Page 43 of Rule the Night (Blackwell Butchers #1)

REMY

“I can’t believe this stupid motherfucker,” I muttered on our way out of town.

Bram drove the Hummer while I stared out the window, sulking about the fact that I had to spend my Saturday doing such a dumb fucking errand.

“He’ll learn,” Bram said, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. “Or he won’t, in which case he’ll find a nice resting spot up on the mountain.”

“At least the interns brought him in.”

The term was a running joke, our name for the shiftless street toughs who had potential, the ones we paid to do the grunt work in our operation.

“True.”

It was bad enough we had to go to the warehouse on a Saturday. At least Brick was already waiting.

“You try any of that peach thing Maeve made last night?” I guess it was off topic, but the truth was, Maeve never felt off topic, owing to the fact that I spent almost every waking moment — and more than a few of my sleeping ones — thinking about her.

“No.” Bram’s voice was tight, like it always was when one of us mentioned Maeve.

After almost a month, he was still a total dick to her, which shouldn’t have been a surprise since Bram was a total dick to everyone.

But Maeve was different, and I knew she was different because instead of being an outright asshole, Bram’s dickishness toward her came in the form of pretending she didn’t exist.

Bram was usually more assertive when he didn’t like someone, which was how I knew that wasn’t the problem.

“Me neither,” I said, thinking about the golden crust surrounding a bed of glittering peaches, like a pie but without the pan. “But man, I wanted to.”

I wasn’t often tempted by desserts, but Maeve worked a hell of a lot of magic in the kitchen.

The meals she made to my macro specs were plenty delicious, but I could hardly ever justify a taste of her desserts, and I’d gotten used to drooling over rich chocolate cakes, pastries that looked lighter than air, and pies that made me want to grab a fork and go to town without even bothering with a plate.

“Don’t get used to it,” Bram said, turning onto the main highway leading away from Blackwell Falls.

“That why you never eat her desserts?”

He flipped me off without a word, which was how I knew I’d hit pay dirt. If my question hadn’t landed, he would have had some kind of quippy response. His wordless middle finger meant he didn’t trust himself to speak.

I knew him though. Like I knew Poe. Like they both knew me.

Bram would have given his left nut for some of Maeve’s homemade desserts. The fact that he refused to eat them spoke volumes. Fucker was probably beating off with a Snickers in one hand while Poe single-handedly devoured every treat Maeve took out of the oven.

We took the second exit off the highway and entered a long stretch of flat land touched with gold. There were fields of sunflowers, corn, and lots of things I couldn’t make out from the road, industrial sprinklers dropping water on the crops.

These were the small towns outside of Blackwell Falls where generational farming was still a thing and the farmers hauled their crops to the Blackwell Farmers Market every Saturday until the first snowfall.

I’d never even been before Maeve came to live with us, but she insisted on buying our produce there, and I’d gone along a couple of times when she and Poe had done the grocery shopping.

We passed several machines working the land, then pulled into a long dirt driveway leading to a dilapidated gray barn. The place was deserted except for a Harley Sportster and an unmarked white work van that had seen better days.

Bram pulled next to the bike and we reached into the back seat for our masks.

We got out of the car, put on the masks, and bypassed the big swinging doors for a smaller side door at the side of the structure.

There was nobody around, but there was no reason to be sloppy by advertising the fact that we had one of the Barbarians inside.

There was no keypad here, no security or alarms. As far as anyone knew, this was a twenty-acre stretch of land — small by modern farming standards — that had been sold off to a developer who was still deciding what the fuck to do with it.

Except the “developer” was us and we were already using it for its intended purpose.

We stepped into a shadowy interior lit only with the shafts of sunlight streaming in from cracks in the barn’s siding. It smelled like warm earth and hay, with the faintest remnants of manure, a combination that wasn’t at all unpleasant.

Tate and Danny, the two interns we’d tasked with the job of collecting our prisoner, stood next to a shirtless man in blood-stained denim whose wrists and ankles were tied to a rusting metal chair in the center of the cavernous space.

