Page 24 of Rule the Night

Home. So this was it. They really did expect me to live with them. Or he expected me to live with him. Or however it worked.

“Where is home?” I needed to get my head around this part, around what would come next. I’d gambled big and failed to get justice for June. Now I had to honor the bargain and pay the price for my failure until the next Hunt in three months.

I felt sick with that thought of it: the fact that I’d failed June, that I’d have to live in servitude to the three men called the Butchers.

All of it.

“Not far from here.” He wiped tenderly around my wound with a clean piece of gauze, then rested my hand on his knee while he uncapped a bottle of antiseptic ointment.

I told myself my pulse raced because I was in pain, because I’d just been chased through the tunnels for ten hours, but it was strangely intimate to have my hand resting on the denim-clad knee of the dark-haired man tending to my wounded hand.

“Do I get to know your name now?” I asked. “Or should I pick a nickname for the next three months?”

One side of his mouth lifted in a lopsided smile and I was surprised to see a teasing glint in his eyes when he met my gaze. “A nickname could be fun, but my name is Poe.”

“Poe,” I repeated. “Like the poet?”

He shrugged. “What can I say? My mom was a fan.”

I took that in: the literary name, the mom who’d liked to read. Past tense.

Not what I’d expected.

“What about them?” I asked, looking at the two guys still wearing animal bone masks on the other side of the room.

“The blond is Remy,” Poe said, wrapping my hand in clean gauze.

Remy. A surprisingly normal name for a guy who wore a dead animal mask and chased girls through a maze of abandoned underground tunnels.

My gaze was pulled to the other one, the one with dark hair who’d commanded the room. The one who’d caught me in the tunnels, his muscled flesh as immovable as a wall of granite.

Got you.

“And the other one?”

“Bram.”

There was no way he’d spoken loud enough for the other guy to hear, but the giant named Bram turned his head on cue, like he felt us talking about him.

Like he felt me looking at him.

His dark eyes locked onto me like a missile and something wild and unfamiliar stirred at my center.

Then he reached for his mask and removed it from his face.

Time seemed to stop. His gaze was still glued to mine, but now his eyes had context they hadn’t had before.

His face was almost harsh in its angularity, his nose slightly crooked, like it had been broken more than once. His eyes were hooded and unreadable, his lips almost vulgar in their fullness. His cheekbones looked like they’d been forged by steel. A long scar slashed across almost the entire left side of his face, starting just under his eye and ending near the corner of his mouth.

He’d looked inhuman when he’d been wearing his mask. Now he seemed almost mythical, a creature from another time and place, like he belonged here in the tunnels.

Like he belonged to the night.

A low hum started in my body, a vibration that worked its way outward from my center, filling empty spots I hadn’t even known were there.

It took me a second to name the feeling as desire.

I was frozen, fear and lust warring in my body.