eyes even if she tried. She wrapped Emmy in her arms and held her tight for a long moment, while the jeweler looked on, completely passive.

I asked him in a quiet voice, “Have the payment arrangements been made?”

“Yes, Mrs Farmer. It has all been taken care of. I will provide you with a receipt, of course, and the diamond’s certificate. If you wish to have it done here in Singapore, I would be happy to provide you with the names of several fine goldsmiths capable of setting such a fine stone.”

“Do you think any could have it done by Saturday?” I asked.

Giving me a slight, knowing smile, he said, “With enough incentive, they certainly could.”

The jeweler wrote a few names and phone numbers on a piece of paper for me, then handed the box to Angela and the paperwork to me.

I made a mental note to contact our insurer ASAP as we exited the building back into the heat and humidity of the street.

“Would you like us to have it set while we are here?” Emmy asked once we were safely in the air conditioned interior of our limo.

“I don’t know,” Angela admitted. “I want to wear it, but I don’t want to lose it for a few days, either.”

“You’ll have it for the rest of your life, baby,” I said. “There’s no rush either way.”

“Could… Could we maybe have it made into jewelry at Tiffany’s in New York?” Angela asked.

“Certainly,” Emmy said. “Whatever it is you want.”

Back at the hotel, Angela asked me how much the diamond had cost while Emmy was distracted with ordering room service on the telephone.

“Ange, It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Was it a hundred thousand dollars?” she persisted. “More? Less?”

“A lot more,” I said. “But like I said, babe, Emmy wanted to get it for you. The amount of money is sorta beside the point.”

“A lot more?”

“Yes, a lot more,” I agreed. “But it’d be worth any price to see you wearing it.”

Angela carefully opened the box and pulled out the black velvet cloth, spreading it in her hand to reveal to pretty pink diamond nestled within.

“It’s so beautiful,” she breathed.

“It is perfect for you,” Emmy said, drawing near to look at the gemstone in Angela’s hand. Emmy reached over and plucked the almond-sized stone from the velvet and held it up to Angela’s upper chest, about where it would lay when set in a pendant. “I very much like the idea of having Tiffany make the necklace.”

Angela took Emmy’s hand in her own and kissed it, then drew Emmy in closer and kissed her long and passionately.

“I love you so much,” she murmured. “You make me feel so… so valued, so treasured. You and Lee.”

I wrapped both of them in my arms and kissed them each in turn. “You are our treasure, Ange. You bring so much love to our little family of three, I can’t even begin to say it.”

“Do you know what I want now? Right now?” Angela asked, showering Emmy and me with kisses. “I want to take a nice, long shower and clean all the sweat and the bug spray and sunscreen off you two, then I want to kiss every single inch of your bodies, over and over. And I want you to do the same to me.”

Angela slapped my hands away when I tried to remove my clothes in the suite’s large bathroom. “I want to do that,” she said. Happy to let her have her way, I agreed.

“But I get to strip you naked, too,” I said. “Fair is fair.”

“Lee,” Angela said as she set the dagger on the countertop. “I worry about you, you know. All this training, for what? To fight? To kill? It makes me afraid that I might lose you.”

“I do my best to be careful,” I said, taking her worried face in my hands and kissing her frown lines. “That’s why I train so hard- so that I’m the one who… Well, I’m the one who wins,” I said. “I don’t like that this is part of our lives, and I wish it wasn’t, but it is, so I do everything I can to make sure that I’m the one with the winning hand.”

“I know. Emmy has told me everything, and I understand, I do, I just wish…”

“I get it,” I said, kissing her again. “I do. Believe me, I absolutely don’t want to wind up dead in some dark warehouse somewhere, either. I plan on growing old with you, and our baby girls.”

“But not Emmy,” Angela said, her expressive face showing her feelings.

“No, not unless we can get her medical treatment, and so far I’ve seen no sign of her being willing to do that,” I agreed.

“I hate that,” Angela said.

“I do, too.”

We stood there for a long moment, holding each other in silence, sharing our feelings without the need of any words.

Emmy joined us just as Angela finished removing all my clothes and I was about to start on her cute little sun dress.

“We should not shower too long,” Emmy said. “Our dinner will get cold.”

“It’d be the only thing around here that is,” I said.

“It is very warm here in Singapore,” Emmy agreed as she unzipped the back of Angela’s dress.

“I like it,” Angela said. “It reminds me of home, in Cartagena. Very tropical.”

I loved the way she said ‘tro pee cal’. Most of the time I didn’t even notice either of their accents anymore, but every once in a while I was reminded of how sexy Emmy and Angela both sounded when they spoke.

“I’m getting fat,” Angela complained when I soaped up her tummy, which was still flatter than most women could ever hope for.

“You will be beautiful even when your belly is big and round,” Emmy said, kneeling down and kissing Angela’s tummy. “Perhaps especially then.”

Angela ran her fingers through Emmy’s fine, silky white hair as Emmy continued to lavish her attention on Angela’s middle.

“You’re going to have our baby soon,” I said, leaning down and kissing the side of Angela’s neck. “Our baby girl, Ange. Our first child.”

