Page 6 of Rule the Night (Blackwell Butchers #1)

REMY

We didn’t enter the tunnels first. We didn’t need to. We knew them like the backs of our hands, could have made our way through them without the red lights hanging from the stone ceiling.

The other guys swarmed the entrance, disappearing into the darkness with shouts of glee that echoed off the stone and grew muffled as they got farther from the entrance.

We waited until they were gone to step into the tunnels. If the other masked men were warriors on the warpath, we were hunters set loose in our urban wood. We stalked into the first tunnel like the mountain lions that prowled the thick forests surrounding Blackwell Falls.

I sank into the darkness. Some of the men saw it as something to conquer, but I’d always thought of it as a partner in the Hunt. Darkness was what allowed our prey to hide, what allowed us to hunt them.

There was no game without it.

It only took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. The tunnels smelled comforting and familiar, like dirt and cold stone and dead things long buried.

In the distance, we heard one of the girls scream.

“There’s always one,” Poe muttered.

He wasn’t wrong: there was always one girl who was caught right after the Hunt started, someone too slow to put enough distance between us and them, someone too indecisive to make the quick decisions necessary to evade capture by the horde that whooped and hollered its way through the tunnels, the men allowed to satisfy their basest instincts for the night.

To chase, to hunt, and sometimes, to fuck.

“She moved fast,” Bram said.

He wasn’t talking about the girl who’d been caught. He was talking about our prey: the dark-haired girl who’d been stupid enough — or brave enough — to bring a gun to the Hunt.

I didn’t ask Bram how he knew she’d moved fast in the tunnels.

Bram knew everything.

And I could feel it too: the dark-haired girl wasn’t slow or indecisive. She’d stepped into the tunnels with authority, ahead of the others, like she’d known where she was going when there was no way that could be true.

We passed the first set of branching tunnels, one to the right, which led toward the side streets on our side of Main, the other to the left, which led under the road itself, toward the other side of the street.

We were a few hundred feet in when we passed the first set of chains hanging from the tunnel’s ceiling. They weren’t attached to any of the girls, but I knew it was only a matter of time before we passed one of them, marked and strung up, left there to be toyed with by the team who’d claimed them.

I caught the faintest whiff of strawberries in the moment before the scent disappeared.

It was probably our prey’s shampoo or body wash, but I knew instinctively it was her, felt it in my bones, in the hardening of my dick, which was weird because unlike some of the other teams, we didn’t hunt with the intention to fuck — we hunted for the sake of the hunt.

It wasn’t normal. Or I assumed it wasn’t normal, assumed most men went their whole lives without the primal need to hunt, to kill.

But I wasn’t normal. We weren’t normal.

Something was broken in us. Something was wrong with us.

I’d stopped trying to figure out the why a long time ago. Camus was right when he wrote, “Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”

Because when you got right down to it, we were just animals.

Bram, Poe, and I needed to stalk and kill and the Hunt gave us opportunities for both, although more often than not it ended in the servitude of a girl who would come to live with us for three months after we caught her.

But every now and then, we lost. Then we got to kill too, and that was every bit as good as winning.

I wondered about the girl. Why she’d come, who she wanted dead.

She’d clearly planned for the Hunt. Not just by bringing a gun, but in her choice of clothing: jeans and well-worn, thick-soled boots. She’d worn her hair in a ponytail to keep it off her neck and face, had edged toward the entrance to the tunnels like she’d already planned a strategy for winning.

But I sensed a contradiction.

I’d seen the way her throat rippled when Bram confronted her, had seen the flash of fear in her blue eyes before she’d tucked it away.

The Hunt wasn’t posted on the bulletin board at Cassie’s coffee shop. It wasn’t advertised in the Blackwell Bulletin. A girl had to be street-smart to find her way into the tunnels for the Hunt. She had to hang out at Syd’s or ride with the Barbarians or the Blades.

This girl didn’t belong at Syd’s or with one of the local MCs, and she sure as shit wasn’t hanging with one of the street gangs that operated in Southside under Bram’s rules.

Under the black clothes and defiant lift of her chin, the dark-haired girl looked like she belonged at some yoga retreat for rich girls.

Or maybe at the Mill, the bar locals went to when they wanted to feel like they were tough enough for Southside but were too scared to actually set foot on the south side of town.

“This way,” I said when we came to another set of branching tunnels.

We turned the corner and I stumbled over a pile of junk lurking in the shadows.

I caught myself before I fell. “Fuck.”

The clatter of falling crates and old furniture echoed through the tunnels.

“Can you not?” Poe muttered.

“Not like I do it on purpose.” Sometimes I felt like a big dumb dog, tripping over shit right and left, spilling stuff, knocking shit over. I had no idea why I was so fucking clumsy but it was a serious buzz kill.

He sniffed the air like a dog. His dark blue eyes as black as Bram’s in the near darkness. “Strawberries.”

I nodded. This was how we hunted, with a kind of shorthand that didn’t need explanation.

Voices rose behind us. I didn’t know which team had moved back into the main tunnel but I hoped they knew better than to hunt our prey.

For their sake.

“Hawks?” Poe asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

“I dare them.” Bram’s voice was low and threatening, and I knew he meant it. A part of him — a big part — would enjoy having the Hawks step over the line, hunt our girl.

That was the part Bram tried to keep tucked behind a veneer of cold and calculated discipline.

But deep down, he wanted a reason to let out the monster he’d been carrying around ever since his parents had been killed in that car crash, ever since he’d been left to take care of Cassie all on his own.

As for me, well, I didn’t have an excuse. My parents were still alive, still married, my little sisters healthy and happy. We’d suffered no loss, no trauma.

I’d just been born this way. I’d stopped wondering why a long time ago.

The thrill of the Hunt heated my blood as I followed Poe deeper into the tunnels, the scent of strawberries winding its way through my body. We would find the dark-haired girl, bring her to the loft.

Then she would be ours to do with as we pleased.