Page 1 of Rule the Night (Blackwell Butchers #1)

MAEVE

I didn’t scare easily — not anymore — but the Orpheum at night terrified me. It wasn’t just the way it looked, which okay, was pretty unsettling: abandoned movie theater, old neon sign, and an array of inked, leather-clad guys congregating outside.

It was what was waiting inside that made me feel like my heart was going to beat out of my chest.

June would have thought it was ridiculous, me carrying a weapon. I could almost hear her laughing, could almost hear her telling me to stick to baking cookies and leave the protecting to her.

She’d been the oldest after all.

Then came the voice of my parents: my mom disapproving, my dad horrified.

Once upon a time, we hadn’t been the kind of people, the kind of family, who carried guns. But that was then and this was now and if anyone knew how dramatically life had changed since my sister’s murder, it was my parents.

Which was why I was here, walking through the doors of the Orpheum on the south side of Blackwell Falls, the side my dad had been telling June and me — and our two younger siblings Simon and Olivia — to avoid since we were old enough to go into town alone.

We weren’t the kind of people who hung out in Southside either.

It was a rough crowd, full of men and women in leather, tattoos signifying their membership in the local MCs or street gangs, piercings, and lots of long, hard stares.

I’d dressed for the occasion in tight black jeans and a cropped black T-shirt, plus the leather jacket.

I’d pulled my long black hair into a ponytail worn with my flat lug-soled boots — both of which seemed like wise choices considering my reason for being here — but I wasn’t sure I was fooling anybody.

This was definitely not my scene.

I walked past the crowd with my head held high (fake it ’til you make it and all that) and stepped into the lobby of the Orpheum.

It was noisy inside, with the air of a club or bar, music beating from the shadowed hall to the left of the defunct concession stand, the popcorn machine as empty and lifeless as one of the cars that were routinely stripped on the streets outside.

I wasn’t worried about that myself. I was driving June’s old Honda, a reliable if boring hunk of black metal that had over a hundred thousand miles and still smelled like her perfume.

The only value the car had was sentimental.

I stood in the center of the lobby and tried to get the lay of the land. Most of the crowd was funneling toward a bouncer on the left, but I looked right in time to see three large men disappear down another hall.

It didn’t take me long to get a handle on the layout of the place: the concession stand in the middle, the hallways on either side that had once led to movie theaters.

The problem? Which way to go.

“Looking for Fight Night?”

I looked up and found a tall, wiry guy with platinum hair looking down at me. He was wearing a leather vest with the Blades’ logo, gauges as big as quarters stretching his earlobes, his skin covered in ink.

“Um… no.” I didn’t know exactly where I was going, what it was called, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t Fight Night because I’d heard about Fight Night and it had been described exactly like it sounded: a no-holds-barred street fight in one of the abandoned auditoriums.

Not why I was here.

The guy lifted his eyebrows in surprise. “You’re looking for the Hunt.” He pointed to the right. “That way.”

The Hunt.

The words dried out my mouth. I’d known what I was getting into — kind of — but Hannah, my coworker at Lushberry, had told me it was a game. A high-stakes game, but a game nonetheless.

Calling it the Hunt made it sound like something completely different, and I wondered for the thousandth time if I’d completely lost my mind, if June’s murder had untethered me from reality.

“Thanks.” I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt.

“Good luck.”

The skepticism in his voice wasn’t exactly reassuring.

I threaded my way through the crowd and started for the hall on the right. It was quieter over here, the music from the other side of the theater a low thump, more of a vibration than a sound.

The theaters on this side of the building were dark and quiet, the hall empty except for two large guys standing in front of an unmarked door that looked like a supply closet.

One of the guys — tall and muscular with black hair and a Barbarians tattoo — looked me up and down. “Wrong side, girlie.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Fight Night’s that way,” the other guy said, tipping his head toward the other side of the theater. He was tall and thin, with long blond hair and a Blades tattoo on his left arm, visible under his black tank top.

“I’m not here for Fight Night.”

“Cutting it close,” the Barbarian said. “Doors close in less than five minutes.”

I shrugged.

“Your funeral.” He stepped forward. “Arms up.”

“Arms… what?” He was close now, just a foot away and clearly planning to touch me.

“Weapons aren’t allowed in the Hunt,” the skinny guy said. “Not on the girls anyway.”

I snorted at that last part. Was there a single situation in the world where women weren’t undermined?

“Figures,” I said, already queuing up my lie. “I don’t have any weapons.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” The Barbarian gestured for me to lift my arms.

I raised them because I didn’t have a choice. I mean, I could have left, called the whole thing off. But that wasn’t really an option, not if I wanted revenge for June.

And I very much wanted revenge for the murder of my sister. Wanted to keep what had happened to her from happening to anyone else.

There was nothing sexual in the pat down.

The big guy started at my shoulders, running his hands down my arms like he was a doctor looking for a break.

He continued up the side of my body, past my cell phone in my jacket pocket, then shook his head when he got to Rose in the shoulder holster against my side.

“You said you didn’t have any weapons.” He sounded almost wounded.

