Page 36 of Rule the Night (Blackwell Butchers #1)

brAM

I waited for Remy and Poe to be out to walk the three blocks to Aloha’s headquarters.

I told myself it was because they were busy.

One of the Barbarians had been caught selling drugs outside their designated area — and within the buffer zone I’d instituted around schools to boot — and while I could have gone to the MC’s president to issue a complaint, dealing with the rule breaker directly was more effective.

Remy and Poe would deliver the message that he’d been caught.

So yeah, they were busy, but deep down I knew that wasn’t why I found myself walking alone to meet with Aloha.

It was because I didn’t want Remy and Poe to know what I was doing, didn’t want them to know how preoccupied I’d become with Maeve Haver in the nearly three weeks she’d been living with us.

I’d never been distracted by one of the Hunt girls before. We hunted them, they came to cook if they lost, sometimes Remy or Poe flirted with them, and I avoided them.

The end.

But somewhere between that fucking gun Maeve had tried to bring into the Hunt — the gun she still carried under her sweatshirt around the house, like she was going to shoot one of us dead while we ate her lasagna — and the way she filled the fridge with home-cooked meals, I’d started to obsess over her in a way that was more than a little uncomfortable.

And I couldn’t even think about the desserts.

I could only assume she’d been sent by the devil to tempt me, because the only thing that could make the stubborn dark-haired beauty more tempting was the way she filled the house with the smell of mouth-watering muffins, chocolate cookies, and vanilla-laced cupcakes.

I didn’t eat any of them on principle, but that didn’t mean I didn’t dream about them — about her — when I was in my room, satisfying my sweet tooth by powering Snickers bars two at a time.

Fuck.

I pushed Maeve from my mind as I made my way back toward the heart of Southside. The loft was at the edge of town, where Main Street dead-ended at the Blackwell Preserve. I liked it because it was quiet, the two blocks surrounding our building empty by design.

We’d been buying up the surrounding property over the last few years, creating a quiet empire of old warehouses and factory buildings.

We weren’t alone. The Kings had bought up a few Southside properties, and the Blades owned one or two, but the three blocks around the loft were owned by the shell corporation set up by Remy, Poe, and me.

We could have made a mint selling to some developer who would have turned the old buildings into overpriced residential units or hipster eateries, but the whole point was to make sure Blackwell was owned by Blackwell people.

It was debatable whether the Kings — the rich fucks who’d come here for college and set up residence outside of town — qualified, but they had a kid now, had settled down enough to make it seem like their move here was permanent.

Plus, they contributed to the town in their own way, running the drug trade — among other things — between Aventine University and the town.

With my permission of course.

I reached Aloha’s building, an old brick warehouse with a BLACKWELL WIRE sign on the roof, intact from the days when floral wire had been manufactured there and shipped all over the country.

I didn’t have an appointment, but that didn’t matter here or anywhere in Blackwell. The town belonged to me, had since I’d started working to make it safe for Cassie while making enough money to make sure she’d never want for anything even though we’d lost both our parents when she was just a kid.

That she spent her days at the coffee shop on the north side of town, far away from the drugs and gangs that dominated Southside, was one of my only points of pride.

I’d bought the coffee shop and the apartment units above it to give her a safe place to call home, and no one was happier than me that she rarely stepped foot on the south side of town.

I hopped up the concrete platform leading to Aloha’s warehouse — one of the buildings owned by the Blades — and approached the metal door. It clicked open in seconds thanks to the camera mounted above it, and I stepped into the cool, shadowed interior.

Concrete floors stretched into the distance, and old factory equipment loomed in the shadows. Dust motes floated through the air, lit by the columns of sunlight that streamed in from the big windows overhead.

I crossed the expanse of concrete, aiming for the steel-walled box that had been constructed toward the back of the building. Aloha’s currency was information, his idea of security more concrete than my own.

Aloha kept people out of his shit with metal walls and a series of 0s and 1s, lined up on a computer screen like ancient hieroglyphs. I kept people out of mine with fists and guns and knives.

With fear.

I stopped at the door leading to the metal box, then stepped through it when it clicked open.

The door was heavier than it looked. It swung shut with a thud and I stepped into a room that was even darker than the shadowed warehouse floor.

That had been an homage to the past: the machines that had once made something tangible now silent, the ghost of footsteps and busy hands lurking in the shadows.

Aloha’s headquarters was an ode to the future. Computer screens were lined up on long worktables, and the only light came from strips of LEDs mounted under the ceiling of the black box and the electronic glow of the computer screens.

Two of the computer stations were occupied by two younger dudes in Blades cuts. A pretty bald woman sat at a third, her fingers flying over the keys, earbuds visible in her ears.

Other than the tap of fingers on keyboards and the soft hum of the processors at work, the place was silent.

I ignored them and approached the bald guy sitting in front of three monitors, the Blades MC logo — a pair of daggers forming an X over a blood-drenched skull — visible on the back of his cut.

He stopped typing and turned his chair to face me without missing a beat.

It was a concession I didn’t take for granted.

I was in Aloha’s lair now, a place where the hacker reigned supreme over everyone but me, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to keep people waiting when he was deep in the weeds of his work.

He stood and I shook his hand. “How’s it hanging?”

He had course features and a graying beard, his once-muscular arms now more meaty than sculpted.

“It’s hanging,” Aloha said. “You?”

“Same. Thanks for that work you did for us a couple weeks ago.”

It was hard to believe Maeve had already been with us for almost three weeks.

She’d slipped right into our lives, filling the fridge and freezer with her delicious food and the loft with the scent of strawberries (what was that?), disappearing for her shifts at the mall, shutting herself in her room with her computer, which she always closed when one of us approached.

“No problem,” Aloha said.

The favors I asked of Aloha — of anyone in Blackwell Falls — weren’t really favors, but I pretended they were in the name of a good working relationship, and Aloha played along for the same reason.

“Mind taking a deeper dive?” I asked.

“On the girl?”

I nodded.

“Anything specific?”

I thought about Maeve’s background, her sister’s murder, the fact that Remy had caught her listening to that douchebag Ethan Todd. “Her sister was murdered a year and a half ago. I want anything you can find on the case, her family, the guy they got for the crime.”

I knew from my own research that the sister’s boyfriend had been a fan of Todd — that had been part of the trial — but that didn’t explain why Maeve would subject herself to his toxic bullshit.

He rubbed at his beard. “Sounds like you want everything.”

I had a flash of Maeve’s dark hair, swinging in its ponytail while she checked something in the oven, her blue eyes bright when she looked at me even though it was obvious she wasn’t a fan.

“I want everything.”