Page 5 of Bleed the Shadows

Then Bram reached for the knife sheathed at his waist.

The blade glinted in the eerie red light, but I didn’t flinch then either. I knew instinctively that he wouldn’t hurt me, not in a way that would be visible.

No, Bram would make me feel small and invisible. He would set my soul on fire until it burned into ashes at his feet. He would break my heart into a million pieces.

But he wouldn’t make me bleed.

I drew the knife across his palm, and the other girls gasped and shuffled as blood rose to the surface of his skin.

He lifted his bloody hand to my cheek and I met his gaze as he held it there. And this time, I didn’t recoil from the wet heat of his blood.

Behind him, the other hunters shifted, like something momentous had happened, like they didn’t know what to make of it.

Then Bram dropped his hand and sheathed his knife.

“Start the clock.”

4

ETHAN

I watchedfrom behind my mask as Bram approached the girl named Maeve and I knew immediately that there was something between them.

It wasn’t a total surprise. Anton had dug deep on Maeve Haver since she’d been spotted by the security cameras idling outside the iron gates around my house on the mountain. We knew she’d been staying with Bram, Poe, and Remy.

The fucking Blackwell Butchers.

We also knew she’d left and was now living in an apartment with a friend named Bailey Alvarez, an apartment with Maeve’s name on the lease.

I’d assumed she’d just been a fuck for the Butchers, a Hunt girl who’d lost.

One of many.

But I was good at seeing things other people missed. Especially in people.

I knew when women — even confident women — were insecure. Knew when they had a black hole that needed filling, preferably by a man. I knew how to convince them I could fill that hole, knew how to coax them along, make them feel seen.Knew exactly when to start turning the wheel, bringing them around to my way of thinking, to doing the things I wanted them to do.

After that it was easy to get them working in the cam rooms or farming them out to in-person clients. That was the thing most people didn’t understand. For the women who worked in my operation, it wasn’t about the money.

It was about the approval.

It was about pleasing me, making melikethem, which was the funniest fucking part of the whole bit. I liked them — some of them — in the way I liked a good pen or a warm jacket.

I liked them when they were functional, when they served a purpose.

But I did see them. I saw what they needed from me to become another instrument in the toolbox of my underground empire.

And now I saw Bram Montgomery, saw the way his body tightened as he approached Maeve Haver, his gaze locked on her face like a missile homing in on a target.

They had fucking chemistry.

I could almost see it rippling through the air between them, could almost feel the energy Bram put into maintaining the three feet of distance between them as he handed her the clipboard.

He felt something for her, and I tilted my head to look at Poe Killborn and Remy Taft, looking for signs in their body language that would mimic Bram’s hunger.

But Poe and Remy stood stock-still, their faces hidden by their creepy fucking animal bone masks and the fact that they were in profile.

It didn’t matter. If Bram had a thing for the Haver girl, I was willing to bet Poe and Remy had a thing for her too. The Butchers were younger than me by ten years, but they’d been apackage deal even when I’d left Blackwell Falls almost a decade earlier, although they’d just been getting started then.