“Alan’s dead?” she echoed. Derrick would never believe her, but she had a slight chance with Patrick. “But he…we…” She trailed off and pressed her fingertips to her mouth. She didn’t have to fake fear or the tears in her eyes. She didn’t want to appear defiant, but rather as if the news had crushed her.

Patrick glanced at her through the rearview mirror. “How did someone get your key, Azelie?”

She shook her head, allowing tears to track down her face. “I always put it in the same spot, that tiny knot in the wooden panel. I’ve never carried it out of the building. Not once. I thought it was safe with Bobby and whoever the security guard is in front of the door.” She sobbed again and ducked her head. “It doesn’t make sense that someone would know where my key was hidden. Alan is the only one who knew.”

“We knew,” Patrick declared. “I personally showed the knot to you.”

“You’re right, you little slut. No one else knew, but they used your key to get in,” Derrick snapped. His fingers were vicious, biting into her arm. She would worry about bruises later; right now she had to think about how she was going to stay alive.

“How do you know Alan’s dead?” she whispered. “Maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s at home.” Her voice shook naturally from fear and stress. The hope she poured into it was acting. She knew Alan had to be dead for his brothers to act the way they were. They had to have seen him. Did that mean Andrii had killed him? Were they aware of Andrii? She was certain they were going to kill her. She might have had a chance with Patrick but not with Derrick. He was still in a killing rage.

“We saw his body and what those fuckers did to him before he died,” Derrick snarled. “If you had anything to do with this, every single thing done to him I’m going to do to you. I know ways to keep you alive even when you’re begging for death.”

“Why would I want Alan dead?” That seemed like a fair enough question. “None of this makes any sense.” She wailed the last, sounding scared and bereft.

“You tell me why you would want my brother dead,” Derrick demanded. “He was pissed as hell on your behalf when you went running to him about not getting enough money. Every chance he got he stood up for you, but you turned on him. Was it because you saw Patrick at the club, and he was with someone else? You got jealous and had him killed?”

“You’re absolutely crazy to think that,” she whispered. “Insane.”

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 term offices gave 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. She does 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 to take 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’s brother. 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.

“Derrick.” Patrick sounded like the voice of reason. “Back off. We were getting somewhere, weren’t we, Azelie? You want to tell us the truth. You cared a great deal for Alan. Anyone could see it. He was always loyal to you, trying to make certain you were safe. He was so enraged when he found out McGrady hit you. And threatened you.” He gestured toward McGrady’s body. “That was done for you. Because McGrady dared to strike you.”

It hadn’t been Andrii who had done those terrible things to McGrady. Could she honestly say she was sorry McGrady was dead? No. He’d threatened the merry widows and Doug and Carlton. He’d threatened her. But did she want him to die in such a hideous way? No.

A small sob escaped before she could stop it. Her gaze clung to Patrick’s. She knew what the brothers were doing. One was good, the other bad. They would play her like this, one giving hope, the other taking it away. She reminded herself over and over, a chant in her mind, not to believe in Patrick. He had no intention of saving her.

“You knew someone stole from us.” Patrick made it a statement, switching subjects. “Alan said you believed it was an elite hacker, someone who may have been hired to harm us. He said you were still going through the books looking for a lead. Did you find one?”

Her mind was in complete chaos from sheer terror. If she was going to stall in the hopes of being rescued, although she had no idea how she would be rescued or who would rescue her, she had to pull herself together. Her body was almost numb from the blows Derrick had delivered. She realized he could have hit her a lot harder. He knew where to strike her to scare her, humiliate her and cause pain without damaging her. That only reinforced the possibility Andrii had raised that they were involved in human trafficking.

She took a deep breath, but that only dragged the stench into her lungs. She felt like her entire body was covered in blood, sweat and urine from the dead in the room. Now that coating was inside of her, where she would never get it out.

“I was still searching.” Was that even her voice? “You have a lot of business associates. Alan was going through them with me to tell me which were the most likely to be able to hire that kind of hacker. It would take a lot of money. I don’t know any of his—your—associates personally. Alan didn’t want me around them.”

“But you did meet a few,” Patrick persisted. “Derrick brought them into your office.”

It made sense that it had been Derrick, not Alan, who had allowed the men into her office. Alan had always been adamant that she stay out of sight. It hadn’t made sense to her at the time. Now she could see Derrick doing it, mostly as a silent threat.

Her biggest fear was that she would inadvertently blurt out Andrii’s name if she became too disoriented. He would come for her. She knew he would. He would have no idea that Alan was one of triplets or that his brothers were even more vicious and cruel than he had been. Andrii believed himself capable of handling men like the Billows triplets, but he didn’t have all the facts. She didn’t want him to come, as much as she needed to believe he would.