Page 76 of Rule the Night

Her trips to the firing range had gotten me curious, and I’d gotten into the habit of checking her location at least once a day when she was out of the house, even though I knew it would piss her the fuck off if she ever found out.

And don’t get me started on the tracking app we’d put on her phone.

But now she wasn’t at Cassie’s Cuppa or at the range. She wasn’t anywhere in Blackwell Falls.

She was in the city.

What the fuck?

I walked into the living room holding my phone. Bram was at the dining-room table doing something on his computer while Remy played a video game on the sofa.

“Maeve isn’t at work.”

Bram looked up, his face frozen in that expression he’d perfected where he tried to make it seem like he didn’t give a shit about something, but the fact that he was trying so hard meant he actually gave quite a lot of shits about that something.

“What do you mean?”

“She said she was going to work today, but she’s in the city.”

“She lied to us?” Remy sounded hurt.

I rolled my eyes. “That’s the least of our problems. Why the fuck would Maeve have gone all the way into the city? And why would she have lied about it?”

Remy stood up fast, snapping at me. “I know.”

He started around the sofa, bumped into the coffee table, and went down hard.

“Ow, fuck!” He popped back up inside of two seconds, probably because he was so used to falling over shit.

“What do you know?” Bram asked as Remy continued to his laptop on the dining-room table.

He opened it up and tapped at the keys. Then he turned it around so Bram and I could see it. “Ethan Todd is in the city today. He’s giving some bullshit speech at a bullshit douchebag conference.”

“Why the fuck would Maeve go all that way to see that guy?” I asked.

“I told you, shefollowshim,” Remy said. “Likereallyfollows him.”

Bram leaned back in the chair and rubbed at his jaw. I knew that look on his face.

“What?” I asked. “What do you know?”

He hesitated. “I had Aloha do some work on Maeve.”

“We already did background,” I said.

“Not background,” Bram said. “A deep dive.”

“Why?” I remembered my conversation with Maeve in the car the first day we’d gone to the store together, remembered how hurt and angry she’d been that we’d dug around in her life.

It would be so much worse now, especially after what had happened between us in the studio.

The memory of it haunted my dreams: the sweet smell of her flesh, the taste of her on my tongue, her tight little cunt wrapped around my dick as I tunneled through her.

I wanted more. A lot more.

But I also knew it was a tricky situation. Maeve wasn’t here because she wanted to be. She was here to honor a debt.

And I didn’t want fucking me to be part of that bet, even subconsciously.