Page 103 of Blue Moon

“I never took it for myself.”

“Fine. Tell us who has it, and you can bunk with Ron while we pick them up.”

“No.”

“No?”

Ana was on her in the blink of an eye, one hand holding Elene’s nose and the other keeping her mouth shut as she calmly began counting. Elene struggled, but Ana had both the strength and the technique to win the battle.

Ryder was on Emmy’s team. He’d seen some real dark, fucked-up stuff over the past couple of years, but the complete lack of emotion on Ana’s face as she pushed Elene toward the brink of death unnerved him. Enough that he almost stepped in, but he couldn’t undermine Lilith. Not if he expected to walk out of there unscathed. How many times had she done this before?

It took Elene twenty seconds to realise that by fighting, she was wasting oxygen, and she stilled. Smart woman. Not smart enough to avoid this predicament in the first place, but perhaps clever enough to figure a way out.

“Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty.”

Ana released her hold, and Elene sucked in a lungful of air, her shoulders heaving.

“I’ll ask the question again. Who has the money?”

“You can’t have it.”

“Then next time, we’ll try seventy seconds.”

Ryder crouched beside Elene. “Nobody wants to hurt you, but at the same time, we can’t go back to our client empty-handed.”

“And I can’t tell you where the money is.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“Both,” she whispered, and then she focused on him with intense blue eyes. “Please, I beg you, if you ever felt anything for me at all, just kill me quickly.”

Fuck.

“Why would you die for this? It’s only money.”

“Why would you kill for this?”

A good question. Truthfully, they’d never planned to kill her, only scare the shit out of her. Either she was calling their bluff, or she was more scared of whoever had the money than she was of Ana.

“If you tell us who has the money, we can protect you from them.”

“I don’t need to be protected from anyone but you.”

“You understand that we can’t let you walk away with stolen cash.”

“I understand that.”

“So the money’s useless to you anyway.”

“I already told you, I don’t have it.”

Khatia muttered in his ear. “This makes no sense.”

Right.

Elene would rather die than reveal the whereabouts of the money, but she claimed she wasn’t scared of whoever had possession of it. Where was Hallie when Ryder needed her? She’d tell him to think outside the box, that if the obvious options were incorrect, to dig for the obscure.

And then he realised.

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