Page 62 of Rule the Night (Blackwell Butchers #1)

ETHAN

The cam girls were hard at work. Most of them.

I sent messages while I watched them on my screens, warning the ones whose numbers were down, the ones who lay in their rooms reading or sleeping instead of hustling new customers.

It was one of the best parts of the job: watching like a god, sending them messages and watching in real time when they jumped to reach for their phones, furiously typing their excuses and apologies.

And sometimes their defiance.

But those ones didn’t last long.

It was harder to crack the whip now that I was back in the States, but I wasn’t alone. I had people in Hungary, acolytes who were intent on proving themselves.

They would keep the girls in line when my messages didn’t.

I looked up as a knock sounded on the door.

“Enter.” It was a joke. Kind of.

I was a king and my castle was wherever I made it. For now, that was here, in this newly acquired house outside the town where I grew up.

The door opened and Anton Vladescu, head of security and all-around right-hand man, shuffled in, trying not to drag his bad right leg. He was big and meaty, with thinning brown hair and the coarse features of someone who’d spent his life drinking and getting his face beat in.

I’d plucked him from a bad situation with the Romanian mafia and given him a ticket to ride the Ethan Todd empire.

Lucky him.

He’d been with me for almost a decade, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could trust him to do any dirty deed because he’d done them all on my behalf over the years.

“Someone down by the gate,” he said in thickly accented English.

“Now?”

“A few minutes ago.”

I pulled up the cameras on the road at the front of the house and rewound the footage.

A small black car eased forward, then stopped in front of the gate. I zoomed in, trying to get a look at the person in the car.

“A woman,” I said with surprise.

“Looks like,” Anton said.

I watched the clock tick at the bottom of the video. The woman remained parked in front of the gate for over four minutes. When she finally put the car in gear, she made a U-turn to go back the way she’d come.

I hit pause and zoomed in on her license plate number. “Run it.”

Who was this little bitch?