Page 31 of Rule the Night (Blackwell Butchers #1)

MAEVE

I was up early the next day, relieved Hannah had agreed to take my shift at Lushberry so I could start meal prepping. If I was going to keep my job and honor my commitment to the Butchers, I needed to have some meals ready to go for the days when I was at work.

I started off with breakfast, putting two kinds of muffins — blueberry and chocolate chip — into the oven while I made a special high-protein/low-carb batch of blueberry bran for Remy.

Then I went to work on egg bites in two batches, filling muffin tins with eggs, cheese, bacon, and diced scallions for Poe and Bram and setting up a second pan for Remy with egg whites, finely chopped broccoli, and cheese measured to meet his macro targets.

What a royal pain in the ass.

By ten a.m., I was working on lunch options: three kinds of wraps, two kinds of salad, and a pasta salad for Poe and Bram (Remy avoided “empty carbs”).

I was mixing the pasta salad in a giant stainless-steel bowl when Poe entered the kitchen, his dark hair tousled from sleep.

His chest was bare, but thankfully, he was wearing gray sweats, although they did nothing for all the dirty thoughts that had been running through my head since our altercation in the hallway.

“Wow,” he said, raking his hands through his hair, “looks like you’ve been at it a while.”

“I have to prep some stuff in advance. I have a job.”

“Lushberry, right?”

I frowned. “Let me guess, you got that from the background you did on me.”

“Yeah, but I already apologized for that.”

“I know.” I said it through my clenched jaw. How much did these fuckers know about me?

About June?

Relax, M. Jesus.

June was always quiet when I was cooking or baking, which was probably why I didn’t do it much anymore, but now that I was clashing with one of my three new roommates, she was suddenly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Figured. June had always been nosy.

“Did you have to take today off?” Poe asked.

“I got someone to cover my shift, but I can’t do that all the time.”

I had no idea what the Butchers did for a living, but it sure didn’t seem like they were going to put on a suit and go to an office for eight hours every day.

“Sounds like we need to have a meeting,” he said, “sync our schedules.”

“I don’t know about that.” Sync our schedules made it sound like we were… I don’t know, friends or something.

“We have stuff we need to go over with you too,” he said.

“What kind of stuff?”

“Legal stuff. I’ll text Remy and Bram.” He eyed the muffins cooling on the counter. “Are these free game?”

“Of course.” I pointed out the ones I’d set aside for Remy, and Poe added one of the other muffins to a plate with two of the egg bites, then went to make a cup of coffee.

A few minutes later, Remy appeared in the kitchen wearing jeans and nothing else. He padded sleepily to the coffee machine and my eyes were drawn again to the ink on his back.

Memento Mori. Remember you must die.

I didn’t want to remember that, didn’t want to remember how quickly it could happen to people who didn’t deserve to lose their lives too soon.

He made his coffee and sniffed the blueberry bran muffin appreciatively before confirming that I’d cooked everything to his specifications.

“I can do that for you if you leave me instructions,” I said when he started making his smoothie.

Why was I offering to do extra work for one of the men who’d chased me through the tunnels? One of the men who’d enslaved me as their cook/who knew what else?

“Really?”

I shrugged. “Sure. If you have extra blender bottles I can put them in the fridge for you so they’re ready to go.”

“That would be awesome.”

Bram stepped into the kitchen. “What would be awesome?”

Why did it seem like he was always coming in at the tail end of a conversation?

“Maeve’s going to make smoothies for me every day,” Remy said, spooning ingredients from his mylar bags on top of the protein powder and yogurt.

“Good for you,” Bram said.

“Are you always this cheerful in the morning?” I asked.

He looked at Poe, ignoring me completely, like he had done the day before. “Are we doing this or what?”

Poe opened his mouth to speak but was drowned out by Remy at the blender.

“… fucking dammit,” Poe was saying when the blender cut off a few seconds later.

Remy grinned. “Sorry.”

Poe glared at him, obviously not willing to risk it by speaking again, which turned out to be an unnecessary precaution when Remy pulled his blender bottle off the machine and started chugging.

“I don’t have all day,” Bram said.

Poe opened one of the drawers in the kitchen and removed a piece of paper. “We need to go over some house and scheduling stuff, but first, you need to sign this.”

He slid a piece of paper across the island.

It took me a few seconds to realize what I was reading. “You want me to sign an NDA?”

“It’s routine,” Poe said.

“Routine.” The word felt strange in my mouth, probably because nothing about the last forty-eight hours had been routine.

“Just legal BS,” Remy said.

I skimmed the document. “I should probably have a lawyer look at this.”

Now I understood why I’d never heard anything about the girls who lost the Hunt and went to live with the Butchers.

“Do you have a lawyer?” Poe asked.

“Not really.” The only lawyers I knew were the DA who’d represented the state in the trial against Chris, June’s boyfriend, and one of my dad’s old college friends.

“Do you want us to find you one?” Remy asked.

“Isn’t that a conflict of interest or something?” I asked.

“You can find one yourself if it bothers you,” Bram said.

It was one of the few times he’d spoken to me since we’d exited the tunnels.

I tried to imagine approaching Roger Davies, my dad’s old college roommate, a balding, jovial man who practiced some kind of family law, with an NDA outlining the terms between me and the three men who’d earned my servitude by hunting me through a series of underground tunnels.

That wasn’t going to work.

“It’s fine,” I muttered. “Just give me a minute.”

I was no lawyer, but the contract looked pretty basic: I agreed not to divulge any details regarding Bram Montgomery, Poe Killborn, or Remy Taft, or their living situation or work or personal lives and any and all affiliated “interests.”

If I did, they could sue me to within an inch of my life.

That was the gist.

“What are you?” I asked. “Some kind of mobsters?”

“Are you going to sign it or not?” Bram's expression was as blank as always, his eyes like twin black holes.

I considered refusing, walking out and never looking back, but I knew they wouldn’t let me compete in the next Hunt if I reneged on the terms of this one.

And I intended to play again, as many times as it took to win justice for June.

I signed my name before I could change my mind and shoved the piece of paper back toward Poe. “Anything else?”

“Maeve has to work,” Poe told Bram and Remy. “She’s making meals ahead of time for when she’s not here.”

“When do you work?” Remy asked.

I picked up my phone, on the island where I’d left it while I’d been cooking. There was a text from Bailey, checking in, but I swiped up to deal with it later.

“Three days next week,” I said.

Remy took my phone from my hand.

My mouth dropped open. “Hey!”

“Just connecting you to the house calendar,” he said.

“We need to give her a parking lot remote too,” Poe said. “And give her the code for the house.”

These guys were unbelievable. “You could have asked.”

“This’ll be faster,” Remy said.

He gave me back my phone less than two minutes later and pointed out the calendar app and the remote for the parking lot. Then Poe gave me the code for the front door.

I was surprised the loft wasn’t wired to an alarm, and I said so.

Remy laughed. “We don’t need an alarm.”

His tone was lighthearted, but there was something ominous in the words, and I had a flash of us on the street after the Hunt, people walking by, going about their business.

Something had been off about that morning, but I’d been too exhausted and disoriented, too angry and upset that I’d lost the Hunt, to put my finger on what it had been.

Now I saw it clearly: no one had looked at us.

I’d been standing next to three huge, tattooed men, men who ruled the night, and yet we might as well have been invisible, as if the Butchers were boogeymen.

As if looking at them might turn you to stone.