Page 18 of Rule the Night (Blackwell Butchers #1)

MAEVE

“I wasn’t working inventory last night.”

Bailey had turned off the TV. Now her body was angled toward mine, her eyes on my face. It was one of the things I’d always loved about Bailey: if I needed her she was there, like really there. She wasn’t thinking about her phone or the show she wanted to watch.

“Ooookay, where were you then? And why did you lie?” Her face lit up. “You’re seeing someone!”

“Definitely not that.” I’d had exactly three hookups — all of them from online apps, none of them lasting more than a month — since my two-year relationship with Noah Larsen in high school.

She frowned. “What then?”

I didn’t blame her for being confused. We didn’t keep secrets from each other. Or we hadn’t until I’d started hunting the man responsible for June’s murder. I’d kept a lot of secrets since then — Bailey just didn’t know it.

I drew in a breath and spilled it: the hours I’d spent stalking my target, the underground game I’d heard about from Hannah, my deep dive into the Hunt, the price I had to pay for losing.

The only thing I left out was my failed assassination attempt on the man I blamed for June’s murder, and then only because I didn’t want Bailey to be implicated as an accessory if the cops ever figured out it was me.

When I was done, Bailey just stared at me like I was a complete stranger. Which, fair.

She shook her head. “Wait… you’re saying you let these guys hunt you through tunnels and now you have to be their… their… sex slave?”

“I didn’t say sex slave.”

“What else does it mean when three guys force you to move in with them as some kind of servant?!”

“Can you just… keep it down?”

Bailey was getting loud and the walls weren’t exactly thick between our unit and Mrs. Carr’s.

“Keep it down?” She jumped up from the couch and started pacing the room, rubbing her forehead like she had a migraine coming on, which was possible.

Bailey had been getting migraines since we were fifteen.

“Keep it down. You’re going to be a slave to three guys you don’t even know and you want me to keep it down? ”

Okay, now she was just sounding hysterical.

I stood. “I don’t expect you to understand, but this is just…” I took a deep breath. “This is just something I have to do. For June.”

“Chris is in prison!” Bailey practically shouted.

“And that’s where he belongs,” I said. “But he’s not the only one responsible. You know that.”

Bailey’s shoulders sagged. “You can’t go after every misogynist in the manosphere.”

“I’m not. Just one.” I started up the narrow flight of stairs to my room on the second floor.

Upstairs, I entered the bedroom that had been mine since I’d moved in with Bailey during community college and pulled my suitcase from the closet.

“You can’t do this,” Bailey said, appearing in my doorway. “This is crazy, Maeve.”

“I know it seems that way,” I said, pulling a stack of clothes from my dresser and crossing the room to put them in the suitcase.

She sat on the edge of my bed. “How else would you describe moving in with three guys you don’t know after playing a game to get them to kill for you?”

I returned to my dresser for my underwear, bras, and socks. “Okay, it’s a little crazy, but I’m doing it for June.”

“June is dead,” Bailey said.

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that?” It came out harsher than I’d intended, but I didn’t need to be reminded that my sister was dead.

And right on cue, June’s voice was in my head again.

Chill, Maeve. Jesus.

Bailey’s mouth was drawn into a tight line somewhere between hurt and anger.

“I’m sorry.” I sat next to her on the bed and took her hand. “I just… I have to do this. I have to, okay?”

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “You do know that, don’t you?”

I pulled my hand away. “That’s not the point.”

“What about your parents? What about Simon and Olivia?”

“I’m not going to tell my parents.” I got to my feet and headed for the closet. “And I’m definitely not telling Simon and Olivia.”

It was the last thing any of them needed. They’d been through enough. This was my fight.

“So you want me to lie for you.”

Now she sounded pissed.

“It’s not going to come up,” I said, pulling blouses and dresses off hangers. I added them to the suitcase and went back to the closet for shoes. “I’m not disappearing. I’ll be right in town, I think. And I’ll still be able to see you and text and stuff.”

I wasn’t actually sure about any of that, but I didn’t get the vibe from the men known as the Butchers that they intended to keep me under lock and key. And they couldn’t really, because I needed to keep working to pay my share of the rent. I wasn’t going to leave Bailey in a lurch.

Silence settled between us as I dug through my closet, trying to choose shoes that would work for multiple outfits so I wouldn’t have to borrow a second suitcase from Bailey.

That would be a bridge too far.

When I turned around to add the shoes to my suitcase, Bailey was sitting on the bed with her arms folded over her chest and I had a flash of her at ten years old doing the same thing, except back then she‘d been the one with the crazy ideas and I'd been the voice of reason.

“I guess you’ve made up your mind then.”

I threw the shoes in my suitcase and sat next to her again. “I have. I’m sorry. I know this is weird. I love you and I don’t want you to be mad at me. I just… I can’t get past this. Not until he pays. June would want me to stop him.”

It wasn’t exactly true. June would have taken care of it herself. June had always taken care of me — of all of us — which was exactly why I had to take care of her now.

“I’m going to be all alone here.” Bailey sounded forlorn.

“I’ll be close though,” I said. “And I’ll still be paying my share of the rent. Who knows? Maybe you’ll like living alone.”

“I won’t,” she said, sulking.

I laughed a little. “You won’t have to tell me to get my crap off the coffee table and no one will eat your ice cream without asking permission.”

She exhaled. “True. Will I be able to come visit you?”

“I’m not sure.” There was a lot I didn’t know, which only reminded me how insane it had been to agree to the situation at all. “Probably?”

“Will you text me an address when you get there?” she asked. “Someone should know where you are.”

I nodded. “Definitely.”

That was a nonnegotiable. After what had happened to June, we were careful about keeping each other posted on our whereabouts.

My parents and Simon and Olivia too. When the worst happened to one person in your life, you felt it breathing down your neck forever, a reminder that your life could change on a dime.

In the weeks before her murder, June had been hard to reach. She hadn’t texted, had sometimes taken days to answer texts. She’d been missing for three days when we finally realized something was wrong, that something had happened to her.

Those three days haunted me. I knew the exact date Chris had killed her from the trial, and I had nightmares of June buried in the woods, all alone, for the eight days it took to find her.

I closed my suitcase, then hurried around my room to gather my charging cables, computer, a couple books, and other necessities. I’d been inside the apartment for almost an hour and I didn’t trust Poe not to come looking for me.

That would make things worse. Right now Bailey could imagine the men who’d hunted me as semi-normal. But one look at Poe, with his animal-tooth necklace and inked skin, his bulging muscles and unreadable gaze, and she’d lock me in the house and call the police.

I looked around the room to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. “I think that’s it.”

She reached out her hand for the tote bag. “Let me get that for you.”

“I got it.” I leaned in to hug her. “Thank you.”

For all her worry, she was still going to support me in this crazy scheme.

“Whatever,” she said. “Just tell those guys if they touch a hair on your head, I’ll kill them.”

I had a flash of my three hunters: the teasing glint in Remy’s hazel eyes, the heat of Poe’s body so close to mine in the tunnels, Bram’s scar slashing his face like a boundary I shouldn’t cross, the vacuum of his energy threatening to suck me into nothingness.

My pulse raced, my body alive in an unfamiliar and terrifying way. I was about to move in with three strange men known as the Butchers.

And clearly, it wasn’t my hair I needed to worry about.