Page 76 of Rule the Night (Blackwell Butchers #1)

ETHAN

Maeve Haver.

That was her name.

I repeated it in my mind as I hit mile five on the treadmill, part of an extensive fitness, nutritional, and longevity routine that included occasional visits to a Honduran network state to receive experimental stem-cell treatment to the tune of twenty-five thousand dollars a pop.

The girl’s name — old-fashioned, classy — had sounded familiar from the jump, and it had only taken me a minute of reading to find out why: she was the sister of that dumb bitch whose psycho boyfriend had murdered her last year.

It had nothing to do with me, but that hadn’t stopped the press from linking me to the psycho in question for the simple fact that he’d been one of my followers.

Him and 5.999 other million people.

I’d never spoken to him. Had never even gotten a fucking DM from him.

And still it was my fault the asshole lost his shit.

It happened all the time. Domestic violence activists screamed constantly about the fact that women were so much more likely to be murdered by a partner than a stranger, yet no one bothered to get to the bottom of why.

Their brains were too primitive to get past the correlation of male violence to the causation of women everyone wanted to beat the shit out of.

Where was the research on that?

Where was the research on the fact that women were so fucking full of themselves, so fucking superior, that even the men who loved them ended up wanting to kill them?

My smartwatch beeped and I hit a button on the treadmill to bring it to a stop.

I was panting, my heart rate right where it should be for my VO2 max, and I stepped off the treadmill and grabbed my towel.

I guzzled some electrolytes while I wiped off the sweat, then picked up my phone, returning to the information Anton had sent about the girl who’d been stalking me.

Maeve Haver.

She was from Blackwell Falls, like her sister, and her family still lived in town. So did Maeve, last known address an apartment off Main Street. She worked in the mall in Carlton — how quaint — and drove a twelve-year-old Honda still registered to her dead sister.

That was fucked-up.

And there was something else: cell-phone data had her staying in a loft in Southside the last two months.

A loft belonging to Bram Montgomery and his friends.

Well, that part was just a rumor. The building was technically owned by an offshore corporation. But I knew what that meant better than anyone.

I also knew Bram Montgomery. Or more accurately, I knew of him.

It was part of why I’d left Blackwell Falls all those years ago. It had been fun here before Bram and his friends — the fucking Blackwell Butchers — had started getting in everyone’s business, acting like they owned the place.

Back then, my little enterprise had been a startup.

A startup with important backers, but a startup nonetheless.

I hadn’t wanted to tangle with Bram. I hadn’t wanted to tangle with anyone.

The name of the game had been discreet power, and I’d spent the last ten years amassing a lot of it: powerful people who owed me lots of favors, who wanted to keep me quiet.

But if Maeve Haver was staying with the Butchers, it meant something.

Namely, it meant that she’d lost the Hunt.

I called Anton. He was in the house somewhere, but I wasn’t looking for a long conversation.

“Boss,” Anton said when he picked up.

“I need you to find me a way into the next Hunt.”

“It’s run by Bram Montgomery,” Anton said in his accented English.

“And?”

I knew what he was thinking: that fucking with Bram and his Hunt was asking for trouble, that the masked men who participated hunted in teams of three, all of them friends in one way or another, all of them vetted by Bram.

“I’ll find a way.”

“I knew you would.”

I tossed my phone aside. It was time for my cold plunge.