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Louder…

I wriggled harder. Strategy fled as panic turned my movements frantic. Even if I got loose, I doubted I could outrun my abductor, but I wasnotgoing to sit here and wait for them to butcher me without a fight.

Louder…

Was I imagining things, or did the rope around my right ankle give a little? I put more weight on that side, trying to?—

The footsteps stopped.

They were here.

I stilled. My pulse tried to claw its way out of my veins, and I steeled myself again to face my abductor.

I dragged my eyes up, over the dead body and up a pair of black-clad legs.

Up, up, up, all the way to a familiar face.

My breath condensed into icicles.

No.

CHAPTER48

Vuk

“Idon’t know where she is!” Hank blubbered. “I swear! She happened to walk by while I was taking a smoke break. That’s all. I had nothing to do with her disappearance or Emmanuelle dropping her. I—” His words devolved into gurgles when I tightened my grip around his throat.

His face turned purple, and his feet kicked futilely in the air.

I’d started interrogating him the minute Sean dumped him at my house an hour ago, and I was tired of his excuses. More than twenty-four hours had passed since Ayana was last seen; my patience, like my mercy, had run dry.

“Please.” Hank gasped. “I can help. “If you let me—I—” He choked again, his eyes bulging.

I was tempted to squeeze harder until this pathetic stain on humanity was no more, but he was the last person to have spoken with Ayana. Plus, he had an inside line to Beaumont, which might or might not come in handy, depending on how things played out. There was just too much fucking uncertainty at the moment.

I reluctantly released him. He doubled over, wheezing.

I’d moved from my office at Valhalla to the basement of my house soon after Sean went to fetch him. It was a tertiary office I’d set up across from my makeshift rage room. I needed somewhere private to deal with Hank, and neither Valhalla nor my official company headquarters was the place.

“Look, I—I don’t know what happened, but I saw what street she turned onto when she left,” Hank said when he regained enough oxygen to speak properly again. “It was that…that side street with no shops. It leads to a bunch of cafés and stores. I know Ayana—I’ve been her agent for years. When she’s stressed, she’ll go to a coffee shop and sit there forhours. If you check the?—”

“We did,” Sean said coldly. He’d been watching us quietly from the corner. “She doesn’t show up on the surveillance footage from any of those businesses.”

Beads of sweat gleamed on Hank’s upper lip. “Well, there are a lot of other…” He faltered at my glare. His eyes darted left and right, left and right before they finally met mine again. “Okay. You say she’s been missing since yesterday afternoon, right? Well, I don’t know if this is connected or helpful at all, but, um…”

“Spit it out,” Sean growled.

“I haven’t seen Emmanuelle since yesterday afternoon either,” Hank blurted. “We had a meeting scheduled for this morning, and she didn’t show up. That’s not like her. I’m not—I’m not saying she’s a kidnapper or anything, but the timing is weird, right? And I know she has it out for Ayana, so maybe she knows something?” His voice turned into a squeak at the end.

Sean and I exchanged glances.

Hank might be smarter than we gave him credit for because the same thought had initially crossed my mind, only I had information he didn’t.

Thanks to Dominic, I knew for a fact that Emmanuelle Beaumont, née Élodie Beaumont, was involved with the Brotherhood. She was the sister of Stéphane Bouvier, also known as Shepherd, no last name. The name of their tiny French hometown was what had tripped my alarms when I read her bio.

Shepherd and I had crossed paths briefly before my brother died. He’d joined the Brotherhood a month before I left, and he’d wanted to see my poison-making process. During that night in my lab, he’d made an offhand comment about his hometown.

It was a mistake on his part. The Brothers were trained never to share personal details, not even with each other, but he’d been too new and green to catch his slip-up. I hadn’t paid much attention at the time, but I remembered looking it up out of curiosity and finding out there were only a thousand or so residents who lived there.