Page 5 of Explosive Vengeance

“I’ve already made inquiries.”

Guillaume couldn’t go home now. He texted his wife to say he had a late meeting so she wouldn’t worry, then had Jean-Pierre drive him to the hospital where the remains were waiting. Berdine met him there, but refused to grant him access to the body because it was in such bad condition.

He sat in the hallway for nearly four hours waiting for the private forensics team to process the dental records. Berdine finally exited the exam room and walked toward him, his expression grave.

And Guillaume knew.

He shot out of his chair, his heart threatening to explode. “Who is it? It’s not Dom. Tell me it’s not Dom.”

Berdine stopped several feet away and shook his head. “I’m so sorry, Guillaume.”

“No!” He bellowed it, grief and denial punching through him. He took several staggering steps up the hallway then pivoted and paced back the other way, raking his hands through his hair as the horrible finality hit home. “No, no,no…”

His only brother was dead. Tied up and burned to ash in his own house, without any alarms being triggered. How was that possible?How?

He lurched toward the door his brother’s body lay behind. Berdine blocked his way. “No. I can’t let you see him like this. It’s best if you don’t see him.”

Guillaume stared up at him, struggling to hold his grief inside. He was going to be sick. “I can’t… I can’t accept this,” he croaked, his voice breaking.

Berdine gently took him by the shoulders and steered him back into a chair. Guillaume collapsed into it like a doll. And then he broke.

Painful, ragged sobs burst out of him, each one searing his chest, his lungs. He buried his face in his hands and cried for his little brother, a charred corpse lying in the room across the hall.

I failed him. I failed him!

Jean-Pierre got him into the car. Guillaume alternated between a fog of shock and piercing grief on the drive to his home. His young daughters were asleep in bed but his wife was there to meet him at the door, her heartbreak written all over her face. Without a word she enveloped him in a comforting embrace that made him break down again.

Once he had regained control, he sent her to bed and immediately locked himself in his office with Jean-Pierre. “I want to know who Dom met with,” he bit out, rage beginning to burn through the terrible, suffocating pain. “Get me all the surveillance footage from his office and townhouse. Get me whatever I need to find out who did this.”

In less than an hour, Guillaume had his suspect.

He stared in shock at the attractive woman captured in the security feed. The only footage they’d been able to get was when she’d first entered the building. Gabrielle Boucher, representative of the wealthy Monsieur Roche, who Dominic’s company had done several business deals with over the past few months—buying and selling women in the skin trade.

There was barely any background on her, making her ten times as suspicious.

But there was more. So much more.

Dom had kept a woman in his townhome. A captive he’d bought off a skin trader in a recent shipment from North Africa. She was missing. And Dom’s main business account had been drained just minutes prior to his death.

Gabrielle. She’d done this. She’d taken Dom’s money and then taken the woman and killed him. Now the captive woman was out there somewhere too, about to tell what Dom had done.

Shaken, sick to his stomach that his brother was gone, Guillaume swallowed the bile burning the back of his throat and spoke to Jean-Pierre. “Find her. Find her and bring her to me.”

“Yes, sir.” New orders in hand, Jean-Pierre left the room to begin the hunt.

Guillaume sucked in a painful breath and continued to stare at the woman’s image on screen, memorizing her features. The only consolation in all of this is that Dom had died fast. He’d likely suffered before dying, but in the actual moment of his death, he wouldn’t have known what hit him.

But the same couldn’t be said for the woman who had killed him.

“Gabrielle Boucher” would suffer for what she’d done. Once Guillaume got back what she’d stolen from them, he would double his profit by selling her to the most sadistic bastard in the skin trade.

In the end, she would beg for death, but find no mercy.

****

After reading her sister’s text, Megan rushed from the stables and into the manor house. She loped up the stairs and hurried to the bedroom at the end of the hall that now served as her sister’s office.

As expected, Amber was seated before a bank of monitors, her precious laptop, Lady Ada, front and center on the desk, her chocolate-brown hair swept over one shoulder.

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