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Following at a distance, she watched them walk by the nursing station to the access elevator. As they waited for the doors to open, Rhage reached out and put his hand on Vishous’s shoulder, and the other Brother seemed to shudder.

The exchange made warning bells go off, and the instant the elevator doors closed Marissa headed for the wing of the clinic the three had originally come from. Moving quickly, she passed the sprawling, brilliantly lit lab, then put her head into the six older patient rooms. All of which were empty.

Why had the Brothers been here? Maybe just to talk to Havers?

On instinct, she went out to the front desk, logged on to the computer and scanned the admissions. Nothing about any of the Brothers or Butch came up, but that didn’t mean a thing. The warriors were never entered into the system, and she had to imagine it would be the same for Butch if he were in-house. What she was after was how many beds were occupied of the thirty-five they had.

She got the number and did a quick walk around, scouting each room. Everything was accounted for. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Butch had not been admitted—unless he was in one of the other rooms in the main house. Sometimes patients who were VIPs stayed there.

Marissa picked up her skirts and hightailed it for the back stairs.

Butch curled into himself even though he wasn’t cold, operating on the theory that if he could just bring his knees up high enough, the pain in his stomach would ease a little.

Yeah, right. The hot poker in his gut was not impressed by that plan.

He peeled his puffy eyelids apart, and after a lot of blinking and deep breathing, he came to the following conclusions: He was not dead. He was in a hospital. And shit that was no doubt keeping him alive was being pumped into his arm.

As he rolled over gingerly, he came to one more realization. His body had been used for a punching bag. Oh…and something nasty was in his belly, like his last meal had been rancid roast beef.

What the fuck had happened to him?

Only a vague series of snapshots came to mind: Vishous finding him in the woods. Him with a screaming instinct that the brother should leave him to die. Then some knife action and…something about that hand of V’s, that glowing thing used to take out a vile piece of—

Butch lurched over onto his side and gagged just from the memory. There had been evil in his belly. Pure, undiluted malice, and the black horror had been spreading.

With shaking hands, he grabbed the hospital johnny he was wearing and yanked it up. “Oh…Jesus…”

There was a stain on the skin of his stomach, like the scorch mark of a fire that had been snuffed out. In desperation, he weeded through his sloppy brain, trying to remember how the scarring had gotten there and what it was, but he just came up with a big fat zero.

So like the detective he’d been before, he examined the scene—which in this case was his body. Lifting one of his hands, he saw that his fingernails were a mess, as if something like a file or some small nails had been hammered under a number of them. A deep breath told him his ribs were cracked. And going by his swollen eyes, he had to assume his face had partied with a lot of knuckles.

He had been tortured. Recently.

Reaching into his mind again, he panned for memories, trying to get back to the last place he’d been. ZeroSum. ZeroSum with…oh, God, that female. In the bathroom. Having hard-core, who-cares sex. Then he’d gone out and…lessers. Fighting with those lessers. Getting shot and then…

His recollections came to the end of their train track at that point. Just shot off the edge of reasoning into a pit of huh, what?

Had he squealed on the Brotherhood? Betrayed them? Had he given his nearest and dearest away?

And what the hell had been done to his belly? God, he felt like there was sludge in his veins thanks to whatever had festered there.

Letting himself go limp, he breathed through his mouth for a while.