Page 112 of Rule the Night

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.

72

MAEVE

He didn’t kiss me.Just pinned me against the counter, his body as solid as a mountain.

He glared down at me. “You don’t know what you’re playing with, Maeve.”