Page 71 of Rule the Night (Blackwell Butchers #1)

MAEVE

I was still stewing hours later, alone in my bed.

I’d spent the night working in the kitchen, making the base ingredients on autopilot for the cupcakes, tarts, and cookies I’d planned to tempt Bram. I’d considered dumping it all in the trash, saying fuck it, letting Bram eat enough Snickers to give himself a mouthful of cavities.

But I’d been accumulating ingredients for the past two weeks, and it seemed wasteful not to use them because I was mad at Bram. At least Poe would eat them, and some of it would freeze, although neither of those points soothed my ego or staunched the fury that boiled my blood.

I felt so stupid.

There had never been any possibility of winning over Bram. He hated me. No, worse than hating me, Bram didn’t think about me at all.

I was just a toy with a ninety-day return policy.

I turned over in bed for the hundredth time and flipped my pillow to the cool side with a frustrated sigh.

I thought about Poe, who’d known something was wrong when he’d finally come up from the studio. Like Remy, he’d asked me about it, but I hadn’t been any more interested in talking to him than I’d been in talking to Remy.

They were Bram’s friends. His partners in everything. It wasn’t my place to bitch to them about Bram. Long after I was gone, they’d still be living at the loft, hanging in the living room together, driving around in the Hummer, scaring the shit out of everybody in Blackwell Falls.

I was the outsider — I always had been — and didn’t want to name the space that opened up in my heart at the thought.

I didn’t want to think it meant that I’d miss them.

That in spite of everything, this had come to feel like home and I didn’t want to be an outsider in the loft with the three giant men who’d hunted me in the tunnels.

Because what was I supposed to do with that?

I turned to the other side, tried to fluff my pillow, then sat up.

This wasn’t working.

I got up and went to the bathroom, then stepped into the hall. I couldn’t do any cooking — I didn’t want to wake up the whole house — but I could at least check my custard, make sure it had set, make sure the pumpkin cupcakes I’d made hadn’t fallen while they were cooling.

It was after midnight, the hall quiet as I headed down the stairs to the second floor.

Beyond the living room, the old streetlights along Main glowed, the lights from the Orpheum visible three blocks down.

I went to the kitchen without turning on a light and opened the fridge, then removed the bowl of custard.

I set it carefully on the counter and peeled back the plastic wrap, then got a spoon to check the consistency. I nodded as the creamy cardamom-laced custard hit my tongue. It would be perfect with the cupcakes.

I walked to the counter where I’d left the cupcakes to cool before going to bed. They looked good, flat enough to make the frosting look pretty but not sunken, and I brought them back to the island with me on a whim.

I was wide awake now. Might as well fill the cupcakes.

I got a piping bag out from the cupboard where I’d been keeping all my baking supplies and chose the right tip for fillings, then added custard to the bag.

There was enough light leaking in from the big windows that I didn’t need to turn on the kitchen light, and I laid everything out in an assembly line and got started.

It was easy work: remove a cupcake from the muffin tin, insert the tip into the center of the cupcake, squeeze enough custard to fill it without making it overflow.

I was on the third cupcake when something shifted in the shadows.

I froze, my pulse racing. Adrenaline flooded my body as I searched the shadows, wondering if I was imagining it.

But no. There was something — someone — there.

“Poe?” My voice sounded unusually loud in the late-night quiet of the loft.

“Not Poe.” Bram stepped out of the shadows wearing jeans and nothing else, the tangled mass of his tattoos looking like nothing but shadow in the dim light.

He looked even bigger than usual, the scar cutting across his face fierce and terrifying as he stared at me with his empty eyes.

My heart hardened and I went back to my work.

“What are you making?” he asked.

“Cupcakes. What do you care?”

He came closer. “What kind of cupcakes?”

This was weird. A few hours earlier, he’d ignored me, but now we were having a conversation — if that was what I wanted to call it — about cupcakes.

“Pumpkin, with a cardamom custard filling.” I held it out, still angry, determined to tempt him. “Smell.”

His nostrils flared, but he leaned back like he thought the scent might poison him. “No thanks.”

It made me mad. He was disrupting the little bit of peace I’d managed to create for myself, but he still wouldn’t eat anything I baked, and now he wouldn’t smell it either.

I shoved it closer to him. “Smell it.”

A nerve in his jaw ticked. “I said no.”

Tension had settled like a shroud over the room.

“Taste it then.”

“I’ll pass.”

“I know you want to.” Why was I egging him on? Why did I even care if he tasted my fucking cupcake?

“I don’t.”

I took a giant bite out of the cupcake in my hand. The spicy cardamom custard hit my tongue, cool and creamy, at the same time as the clove-spiked pumpkin cake.

I closed my eyes. “Mmmmm… it’s so good.” When I opened my eyes, his gaze was locked on my face.

I shoved the rest of the cupcake in my mouth even though I hadn’t finished chewing the first bite.

It was hard to talk — and probably pretty gross to watch — with a whole cupcake in my mouth. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

He was on me before I had time to clock his movement across the kitchen.

And then my back was pinned to the counter, Bram’s body pressed against mine, the thing I’d wanted all along.