Page 52 of Rule the Night

It didn’t mean Bram didn’t scare me — I was human after all — but I understood him.

“I don’t know,” Poe said.

I understood Poe too, understood his answer. I didn’t know why Maeve was different either. Not yet. But Dickens wrote that “every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other,” and the mystery of Maeve was part of what made me want to uncover all her secrets, like an archeologist carefully brushing eons of sand away from some priceless artifact.

Maybe that was why Bram was invested too, even if he hadn’t admitted to himself that he was.

“She was watching this guy’s videos earlier,” I said, more than happy to change the subject. It was safer not to force things with Bram. Safer to let him draw his own conclusions.

Bram looked over my shoulder at my computer. “Why would she be watching that shit?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Bram bit into the Snickers, his forehead furrowed as he studied the frozen video. “Find out."

31

MAEVE

I was up earlythe next day, relieved Hannah had agreed to take my shift at Lushberry so I could start meal prepping. If I was going to keep my job and honor my commitment to the Butchers, I needed to have some meals ready to go for the days when I was at work.

I started off with breakfast, putting two kinds of muffins — blueberry and chocolate chip — into the oven while I made a special high-protein/low-carb batch of blueberry bran for Remy. Then I went to work on egg bites in two batches, filling muffin tins with eggs, cheese, bacon, and diced scallions for Poe and Bram and setting up a second pan for Remy with egg whites, finely chopped broccoli, and cheese measured to meet his macro targets.

What a royal pain in the ass.

By ten a.m., I was working on lunch options: three kinds of wraps, two kinds of salad, and a pasta salad for Poe and Bram (Remy avoided “empty carbs”).

I was mixing the pasta salad in a giant stainless-steel bowl when Poe entered the kitchen, his dark hair tousled from sleep. His chest was bare, but thankfully, he was wearing gray sweats,although they did nothing for all the dirty thoughts that had been running through my head since our altercation in the hallway.

“Wow,” he said, raking his hands through his hair, “looks like you’ve been at it a while.”

“I have to prep some stuff in advance. I have a job.”

“Lushberry, right?”

I frowned. “Let me guess, you got that from the background you did on me.”

“Yeah, but I already apologized for that.”

“I know.” I said it through my clenched jaw. How much did these fuckers know about me?

About June?

Relax, M. Jesus.

June was always quiet when I was cooking or baking, which was probably why I didn’t do it much anymore, but now that I was clashing with one of my three new roommates, she was suddenly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Figured. June had always been nosy.

“Did you have to take today off?” Poe asked.

“I got someone to cover my shift, but I can’t do that all the time.”

I had no idea what the Butchers did for a living, but it sure didn’t seem like they were going to put on a suit and go to an office for eight hours every day.

“Sounds like we need to have a meeting,” he said, “sync our schedules.”

“I don’t know about that.”Sync our schedulesmade it sound like we were… I don’t know,friendsor something.