“I lied.” I pulled away when he started to take Rose out of the holster. “You’re not taking my gun.”

His eyes flashed and I realized he was probably a dangerous man. “You can either give me the gun or you can leave. The end.”

My inner battle only lasted a few seconds, mostly because I’d fought it long before I’d gotten here. I wasn’t leaving. Not until I’d done everything I could for June.

“Will I get it back?” I asked.

“When the Hunt’s over,” the skinny guy said.

I couldn’t even see him behind the man in front of me.

“Even if I lose?”

“Even if you lose.” The Barbarian was getting annoyed. “Now are you in or are you out?”

I exhaled the last of my resistance and removed Rose from my shoulder holster.

I handed it to him. “I’ll come after you if I don’t get that back.”

He surprised me by laughing, then turned to the skinny guy. “Bram’s going to like this one.”

He opened the door and I stepped into a small vestibule washed with red light flowing from a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. It illuminated a narrow staircase that led downward.

Not a supply closet. A basement.

A cold chill ran up my spine. Details about the Hunt had been vague. I only knew what I had to do to win and that winning meant getting the revenge I craved.

I knew what happened if I lost too. A risk I was willing to take.

But I hadn’t known it would take place underground and I hadn’t known I’d have to give up Rose.

“Last chance,” the big guy said behind me. He looked ominous in the red light glowing from the stairwell.

I started down the stairs and heard the door close behind me.

There was no music, no sound at all until I reached the bottom of the stairwell. Then I caught the murmur of voices on the other side of a door like the one at the top of the stairs.

I opened the door before I had a chance to change my mind and entered a small room lit red like the stairwell. It took a second for my eyes to adjust, to get a handle on what I was seeing: a group of women crowded to one side of the small room, a group of men on the other.

But not just men. Masked men.

They stood in groups of three, a montage of ink and muscles and piercings, their masks varied in sets of three: skeletons and reapers and creepy hockey masks and one threesome in scary-as-fuck masks that looked to be made out of animal skulls, the bone cracked and gilded, the snout elongated, a yawning maw of a mouth where the mask ended.

I shivered, wrapping my arms around my body as I joined the women.

There were seven of them, in their early twenties like me, except for one, who looked a little older.

Some of them were dressed in leggings and sneakers — ready to run — while others looked like they’d dressed for a night out with the girls.

I felt a swell of sympathy. They were going to struggle.

A folding table stacked with supplies stood against one wall. A handwritten sign over it read FIRST AID. Across the room by the men, another table stood, this one smaller and holding nothing but a clipboard.

On one wall, a digital clock glowed 24:00:00. A red neon sign buzzed near the ceiling.

No names.

No safe words.

No escape.

Jesus. Make it extra creepy why don’t you.

The door opened and the Barbarian who’d frisked me stepped into the room looking surprisingly normal compared to the men in masks.

He walked toward one of the men in the bone masks, although calling him a man was like calling a wild stallion a pony.

He was huge, a giant of a man with huge shoulders, biceps that bulged even as his arms hung at his sides, and thighs barely contained by his ripped jeans.

And his sculpted chest? Well, that wasn’t contained at all. It was completely bare, ink crawling across his exposed skin, shadowed words and images winding up his neck and over his shoulders.

The guard bent to say something to the huge masked man and my blood ran cold when the giant turned his gaze on me.

He nodded, then peeled off from the crowd and crossed the room to the door.

The girls in the room shrank away from him, edging away from the door like a herd of deer sensing a wolf.

He was imposing. Menacing.

But it wasn’t just his appearance that made my skin crawl. It was something else, a kind of vacuous energy that traveled with him across the room, his footsteps heavy in black boots not unlike my own.

He dropped a heavy wooden bolt over the door, the kind people used in horror movies to keep out the monsters, except I was pretty sure all the monsters were locked in the room with us.

“You almost didn’t make it,” the girl next to me said.

She was cute, with a perky nose and blonde hair tied back into a ponytail. She wore sneakers, leggings, and a body-hugging T-shirt, the halter straps of her sports bra visible around her neck.

Smart girl.

“Didn’t expect the meatheads at the door,” I said.

She laughed nervously. “Right?”

The scary guy rejoined the rest of his team and the men shifted, crowding closer together in groups of three, all with matching masks. They talked amongst themselves, glancing at us, sizing us up as they engaged in heated conversation I couldn’t hear.

Teams. They were divided into teams designated by their matching masks.

Three of them chasing every one of us.

I swallowed around the lump of fear in my throat.

The giant in the bone mask now stood off to the side with two other Herculean men, both shirtless and wearing identical masks: a shaggy-haired blond, his arms covered entirely with ink, and a dark-haired guy whose neck was ringed with chains and leather cords.

The hilt of a knife protruded from leather cords tied around each of their waists.

They bent their heads in discussion as the other guys did the same. We didn’t get to choose who hunted us, but the hunters were clearly claiming their prey.

“Hoping for anyone specific?” I asked the blonde girl next to me.

She shivered as she looked at the men huddled in groups across the room. “Anyone but the Butchers.”

I followed her gaze to the three men in the animal bone masks, all of them staring.

At me.