Page 99 of Rule the Night

I just wanted to look.

I reached the bottom of a paved driveway, the only one I could see on the deserted mountain road, and stopped my car. The house was barely visible at the top of a rise beyond the gate, nothing but winking lights through the trees.

There was no name on the mailbox out front, just a plaque on a stone pillar with the house number and an electronic keypad mounted at car level. Above the keypad, a red light blinked on a security camera.

I stopped the car and put it in park, then reached for my phone.

I’d saved the listing: the house — a “luxury mountain getaway” that had been “built for privacy” — had just sold for nearly three million dollars.

I couldn’t prove it had been sold to Ethan Todd, but when I’d checked with the county clerk’s office, the deed had been registered to a company, not a person, and when I’d looked up the company online, it had been registered not in the United States, but in Hungary.

I stared at the lights through the trees, wondering if Ethan was inside, recording another hate-filled podcast, riling up all the men out there who thought their problems were the fault of the women around them, most of whom were just trying to stay alive in a world that sometimes seemed to want them dead.

Getting to Ethan Todd inside the compound on the top of the hill would be even more impossible than trying to reach him in a throng of people outside his hotel, and I was suddenly overwhelmed with frustration.

Ethan Todd was right here in Blackwell Falls, and he was still untouchable. People like June had to hope and pray they could stay safe just living their lives, while the rich and powerful — the evil — were protected behind armed guards and security gates.

Same as it ever was.

I put the car in gear and made a U-turn, then started back toward Old Mountain Road.

I didn’t have the answers yet, but one thing was certain: Ethan Todd was as close as he’d ever be.

And this time, I wasn’t going to let him get away.

62

ETHAN

The cam girlswere hard at work. Most of them.

I sent messages while I watched them on my screens, warning the ones whose numbers were down, the ones who lay in their rooms reading or sleeping instead of hustling new customers.

It was one of the best parts of the job: watching like a god, sending them messages and watching in real time when they jumped to reach for their phones, furiously typing their excuses and apologies.

And sometimes their defiance.

But those ones didn’t last long.

It was harder to crack the whip now that I was back in the States, but I wasn’t alone. I had people in Hungary, acolytes who were intent on proving themselves.

They would keep the girls in line when my messages didn’t.

I looked up as a knock sounded on the door.

“Enter.” It was a joke. Kind of.

I was a king and my castle was wherever I made it. For now, that was here, in this newly acquired house outside the town where I grew up.

The door opened and Anton Vladescu, head of security and all-around right-hand man, shuffled in, trying not to drag his bad right leg. He was big and meaty, with thinning brown hair and the coarse features of someone who’d spent his life drinking and getting his face beat in.

I’d plucked him from a bad situation with the Romanian mafia and given him a ticket to ride the Ethan Todd empire.

Lucky him.

He’d been with me for almost a decade, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could trust him to do any dirty deed because he’d done them all on my behalf over the years.

“Someone down by the gate,” he said in thickly accented English.