His eyes got wide — well, one of them got wide, the other was swollen shut — when he saw us. I knew it was a combination of things: our reputation and Bram’s size and the fact that he was one huge, scary motherfucker, especially with the mask.

Some people said Bram Montgomery didn’t have a soul, but they had it all wrong.

Bram had a soul — it was just as black as the tunnels when the lights went out.

An old wood worktable stood a few feet from the chair, a series of metal instruments lined up on its surface. A package of gauze and duct tape was stacked next to it, along with a rubber tourniquet.

The shirtless guy’s nose was broken, a purple bruise was forming on the right side of his stomach, and a Barbarians tattoo was inked over his chest. “Bram, I swear— ”

The masks weren’t to hide our identity. We didn’t hide. They were for us, to separate the people we tried to be from the ones we were in times like this.

“Anyone spot you?” Bram asked the interns, ignoring the pleas of our prisoner, a Barbarian named, in an irony of all ironies, Brick.

Which suited him because that fucker was dumb as a brick.

Tate, a tall redhead with a baby beard who was due to move up in the organization, shook his head. “He was coming out of the bathroom at the Sunoco outside Greenvale.”

I knew the place: practically abandoned, no chance in hell of a security camera.

Bram nodded. “Good.”

Tate tried to suppress his pleasure. Even faint praise from Bram was a big deal.

“I don’t know what’s going on, I swear,” Brick pleaded. “I mean, okay, I sold an eight-ball to some kid a block from the high school, but he swore he doesn’t go there.”

I looked at Danny, a pimply-faced black-haired kid with crooked front teeth. “You good?”

You never knew with the newbies. Not everyone had the stomach for what we did.

“I’m good.”

Jesus, how old was this kid, fifteen? It didn’t even sound like his voice had dropped yet.

“Why don’t you wait outside,” I said. “Keep watch.”

Better to ease the kid in, and from the look on Danny’s face, he’d already seen a few things before Bram and I had gotten there.

He headed for the door without a word. Bram waited for it to close to turn to the guy in the chair.

“I’m not going to waste time here. We don’t sell around schools. Remy and Poe gave you a warning less than a month ago.”

“But like I said, I— ”

“Tape his mouth,” Bram told me.

He wasn’t angry. This was just business.

I picked up the roll of duct tape while Bram perused the instruments.

Our prisoner’s eyes were wide, focused on Bram as he chose a set of sharp metal pliers. “No… please…”

I tore off a piece of tape and slapped it over his mouth. “Don’t worry, you’ll have nine more chances after this to get it right.”

I didn’t have to tell him what would happen after that.

He knew.

He started thrashing in the chair as Bram stalked back over, the pliers in one hand, the rubber tourniquet in the other. The chair tipped over and the man fell to the barn’s dirt floor with a thud.

Bram righted the chair with one hand and held the pliers in his mouth while he worked the tourniquet around the guy’s forearm.

“Adults want to pump shit into their veins, it’s none of my business.

” His words were garbled around the pliers.

“But only a fucking animal sells to kids. And we’re not animals. ”

He was wrong, of course. We were animals. We’d chased Maeve through the tunnels, had all but forced her to live with us after we’d caught her, had done it before with countless girls.

But there were animals and there were animals, and we weren’t the kind of animals who got kids hooked on drugs.

The tourniquet in place, Bram reached for Brick’s left hand.

He thrashed again and the chair hopped on the ground before Bram called me over. “Hold this fucker still.”

I walked over, planning to put my boot down on the chair’s stabilizer bar, but I misjudged the distance and ended up crashing into him instead.

The chair fell again and the guy screamed behind the tape covering his mouth.

“Sorry.” I put the chair back on its legs.

I was pretty sure the guy was swearing at me, but it was hard to tell with the tape on his mouth.

I stepped on the stabilizer bar to hold him steady.

“They say a cat has nine lives,” Bram said, opening the pliers around the man’s left pinky. “You get ten.”

“Lucky you,” I said as Bram clamped down on the guy’s finger.

Blood arced onto the dirt floor, and a muffled scream tore from the back of the guy’s throat.

But it was nothing to worry about. That was the whole point of the barn.

No one to hear him scream.