Emmy stood up and wrapped her arms around Angela and me, pulling herself in close. She kissed Angela lovingly and said, “You are giving us the greatest gift any woman can ever give. You have given us your love, and soon, you will be giving us the gift of motherhood. Our baby, Angie. A living expression of our love.”

“You will, too,” Angela said, stroking Emmy’s charcoal-colored face. “You’re going to give me and Lee that same gift.”

“Yes, I will. We will be mothers together. But tonight, we are not mothers, but lovers.”

I really didn’t want to get out of bed so ridiculously early the next morning, but I did, leaving Angela and Emmy sleeping peacefully in each others’ arms. ‘I must be the world’s biggest idiot’ I thought as I took the elevator to the lobby. Leaving two of the most beautiful women in the world to go to a smelly gym in some back alley, run by an undercover military intelligence officer who was willing to take me on because Grant had dangled the idea of useful intel about Night Children in front of his nose?

Really, who even does that?

Expecting to meet the same three guys again, I was surprised to get to the gym door without incident. I’d gone through a number of escalation scenarios in my head and worked out plans on how to deal with whatever happened, again on the assumption that they were all a set up. Honestly, that assumption complicated things quite a bit. After all, I wouldn’t want to seriously injure or kill some poor slob who was just sent to try to scare me, right?

If, say, Sketchy Guy Number One pulls a knife and threatens me with it, the obvious answer would be to pull Stabby Jr and say, “That’s not a knife. This is a knife,” right? Well, if Sketchy gets aggressive and comes at me, I wouldn’t want to just gut him if he really was working for Mr Han to test me. If he was actually some shithead alley punk defending his little chunk of turf, I’d probably still be better off not killing him if it wasn’t completely necessary. A disabling leg stab or something like that would be the best move, most likely to end the conflict rapidly with the least potential blowback.

If there were more guys but no weapons, well, I’d have to be much more careful about defining the space of conflict than I had been the first time I met them. I’d been much quicker than they’d anticipated the first time, but they wouldn’t be taken by surprise a second time. This meant that I would have to control the field better and not simply accept their ambush site.

Opening the door to the gym unhindered, I filed all my contingencies away as ‘maybe not necessary, but keep ready’.

“Good morning, Leah,” Mr Han greeted me as I joined him in the back corner of the gym. He was already in his white sweats, so I quickly ditched my Cardinal sweatshirt and pants and put on the freshly cleaned white set again.

“Any problems getting here?” he asked in a conversational tone as I got ready.

“No, sir, none at all,” I said, tying my hair back, keeping an eye on him for his reaction, but all he did was give a little nod.

Again, we worked on knife technique, but this time it was almost entirely about defensive moves, rather than offensive.

“If you go into a knife fight, you must accept that you will get cut. The important thing is that you don’t get cut in places or ways that will end you,” he said. “Don’t ever go for your opponent’s knife. It’s a small target, it moves rapidly, and you’ll only wind up with a slashed hand. It’s best to go for their arm,” he explained, showing me what he meant.

Of course Grant and I had gone through all this quite some time before, but it was interesting hearing another blade instructor giving the same instructions.

As we were working on forms that seemed a lot more like some sort of Gung-Fu or Aikido technique than I was used to, more of a soft deflection rather than a hard block, Mr Han asked, “How many blue dumpsters are there in the alley outside?”

Surprised by the non-sequitur, all I could do was ask, “What?”

“Blue dumpsters in the alley. Between here and the street, how many are there?” he repeated.

“Four on the right, two on the left, but one of the ones on the left is more of an aqua than a real blue,” I grunted out, turning aside a stab at my ribs.

“How many food stands?”

“None when I get here, three when I leave,” I said.

“What kind of food do they sell?” Mr Han demanded as we continued our three-quarter-speed dance of stab and deflect.

“I don’t know the names of any of the dishes,” I said. “The one closest to the street is grilled chicken, the other two are something that look like pancakes and a noodle dish.”

“Excellent,” Mr Han said, stepping back. “The two businesses on either side of the alley entrance- what are they?”

“An ‘Irish’ pub,” I said, making air quotes with my fingers, "and a Chinese social club.”

“What is the Irish pub’s claim to fame?”

“O’Fong’s claims to be Singapore’s oldest Irish pub,” I said, wondering why all the questions.

Satisfied, Mr Han nodded. “Grant was right,” he said to himself, but didn’t bother explaining what he meant to me.

When I got back to the hotel room Emmy and Angela were still in bed, but not asleep. Angela was lying face down on the bed, while Emmy was draped across her. Angela was enjoying Emmy’s attention to her nude body, as Emmy kissed and stroked the bare skin of Angela’s stellar back side.

Leaning in to kiss them both, I noticed that Emmy had the pink diamond in her hand. When Emmy noticed that I’d seen it, she smiled at me.

“Look,” she said, setting the almond-shaped stone right at the base of Angela’s spine. Nestled in that spot, tip pointing down between Angela’s firm cheeks, the pale pink diamond’s hard edges contrasted with Angela’s soft curves beautifully.

