King of Envy: Chapter 48

“I don’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 for hours. 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.

What were the odds of Emmanuelle and Shepherd both hailing from the same place without some sort of connection to each other?

My team couldn’t make the connection because the only evidence of it was hidden deep in their finances, but Dominic’s forensic accounting had finally confirmed my hunch. Emmanuelle was the one who’d kept Shepherd’s faction afloat with money embezzled from her agency and her more lucrative but abhorrent side activities.

Dominic had found a string of large deposits that couldn’t be attributed to her Beaumont salary or other sources. A deeper dive revealed an ugly underbelly to her work—specifically, a “sexual entertainment” ring that drew its “entertainers” from her own model base.

Beaumont’s high-earning models were shielded from that side of the business, but the girls who’d been with the agency for years and hadn’t earned enough for management’s liking were coerced into working off their debts in other ways.

Dominic hadn’t dived into who their clients were, but I bet it read like a who’s who of the fashion industry and beyond. It would explain why Emmanuelle wielded so much power.

So yes, she had a direct link to the Brotherhood and motive for hurting Ayana. She also had extra motive to hurt me, considering I’d killed her brother, but she wasn’t the one who’d taken Ayana. If she had, Enzo—the tail I’d put on her—would’ve told me, but he’d reported as normal all day.

I didn’t know why Emmanuelle missed her meeting with Hank. Maybe she was as sick of him as I was.

Hank was blathering on about cafés again when Sean called me over. “Vuk.” He tipped his head toward the door, indicating we needed to talk in private.

We left Hank in the room. We didn’t have anything sensitive in there, so I wasn’t worried.

“I got a call from my guys on the ground,” Sean said once we were alone. “They found a to-go cup on the side street Hank mentioned. It matches the one Ayana was holding in the footage. They brought it back to our lab to dust for fingerprints. The problem is, the street is a blind zone. No cameras, hidden from view for most passersby. If someone parked a van at either end, no one would see what was happening.”

Frustration chafed beneath my skin. So it doesn’t matter if the cup is hers. We’d know where they’d grabbed her, and that’s it.

“Maybe, maybe not.” Sean pulled up a photo on his phone. In it, a silver button gleamed against dirty concrete. “They also found this on the ground near the cup. Maybe it fell off someone else who walked down the street that day, or it ended up there some other way. There’s nothing to suggest it’s tied to the Ayana situation, but the guys brought it back anyway. They ran its analysis first. No fingerprints, but they did find a trace of alluvial soil. Long Island in particular is covered with that stuff. It’s a tenuous link, but…”

If they were to bring her somewhere, they’d choose somewhere secluded, where there’s little chance of witnesses or cameras.

That ruled out most of Manhattan. Long Island, on the other hand, would be perfect.

Like Sean said, it was a tenuous link. The button could be from a random Long Islander who happened to be visiting the city. But it was a lead, and I was desperate enough to chase down any clue we found, no matter how small.

“Exactly,” Sean said. “Long Island’s a big place, but we’ll sweep the more isolated areas first, especially those with abandoned warehouses.”

I’m going to join you. I needed to do something. If I stayed inside the house for one more minute, I was going to lose it.

Sean didn’t argue. “I’ll let you know once we’re ready to roll out. What do you want us to do with Hank?”

Lock him in there. I want to keep an eye on him. I doubted he had a hand in Ayana’s disappearance, but I still didn’t trust that little weasel.

While Sean went to make the necessary arrangements, I called Roman. It went straight to voicemail—again.

I hadn’t been able to reach him since yesterday. He was a ghost in the wind, and I was growing more and more certain that he was involved in this shitstorm.

There was a ninety percent chance he was the one who’d sent Ayana those photos. Once I got my hands on him, I was going to⁠—

My burner phone rang.Speak of the devil.

I picked up immediately. “Where the fuck have you been?”

“Sorry, but I don’t exist at your whim,” Roman snapped. “I’ve got my own shit going on. Now what’s so important that you called me twenty times in the past two hours?”

I tamped down my questions about the photos and focused on the important topic at hand. I could kill him later; for now, I needed his help.

I gave him a quick summary of Ayana’s disappearance, what we’d found, and where we were at in our search. “Do you have any information about where the other faction operates? Any safe houses or hubs on Long Island?”

Roman was quiet for a long moment. “Maybe. I’d be surprised if they didn’t have something on Long Island.” More silence. I almost thought he’d hung up when he spoke again. “This other faction…there’s something I need to tell you. In person.”

“Is this important, or are you going to feed me more bullshit?”

I didn’t have time to waste. Every minute counted in missing persons cases, and I’d already squandered too many.

“It’s important. Trust me,” he said. “In fact, it could help you get Ayana back.”

That was all I needed to hear.

We set a time and location, and I hung up.

I stared at my phone, my throat thick with desperation. I tried not to imagine Ayana tied up somewhere, terrified and alone.

Hold on, baby.I’m coming.