Derrick slapped her right on the same cheek where he’d punched her earlier. Her face felt like it had exploded. She didn’t make a sound. Even her tears stopped. She might know it was prudent to be scared and give them anything they wanted—as long as it wasn’t Andrii—but all Derrick was doing was making her want to fight back.
“Derrick.” Patrick’s tone was cautionary. Reasonable. “We’re coming up on the club. I’ve beefed up security on the outside and closed both Pleasure Train and Adventure for the rest of the week. We need to find out who our enemies are and take them out before we reopen. No one else has been down in the offices.”
The fact that Patrick used the termofficesgave her a tiny bit of hope. He was still trying to act as if things were more normal than they were.
“We know someone stole our money.Shedoes the books,” Derrick said, but he sounded less threatening.
“We can talk about that when we’re inside,” Patrick said. He drove the SUV up close to the private employee entrance.
When Derrick hauled her none too gently out of the vehicle, she caught sight of three guards in uniform as the two Billows men took her straight up to the door and unlocked it. Derrick slammed it closed on the startled faces of the guards and went straight to the knot where her key should have been. It wasn’t there.
“They may have to disappear,” Derrick announced as he shoved Azelie down the hall toward the door leading down to the offices.
He said it so casually she realized that for Derrick, making people disappear was commonplace. It also meant that those three guards had seen her with Derrick and Patrick. They would remember if she disappeared and the cops went looking for her. His statement made her believe they were going to kill her; otherwise why threaten perfectly innocent security guards? Also, the fingers surrounding her bicep were biting into her flesh viciously. Derrick was deliberately inflicting pain.
Azelie refused to give Derrick the satisfaction of her crying out in pain, nor did she try to fight as they took her down the stairs to the rooms below. Instead of taking her into her appointed office, they hurried her along the same corridor she had taken to try to find the woman screaming out in agony so many months earlier. She thought about the woman now. Which of the triplets had come out to confront her? Someone, maybe all of them, had been with that woman, and they’d hurt her. Maybe killed her. She felt terrible that she’d let that woman down.
Derrick opened the lock in the wooden panel and marched her down the corridor until they came to a room with an open door. She smelled blood. He shoved her inside and snapped on a bright overhead light. The bodies of two men lay like broken life-sized dolls in one corner. Close to the center of the room, Bobby Aspen lay next to Andrew McGrady. McGrady had clearly been tortured before he died, while the two men in the corner and Bobby appeared to have been killed quickly.
Derrick gripped her arm and forced her forward, stepping right into blood on the floor. Blood and fingers. Her stomach lurched as he stopped, looming over the body in the center of the room. Alan Billows had been tortured too, but what he’d gone through looked to be far worse than what McGrady had been put through. It was Billows’ fingers strewn all over the floor. Whoever had tortured Billows knew what they were doing. She tried to drown out Andrii’s voice telling her he was a trained assassin. He had learned how totake people apart at an early age. She found herself praying Andrii hadn’t been the one to do this horrible, cruel thing to Billows.
“I’m going to be sick,” she whispered.
“Be as sick as you want.” Derrick was entirely unsympathetic.
Azelie didn’t blame him. The man, who looked as if he’d been carved up like a turkey, was nearly unrecognizable, and he was their brother. She was positive they would kill her now. How could they not? She would want to kill someone who did that to someone she loved. She had to brace herself for what would come next. No matter what they did, she could never reveal her connection to Andrii.
There was a very uncomfortable chair bolted to the floor in the center of the room, just behind Alan’s body. It appeared as if he’d been in that chair when he was tortured. There was blood and what looked suspiciously like urine on and below it. Fingers were strewn on the floor around it.
Azelie tried to hold her breath so she wouldn’t take in the horrendous stench. Derrick shoved her toward the chair, and for the first time she couldn’t overcome her panic and horror. She struggled against him. There was nowhere to go, no possible way to run, but her fight instincts kicked in and she couldn’t stop the hysteria welling up.
Derrick backhanded her, punched her stomach to double her over and slammed her into the chair. Azelie froze when her bottom landed on the seat, which was covered in the blood and urine of a dead man. Her stomach lurched again, protesting the smells and the vicious punch. She leaned over the steel arm of the chair and vomited.
Derrick swore and stepped back, but Patrick went to the sink, wet a cloth and brought it to her. He wiped her face with surprising gentleness.
“Derrick, cool off. We have no idea if Azelie is involved. It could be that someone took advantage of her. That man at the club, the one with your friend, do you go out with him?”
“No. I met him for the first time that night. He’s Lana’sbrother. The only thing I know about him is that he works as a bartender. I don’t even know where.”
“How do you know Lana?”
“From school. She goes to the college and takes fashion design. We ride the bus together sometimes to get to the school. I had no idea her brother would be at the club, but she told me he’s older than she is and is protective of her.”
“What about your good friend Bradley Tudor? Could he have found out about the key?”
She realized everyone she knew was going to be in trouble. The merry widows, Doug and Carlton, Shaila and David, maybe even Abigail Humphrey and her little three-year-old daughter, Betsy. All because she worked for Billows.
“He doesn’t even know where I work. I babysit his kids when his regular babysitter has appointments or is ill. Otherwise, we don’t really associate at all.”
The surveillance Alan had put on her in the form of McGrady would bear that out. He had to have reported to the Billows brothers. All of them. He might not have known there was more than one, but surely over the time he watched her, more than Alan had gotten a report.
Derrick pushed forward. “This is bullshit, Patrick. She knows more than she’s saying. Don’t fall for her sweet little innocent act the way Alan did. Look at him, his guts spilling out of his body. He didn’t deserve that.”
He stepped around his brother and hit her in the face again, the same cheek, this time splitting open the skin. He punched her breast hard. There was no way to stop the cry of pain as agony exploded through her body.
“Talk, you little bitch. You have no idea what’s coming.”
She could barely see him through the veil of tears, but it was just as well. What she did see appeared to be his features twisted into a demonic mask. That added to her mounting terror. She was going to die a terrible death. She prayed she would just become unconscious and they would kill her outright.
