Page 105 of Velvet Vaughn

“You, you don’t understand,” Lydia stammered. “You have no idea what you’re—”

“I have every idea.” Anja cut her off, sharp as a blade. “Your husband has been running a blackmail operation off the backs of other people’s children for two decades, Lydia. He murdered Vic Shaw, Danica Webb, and Tim Hargrove. He’s responsible for Brad Hatton’s death.” Lydia gasped at that one, obviously not having heard the news yet. “And now Leo is missing, and his phone is in this house. You are going to tell me where he is right now before I lose what’s left of my patience.”

Lydia’s mouth opened and closed twice without managing a single word. Panic broke through her carefully maintained facade.

Remi reappeared from the hallway a minute later, Leo’s phone in his hand. The screen was cracked, a smear of dark red visible along one edge.

“Office floor.” His voice was dangerous in a way Anja had never heard from him before. “Face down under the desk. There’s blood on the rug, Anja. A lot of it.”

The sight of that phone sent Anja’s pulse into a hard, uneven rhythm she couldn’t afford to examine too closely, not yet, not with Lydia standing three feet away, clinging to her lie.

“Where is he?” The words were barely a whisper this time, which somehow carried more weight than shouting would have.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lydia tried again, but her whole body shook now, and sweat had broken out along her hairline.

Anja turned to Remi. “Give us the room.”

“Anja.”

“I mean it.” She held his gaze until he understood exactly what she was asking. “Go check the rest of the house.”

Remi hesitated, his eyes flicking between her and Lydia. An understanding passed silently between them that Anja didn’t need to say out loud. He nodded once and backed toward the hallway, leaving the two of them alone in a living room full of expensive furniture, Impressionist prints, and thirty years of a marriage built on top of two decades of buried bodies.

Anja shrugged out of her jacket and laid it over the back of an armchair. Her movements were slow and deliberate, giving Lydia all the time she needed to watch and understand what was happening. She rolled her sleeves to the elbow and cracked her knuckles, one hand and then the other, the sound loud even in the cavernous room.

Lydia’s eyes went wide, tracking every movement. “What are you doing?”

“I’ve spent my entire career on the right side of a line most people never have to think about.” Anja took a menacing step forward. Lydia matched it backward, retreating toward the fireplace. “I was a homicide detective for six years. Did you know that, Lydia? No, you probably didn’t. I’ve interrogated men who did things that would keep you up at night for the rest of your life, and I never once crossed that line because I believed the line mattered. I believed the system worked eventually, if you gave it enough time and enough patience.”

“Please.” Lydia’s back hit the mantle, nowhere left to retreat to. “I don’t know anything, I swear to you—”

“I don’t have patience left, Lydia.” Anja closed the last few feet of distance between them, near enough now that Lydia had to tilt her head back to hold eye contact, close enough that the older woman’s breath had gone ragged and shallow. “The man I love is bleeding and in the hands of a monster who has murdered at least four people this month alone. Every second I spend standing in your living room being polite is a second closer to that death toll becoming five.” She let that sit fully before she continued, her voice dropping even lower. “I have never wanted to cross that line. Never. I want you to understand that. But I will cross it right now, for him, without hesitating and without feeling the least bit of remorse. So you’re going to want to think very carefully about what happens in the next thirty seconds of your life.”

Sweat rolled down Lydia’s temples now. Every trace of her polished facade was gone, leaving only the terror beneath years of expensive dinner parties and charity board meetings.

“You don’t understand what he’ll do to me,” Lydia whispered.

“No, Lydia, you don’t understand what I’ll do to you if you don’t tell me right this second where they took him.” Anja’s expression must have convinced Lydia there was nowhere left to hide behind polite smiles. “Last chance, Lydia. Where is he?”

For a long, suspended moment, nothing moved, the two of them frozen while Remi’s footsteps echoed against hardwood, checking rooms. Anja did not want to hurt the woman. It went against her ethics. But she would do it. For Leo.

Then Lydia broke.

“The lake house.” The words tumbled out of her in a rush, all at once, water breaching a dam. “Off Route 100, past Eureka, on the water. It’s not in either of our names. It’s held through one of the shell companies, but I don’t even know which one. I swear I don’t.” Her voice cracked, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Please, I never wanted any of this. You have to believe me. I just did what he told me because I was scared. I’ve been scared for years—”

“Save it.” Anja reached for the zip ties clipped inside her jacket pocket. “Turn around. Hands behind your back.”

“Please, wait. I told you what you wanted—”

“And I’m grateful.” Anja spun her around without much gentleness and secured her wrists. “But you’re also the wife of a murderer who is currently holding a person hostage, and I am not leaving you loose in this house to call ahead and warn him the second we walk out that door.”

“I wouldn’t—”

“You’ve lied to my face twice in the last five minutes.” Anja steered her toward the sturdy leg of the dining table, forced her to sit, and secured the tie there, testing it once for slack before straightening. “I’m done taking your word for anything today.”

Remi reappeared in the doorway, breathing heavily, one hand pressed to his bandaged side.

“They’re at a lake house off Route 100, past Eureka.” Anja snatched her jacket off the armchair and shrugged it on as she crossed the room. “Held through a shell company. I need Tyler to pull anything he can on the property while we drive.”

“On it.” Remi fell into step behind her, adrenaline clearly doing the work his body wasn’t ready to do on its own.

Behind them, Lydia had started crying in earnest, moaning something that might have been an apology or another lie. Anja didn’t stop long enough to find out which.

“The police will be here soon,” Anja called back. “They’ll untie you. In the meantime, you can think about the fact that your husband is trying to kill the man I love, and you helped him do it.”

She didn’t wait for a response. She was through the front door and down the steps, Lydia’s muffled sobs fading behind her, Remi close on her heels. They sprinted the last stretch to the Escalade idling in the circular drive with its engine still running.

Anja called Tyler the second she slammed the driver’s door, phone back on speaker as she threw the SUV into reverse. “There’s a lake house off Route 100, past Eureka, registered through one of Curtis’s shell companies. I need everything you can find in the next five minutes, and I need police staged nearby but not moving in until I say so.”

“On it. Give me sixty seconds. I’m pulling county property records.”

Anja swung the Escalade around and gunned it back down the long tree-lined drive, gravel fanning out behind them. Beside her, Remi checked the chamber on his sidearm, his jaw clenched against whatever his body wanted to tell him about the last several hours.

“We’re going to get him back.”

“We are.” Anja’s hands were steady for the first time since Tyler spoke Curtis’s name. Every trace of panic had burned away and been replaced with focused clarity she’d spent six years training into herself on a job that had asked this exact steadiness of her more times than she could count. “Whatever it takes.”

The road unspooled ahead of them, and somewhere out past Eureka, past a stretch of water she’d never seen and hoped never to see again after tonight, was Leo. Anja pressed the accelerator to the floor and refused to let herself imagine any ending except reaching him in time.