Page 30 of Rule the Night (Blackwell Butchers #1)

REMY

As I scrolled through the video listings on Ethan Todd’s channel, the disgust that had been simmering under my skin boiled over into full-fledged fury.

Who the fuck did this loser think he was?

It had taken me a few minutes to realize he was that guy: the guy ginning up all the hate toward women in the manosphere.

Not that he was alone.

Now that I’d looked him up, the algorithms had already pegged me as an Ethan Todd acolyte.

Every time I refreshed my feed there was more toxic bullshit, Ethan Todd wannabes screeching about how women were the problem.

They’d forgotten men were meant to be in charge, had gotten too big headed about what they deserved.

They needed to be put in their place.

I leaned back, staring at the freeze-frame of Todd’s face. He was nothing special, just an average-looking white guy with blond hair and a forgettable face telling men what they wanted to hear: that someone was to blame for their mediocre lives and that someone was always a woman.

So why were so many men listening?

“Why are you watching that asshole?” Poe asked, reaching for a peach in the fruit basket.

He was wearing jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt, which meant he was headed down to work in his studio. Otherwise he probably would have been naked.

Exhibitionist motherfucker.

“Maeve was watching him earlier.”

Poe froze. “When?”

“When I went to her room to tell her she could use the library, which was a lot more innocent than what you were doing with her in the hall.” I was more than a little salty Poe had gotten to Maeve before me.

“You’re just jealous,” I said.

“Jealous of what?” Bram entered the room wearing track pants, sweat dripping down his face and neck from his workout in the loft’s home gym.

He walked to the kitchen, opened a drawer, and came back tearing into a Snickers wrapper.

“Not what,” Poe said. “Who.”

Bram waved around the open Snickers bar. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Poe was fucking around with Maeve in the hall,” I said.

Bram’s jaw twitched. “I thought we didn’t fuck around with Hunt girls.”

“We don’t,” Poe said. “Usually.”

I watched the interaction play out, my computer still open, Ethan Todd still frozen on my screen.

“Why would this be any different?” Bram had forgotten all about the Snickers in his hand, which wasn’t a good sign. He hadn’t raised his voice, but I knew he was pissed, and Bram pissed was enough to send most people scurrying, raised voice or not.

But he was like my brother, had saved my ass more than once when we’d been working the streets after his parents died, back when he’d been trying to keep Cassie out of foster care, Poe had been trying to clean up his brother, and I’d been a young punk rebelling against my middle-class upbringing.

It didn’t mean Bram didn’t scare me — I was human after all — but I understood him.

“I don’t know,” Poe said.

I understood Poe too, understood his answer.

I didn’t know why Maeve was different either.

Not yet. But Dickens wrote that “every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other,” and the mystery of Maeve was part of what made me want to uncover all her secrets, like an archeologist carefully brushing eons of sand away from some priceless artifact.

Maybe that was why Bram was invested too, even if he hadn’t admitted to himself that he was.

“She was watching this guy’s videos earlier,” I said, more than happy to change the subject. It was safer not to force things with Bram. Safer to let him draw his own conclusions.

Bram looked over my shoulder at my computer. “Why would she be watching that shit?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Bram bit into the Snickers, his forehead furrowed as he studied the frozen video. “Find out."