Page 31 of Rule the Night

For all her worry, she was still going to support me in this crazy scheme.

“Whatever,” she said. “Just tell those guys if they touch a hair on your head, I’ll kill them.”

I had a flash of my three hunters: the teasing glint in Remy’s hazel eyes, the heat of Poe’s body so close to mine in the tunnels, Bram’s scar slashing his face like a boundary I shouldn’t cross, the vacuum of his energy threatening to suck me into nothingness.

My pulse raced, my body alive in an unfamiliar and terrifying way. I was about to move in with three strange men known as the Butchers.

And clearly, it wasn’t my hair I needed to worry about.

19

POE

I tappedmy fingers on my knees in the little Honda, stretching my right leg onto the curb. I’d opened the door, giving me room to spread out a little, when it had become obvious the girl named Maeve was going to be a while.

Maeve.

It was an unusual name, and I murmured it out loud in the car, enjoying the way it tasted on my tongue.

I was always a little curious about the girls who came to the Hunt: what brought them to the tunnels, who they hated enough to want dead.

But I was even more curious about Maeve, who was a contradiction. She wasn’t from Southside, that much I was sure of. I would have remembered her glossy black hair, her creamy skin and bright blue eyes, her lush mouth.

And I definitely would have remembered her body.

It had taken discipline not to touch her when Remy and I had run off the Hawks in the tunnels. The fullness of her body had been so close, like a ripe peach just waiting for me to take a bite.

My hands had itched to stroke her cheek, to thumb her nipples, which had been hard under the thin fabric of hercropped T-shirt. I’d wanted to feel the soft expanse of her stomach, slide my hand into her jeans, sink my fingers into her pussy.

I shifted in the seat, trying to get comfortable with my sudden hard-on.

Fuck.

I forced my mind into less frustrating territory, wondering what had brought Maeve to the Hunt. She was fiery, that much was clear, but she didn’t seem like the killing type.

Who could she want dead?

I envied the girls who came to the Hunt. They had a target, one person they could blame for their pain. I, on the other hand, had no one.

And everyone.

There were Whit’s friends, who’d given my little brother his first drink when he was fourteen, but it hardly seemed fair to blame them. They’d been fucked-up too.

Did I blame the kids selling weed in high school, trying to make a buck? The drug-selling gangs that had roamed Southside before Bram had laid down the rules?

The truth was, I blamed them all. But no matter how many other people there were to blame, I always came back to Whit. I could give him a pass for being a dumb kid, taking a drink or trying weed, but he’d kept going, stepping into the abyss of drug use that had finally destroyed him.

That had destroyed all of us.

Now he was doing a five-year stint for running a meth lab and I was still here, looking for someone besides him to blame.

Usually I ended up pointing the finger back at myself. I was his big brother. I should’ve stopped it before it got out of hand, should’ve made him listen, should’ve locked him the fuck up if I’d had to.

But Maeve, she clearly had someone to blame, and I couldn’t help being curious about who that was even though it wasn’t our problem now that we’d caught her.

She’d lost. Now she was ours for three months, and for the first time in a long time, I felt the thrill of excitement.

Of possibility.