Page 189 of Renard's Deliverance

When she’d left him, he’d been breathing.

“Here’s what I know. Three years ago on August tenth, the police received a call from a hysterical woman. She’d come in to clean at Club Kitty and found a man dead in one of the back rooms. He’d been bludgeoned to death with a solid object, maybe a bat.”

“Baton,” she corrected. She was going to throw up.

Jardin’s sharp eyes narrowed. “Police report that his pants were down, and there was dried semen on his cock. He’d just had sex.”

“Sex? Or rape,” she said bitterly.

Jardin sucked in a breath.

“It wasn’t me,” she reassured him.

“Good,” he whispered. “Well, they collected DNA from the scene but couldn’t find a match to anyone on their system. They questioned every employee at the club, however there was one person missing. They couldn’t get in touch with her, but she’d left some of her stuff at the club, including a hairbrush with her DNA on it.”

Fuck. Him.

Fuck him. He’d promised her.

“That woman was called Patricia Smith.”

“Right,” she said hoarsely.

“She became a person of interest in the case when they also found her hair on the body. The problem was that Patricia had disappeared, and no one could find her. That is until the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System was pinged after a woman was kidnapped, beaten, and taken to a hospital where her DNA was collected.”

“Stupid me. I should have realized that. But he promised me.” God. She was so stupid!

“Who promised you?” Jardin asked.

“Stefan.” She let out a dark bark of laughter. “I knew when Marcus, I mean, Mark slumped to the floor unconscious that things were bad. He was still breathing, though. I swear he was breathing when I left him.”

“You hit him with a baton?” Jardin asked without a hint of disapproval or blame.

“Yes,” she said.

“Then you ran?”

“Right into the hands of the devil. After I hit Marcus and he went down, I panicked. I didn’t know what to do so I called Stefan. We’d been, well, dating. I was hysterical. He promised me that he would take care of it. That it would all go away. And in return, all I had to do was move in with him. If I agreed to be his, he’d take care of everything so I would never be in trouble.”

“Stefan got you a new identity?”

“Yeah, I chose the name, but he sorted it all. Why didn’t he get his guys to remove the hairbrush? I thought they would get rid of any sign that I was even there. That’s what he paid them to do. They cleaned up scenes like that all the time! He took me for a fool.”

“My guess is he was keeping it as leverage,” Jardin said. “He planned to bring it out if he needed it in order to control you.”

“That complete bastard!” God, she wished she could make him pay for the damage he’d done to her.

“He probably kept you from seeing the news for those first few weeks, I’m guessing? Did he keep you away the outside world?” Jardin asked.

“Yeah, you could say that. I was so grateful for his help that I let him do whatever he wanted . . . for a while.” Until she fought back.

Which had made life even harder.

And she didn’t want to think about that. What a fool she’d been. How she’d fallen for his lies.

“So Mark died from his head injuries?” she asked, rubbing her stomach. “I killed him? He must have died after I left.”

Jardin frowned. “I’m going to get my hands on the autopsy report and see.”

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