“Gorgeous,” I breathed. “The diamond is nice, too,” I added, glancing at Angela’s face.

Emmy slid her hand up the inside of Angela’s thigh, finishing up with her fingers stroking Angela’s delicate skin just below her lady parts.

“We have been waiting for you,” Emmy said, kissing Angela’s ribs but keeping eye contact with me.

“You guys didn’t get enough last night?” I asked, amused and more than just a tiny bit aroused.

“That was last night,” Angela said with a smile. “This is a new day.”

“I’ll be back in just a moment,” I said, yanking my sweatshirt off and tossing it to the floor as I made my way to the suite’s bathroom. “Don’t start without me.”

After a very quick shower I was back out in the bedroom again. They hadn’t started without me, to my surprise. Angela was still lying on her front, and Emmy was beside her, running her hands tenderly over Angela’s thighs and butt.

Angela’s face was turned my way, and I could see her blissful expression as she reveled in Emmy’s caresses.

I leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Good morning, my beauty,” I said.

“Good morning,” she murmured.

Angela lifted and turned her head the other way, then reached down and pulled Emmy up onto herself as she rolled the two of them my way. It was a well-executed move and would have been very sexy, but the sudden grimace on Angela’s face spoiled the effect a little bit.

Rolling Emmy back off herself, Angela reached underneath her back for a moment, then held up the pear-cut diamond as big as an almond, but much, much sharper. She looked at it with consternation, having totally forgotten that the two were playing with it earlier.

Emmy laughed in that pretty, musical way of hers and took it from Angela’s hand. She placed it on Angela’s chest, right on her breast bone.

“Famous and beautiful diamonds are given names,” Emmy said. “This one is not famous, but it is beautiful. We should name it.”

“What, like the Hope Diamond?” I asked as I sat next to Angela and reached out to touch the pale pink stone.

“I think this one can be the Love Diamond,” Emmy said.

“That makes sense,” Angela said, looking down at the gem on her chest. “Since I love it.”

That evening everybody else associated with the tour arrived at the hotel, so we all had a big dinner in the hotel’s rooftop restaurant. It isn’t as if we hadn’t seen everybody in a while, but it still had the feel of a reunion to it.

“Is it always this hot here?” Jen asked as the two of us sipped our after-dinner drinks, leaning on the terrace railing looking out over the Marina District’s lights. We’d stepped away from the rest of the group to catch up on things.

“Pretty damned tro pee cal,” I said.

“It’s flipping humid, too,” she complained.

“You see that, over there?” I asked, pointing off to the left, out away from the buildings of the harbor and out to sea.

“See what?” Jen asked, squinting.

“There, that line right over there just a few miles. You know what that is?” Answering myself, I said, “That’s the freaking Equator right there.”

Jen leaned back and gave me a sardonic look, realizing I was giving her a hard time. “Yeah, I get it. This is the actual tropics here, and that, coincidentally, is why it feels tropical, like you said. It’s just a shock to the system to come from Seoul where it was like fifty degrees to here where’s closer to ninety and ninety per cent humidity,” she said.

“Our next stop is going to be Sydney, and it’s full-on summer there in Australia,” I reminded her.

“Yeah, but it won’t be hotter than this,” Jen countered.

“No, probably not,” I agreed.

“I’m looking forward to Australia,” Jen said. “I’ve always wanted to go. How about you?” she asked, turning to face me.

“I’ve never really given it a lot of thought,” I said with a shrug.

After a minute or two of companionable silence, Jen asked, “So what have you guys been up to while the rest of us were still in freezing-ass Korea?”

“Mostly a lot of sex,” I replied off-handedly as a joke. “And I’ve been getting in some good stabbing training. Oh, and we bought Angela a gigantic diamond.”

“I never know with you,” Jen said with a sigh. “O.K., let’s unpack all that. The sex part, well, I can believe that. Everybody knows you’re a beast in bed, after all. And-”

“What do you mean, ‘everybody knows’?” I demanded.

Jen shrugged. “It’s common knowledge. Like, everybody knows that you three screw like rabbits all the time,” she said, emphasizing the ‘everybody’.

“Jesus,” I groaned.

“So yeah, like, I can totally believe the sex thing. The stabbing training? Also believable,” she said, nodding to herself. “I guess the diamond part is, too, now that I think about it. I mean, didn’t you just spend something like ten million pounds on a penthouse condo for her in London? What’s going on with that, anyway?” Jen asked.

I leaned back, resting my elbows on the handrail. Shaking my head, I said, “I’m not even sure I want to know what you guys all say about me.”

“Honestly? None of it is bad, in a sense, I guess,” Jen said, sipping her fruity drink. “So tell me about the training. Unless, I mean, you want to tell me about the sex instead. I’m totally down for hearing all about that.”

“I’ll leave the sex up to your imagination-” I started to say, but Jen interrupted me.

“Believe me, I’ve been imagining it a lot,” she said with a wink. “One of these days I won’t have to just imagine it…”

“Keep it in your pants, sailor,” I said with a laugh.