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“What the fuck?” Orik cried out.
Two knives whisked out of her jacket, strong and sturdy. She poised them crossed at his neck.
“You brought a woman here a year ago,” she snarled.
He laughed. With a bullet in his leg and knives at his neck, he still laughed. “Bring a lot of girls here.”
Maybe she should have just killed him. One less asshole on her streets. But fuck, she wanted answers.
“A woman,” she corrected. “Roughly five feet tall with a pink pixie cut and blue eyes.”
The vamp laughed again. “Could have been me. Who’s to say?”
Kierse felt fury in her veins. She kicked out at the wound in his knee, and he screamed in pain. “You might want to reconsider whether you remember.”
“There’s lots of girls. Lots of boys, too,” he cried out. “I don’t remember them all.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, wondering if she’d made a mistake. Was he lying? Was he stalling for time to recover before he got the jump on her? Was he just heartless? Could they all be true?
“Torra. Her name was Torra Hastings,” Kierse spat. “Ring a bell?”
His eyes flared wide. Now that name meant something.
“Oh, Torra?” he asked with another stupid laugh. “’Course I know Torra.”
She blinked. Know. He knows Torra. That didn’t make sense. Her brain couldn’t pick up the present tense fast enough.
“What did you do with her, you bastard?”
“I delivered her to King Louis, of course,” he said with a vicious smile. “That’s who all the Red Velvet workers owe their debts to.”
King Louis.
Her blood ran cold. She should have known it would all lead back to him. The true villain and mastermind of Third Floor and all its depravity.
“What happened to her?”
“Last I saw, she was on break,” Orik said.
“On break?”
“At Red Velvet.”
The pieces all fit together at once. He knows Torra. Not knew. Knows. She belonged to King Louis. She was on break. At Red Velvet. Torra was there now. She was still alive.
Kierse looked away from Orik, her gaze going back to the red monstrosity in the distance. Torra was alive.
And that was the moment Orik struck. He snarled and lunged for her. His vampire teeth sharpened and elongated as he used his considerable strength to try to overpower her.
She was distracted by the revelation, but instinct took over. She slipped into slow motion just before he could reach her. She turned back to him, sidestepping his approach. Her arm continued on its trajectory, and because he hadn’t been anticipating that she’d have any kind of super speed, he moved right into her. With the force of her slow motion meeting his vampire speed, the knife went straight through his jugular.
His mouth formed an O of shock right before she lopped his head off.
“Fuck,” she hissed.
She jerked out of the spray of his blood, which missed her by inches. He was dead. She’d killed a monster in monster territory. This place seemed lawless, but she needed to get the fuck away from the scene just in case they came looking for who’d offed one of King Louis’s lackeys.
She didn’t regret killing him. Couldn’t regret killing him. Not just for Torra but for all the people he’d taken over the years. All the humans he’d treated like chattel. For them. Good riddance.
Anyway, she had a new mission.
She needed to find Torra and get her the hell out of here.
Chapter Forty-Two
Her boots stomped hard against the ground as she backtracked to the brothel. She didn’t know how long she would have before Orik’s body would be found. Or if anyone would even care here. It was a gamble. Time to improvise her plan.
She reached the back door of the brothel without anyone stopping her. She’d spent years inside Colette’s and knew that the back door was the best way to get in and out without raising suspicion. The workers were always going to be more helpful than the goons. She loved the Roulettes, but they were hired muscle. And hired muscle didn’t want anyone inside who could mess with business.
A group of workers sat together in a room on the first floor. She ducked her head in and kept her voice slow and steady.
“Hey,” she said. The group glanced up at her, saw she wasn’t an employee or likely a customer based on her attire, and dismissed her. Then she used the one card she had to ask, “Orik said that Torra was on break. Do you know where she is?”
“Probably her room,” a man said, lounging back on a divan.
“Second floor, third door to the left,” a woman said.
“Thanks,” Kierse said.
Kierse climbed the flight of stairs that led from the back of the brothel. It was primarily used by the workers themselves, so it was blessedly empty. She pushed open the stairwell door to the second floor and scanned the hallway. She waited for a female vampire to pass before she hustled down the hall and knocked on Torra’s door.
