Page 15 of Rule the Night (Blackwell Butchers #1)

MAEVE

I blinked against the sunlight when we stepped out onto the street.

I felt like I was returning from an alternate dimension.

For nearly twelve hours I’d been immersed in the darkness of the tunnels, the silence broken only by the occasional scream of one of the girls and the war cries of the men who hunted them.

But outside the Orpheum, it was just another day.

Motorcycles sped up and down Main Street, their riders wearing Blades or Barbarians cuts, and Southside’s residents went about their business: coming and going from the deli, the hardware store, the diner.

A few doors down, members of the local MCs were already congregating outside a bar called Screamin’ Syd’s, rows of bikes parked out front.

If my skin hadn’t been tight from the blood the Butchers had smeared on my face, I might have thought I’d imagined the whole night.

“Where to?” the blond guy named Remy asked me.

I looked up at him, squinting against the sun. He’d taken off his mask as we’d left the holding room, but seeing his face in the glow of the red lights was different than seeing it in the light of day.

His hair was even longer than it had seemed when it was constrained by the mask. Now it flopped forward in golden waves that fell into his eyes. I’d thought they were blue when we’d stepped out of the stairwell at the Orpheum, but outside in the sun they were green ringed with amber.

His black tank top — retrieved from a back room at the Orpheum where Bram and Poe had also emerged with shirts — showed off muscular inked arms.

“I have a choice?” I asked.

“I assume you need to pick up some things.” He grinned. “Unless you plan to be naked for the next three months.”

He was every bit as huge and terrifying as Bram and Poe, but his expression was more relaxed, his demeanor almost lighthearted compared to the other two rays of sunshine.

Neither Bram nor Poe had spoken a word since we’d left the Orpheum.

My cheeks burned. “No, I definitely don’t.”

“Then you need to pack,” Remy said, like it was obvious.

“Um, okay… I guess you can give me an address and I’ll just come there after I get my stuff.”

Bram barked out a laugh that sounded more like a warning. “Nice try. We’ll follow you.”

I folded my arms across my chest and stared up at him, but it wasn’t easy. Looking at Bram was like looking into some kind of nightmarish void, one that would wipe your memory, steal your soul. “I’m not going to run. I lost fair and square.”

“Ah, a woman with integrity,” Poe said.

I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me or not.

“I like to think so,” I said.

“Either we follow you or one of us goes with you,” Bram said. “Your choice.”

I didn’t love the idea of riding with one of them to my apartment, but I liked the idea of them following me like stalkers even less. “Fine. Someone can ride with me.”

“Poe.” It was all Bram said as he walked off.

“See you at the loft.” Remy turned, smacked into a parking meter, and swore under his breath as he followed Bram down the sidewalk.

Poe sighed and shook his head. “Where are you parked?”

He looked only slightly less imposing in the harsh light of day, his tattooed chest hidden by a black T-shirt that barely contained his enormous arms.

I pointed at June’s Honda, parked across the street right where I’d left it. “There.”

He touched my elbow and stepped into the street without looking, like he knew with one hundred percent certainty that no one would run us down.

I thought about trying to give him the slip, racing for the car, driving away before he could get into the passenger seat.

But that would be wrong. They’d won the Hunt, and I’d known what I was getting myself into when I’d signed the waiver.

Plus, as scary as it was to think about living with the three men who’d caught me in the tunnels, it was even scarier to imagine them hunting me aboveground in my everyday life.

My parents had been through enough. This was my debt to pay, and I was going to pay it.

I got behind the wheel of the Honda and fished for the keys I’d left in the console while Poe folded his massive body into the passenger seat. The car had always seemed average-sized to me, but now that Poe was there, his knees practically under his chin, it looked super small.

He looked comfortable despite the lack of space, and I had the feeling he was someone who was comfortable anywhere. Looking at him — the slope of his cheekbones, the cut of his jaw — made me feel funny, scared, and excited all at the same time.

The guy who’d searched me had returned my gun at the end of the Hunt, but the weight of it against my tit didn’t comfort me the way it normally did.

I had the sense that I was in a new kind of danger, one that wouldn’t be neutralized with a gun.

I started the car. “Let’s get this over with.”