And that was when she realized … the farther they went, the more hard-core things had become.

Had someone taken a game too far with that female? she wondered. And killed her by mistake?

After Butch was sure that Marissa was doing okay, he was all business—and without distraction. That erotic moment with her in the foyer of the mansion had been sexual to him. Everything here in the club? Might as well have been a lawnmower for all he cared. A bowl of oatmeal. A book on Chemistry: As he started to develop a strategy in his head, he was back on his old job, his brain stepping into a set of mental clothes that at once made him hyper-aware and utterly detached from his environment.

And now to hedge his bets: He’d been debating for the last two nights whether or not to tell Axe the real reason they were all at the club. The bene was that they might get somewhere quicker; the ball slapper was that he’d potentially tip off the murderer, either directly or indirectly.

Except he had watched that tape of them talking in the office a hundred times—and he just didn’t think the male had murder in him. In a fight? Yes, absolutely. Axe was a tough son of a bitch in training, capable of crushing opponents in the hand-to-hand sparring even if they were taller than he was—and he was vicious at the gun range and with dagger training, never hesitating to pull the trigger or go for the kill.

But that was a different scenario from brutalizing some female. And for all his hard-core Goth shit, he wasn’t cruel and he wasn’t insane.

“So I lied,” he said in Axe’s ear over the din of moans and techno music.

“Oh, really,” the fighter countered.

“I was just following your example.”

“So honored.”

“I didn’t get the ‘key’ from a friend. It was taken off a female who was beaten to death. I’m here to find out who killed her, and I’m going to need your help.”

Axe recoiled. And then narrowed his eyes. Leaning back in again, he said, “How do you know I didn’t do it?”

“I don’t.” Butch met the guy straight in the eye. “I don’t know that at all.”

Focusing on the stare behind that mask, he waited to see what those pupils did. With the extra stimulation around them, and the fact that his features were covered, the guy was even more likely to show a nervous reaction.

Instead, they were rock-steady.

Which yup, supported Butch’s instinct that the guy hadn’t been lying about having yet to see death up close and personal.

“I didn’t, by the way,” the male said. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

Butch nodded. “I figured. You’ve got a good conscience—you proved that with how you felt about your pops’s death. Your fashion sense, on the other hand, is tragic.”

“It got your ass in here.”

“True, true.” Butch glanced around. “So who’s in charge?”

“Wait, tell me more about the female? Maybe I’ve seen her? Was she one of us?”

“Yup. And I don’t know much more than that. There was no ID on her, just that key. She managed to dematerialize to a safe place—that’s where my Marissa found her.” As Axe glanced at his mate, the guy seemed mortified that anyone, especially a female, had been exposed to such a horror. “She was through her transition, with dark hair, and dark blue eyes. That’s really all I got.”

“Shit.”

“That just about covers it.”

Not for the first time did Butch wish someone had taken a photograph of her, even if it had been after she had passed. God, he wished there had been shots of the wounds, scrapings under nails, a careful search for fibers on her and her clothes. But none of that had happened, of course. Again, the vampire race had no procedures in place to handle situations like this.

And it was funny, he’d never thought about the societal weakness before. He’d been too busy fighting on the front lines to worry about intra-race problems.

Man, some simple investigative processes would have helped them so much.

Axe shook himself like he was refocusing. “About the staff—look for the red on the costumes. They tend to stay on the periphery unless there’s a violation of the consent policy or if things get too out of line, in which case they’ll put a stop to whatever it is. And by out of line, I mean anything more than casual bloodshed.”

“Are there any cameras?”

“Probably, but I couldn’t tell you where or how to get at them.”

Or how to sift through hundreds of hours of streaming images—which was what you’d end up with, given the size of this place and the number of nights that had passed.

Shit.

They had just entered needle-in-a-haystack territory. And considering what was on the line here, that was about as reassuring as a knife at his throat.

Still, he’d beaten bad odds before.

“Let’s go deeper,” he said as he put his arm around his shellan. “We need to see everything.”

Chapter Forty

“They have places … places we can go.”

As Craeg spoke into Paradise’s ear, he was very aware of how close to the edge he was. But the more she danced against his body, the more the sex took over his brain, kicking the shit out of common sense and rationality, getting him to go all caveman. No panties? Fuuuuuuuck. He really needed to get his hands on more of her, so yeah, it was time to disappear into the back where Novo had told him there were private bathrooms you could use. After all, it was the only way they’d find any privacy tonight. Paradise was going to have to go home at dawn, and it wasn’t like she could take him back to her house—not without coming out of the closet about him, which would put her father and them in a very awkward, premature situation.