Page 72 of Rule the Night

I’d never even been before Maeve came to live with us, but she insisted on buying our produce there, and I’d gone along a couple of times when she and Poe had done the grocery shopping.

We passed several machines working the land, then pulled into a long dirt driveway leading to a dilapidated gray barn. The place was deserted except for a Harley Sportster and an unmarked white work van that had seen better days.

Bram pulled next to the bike and we reached into the back seat for our masks.

We got out of the car, put on the masks, and bypassed the big swinging doors for a smaller side door at the side of the structure.

There was nobody around, but there was no reason to be sloppy by advertising the fact that we had one of the Barbarians inside.

There was no keypad here, no security or alarms. As far as anyone knew, this was a twenty-acre stretch of land — small by modern farming standards — that had been sold off to a developer who was still deciding what the fuck to do with it. Except the “developer” was us and we were already using it for its intended purpose.

We stepped into a shadowy interior lit only with the shafts of sunlight streaming in from cracks in the barn’s siding. It smelledlike warm earth and hay, with the faintest remnants of manure, a combination that wasn’t at all unpleasant.

Tate and Danny, the two interns we’d tasked with the job of collecting our prisoner, stood next to a shirtless man in blood-stained denim whose wrists and ankles were tied to a rusting metal chair in the center of the cavernous space.

His eyes got wide — well, one of them got wide, the other was swollen shut — when he saw us. I knew it was a combination of things: our reputation and Bram’s size and the fact that he was one huge, scary motherfucker, especially with the mask.

Some people said Bram Montgomery didn’t have a soul, but they had it all wrong.

Bram had a soul — it was just as black as the tunnels when the lights went out.

An old wood worktable stood a few feet from the chair, a series of metal instruments lined up on its surface. A package of gauze and duct tape was stacked next to it, along with a rubber tourniquet.

The shirtless guy’s nose was broken, a purple bruise was forming on the right side of his stomach, and a Barbarians tattoo was inked over his chest. “Bram, I swear?— ”

The masks weren’t to hide our identity. We didn’t hide. They were for us, to separate the people we tried to be from the ones we were in times like this.

“Anyone spot you?” Bram asked the interns, ignoring the pleas of our prisoner, a Barbarian named, in an irony of all ironies, Brick.

Which suited him because that fucker was dumb as a brick.

Tate, a tall redhead with a baby beard who was due to move up in the organization, shook his head. “He was coming out of the bathroom at the Sunoco outside Greenvale.”

I knew the place: practically abandoned, no chance in hell of a security camera.

Bram nodded. “Good.”

Tate tried to suppress his pleasure. Even faint praise from Bram was a big deal.

“I don’t know what’s going on, I swear,” Brick pleaded. “I mean, okay, I sold an eight-ball to some kid a block from the high school, but he swore he doesn’t go there.”

I looked at Danny, a pimply-faced black-haired kid with crooked front teeth. “You good?”

You never knew with the newbies. Not everyone had the stomach for what we did.

“I’m good.”

Jesus, how old was this kid, fifteen? It didn’t even sound like his voice had dropped yet.

“Why don’t you wait outside,” I said. “Keep watch.”

Better to ease the kid in, and from the look on Danny’s face, he’d already seen a few things before Bram and I had gotten there.

He headed for the door without a word. Bram waited for it to close to turn to the guy in the chair.

“I’m not going to waste time here. We don’t sell around schools. Remy and Poe gave you a warning less than a month ago.”

“But like I said, I?— ”