“Now?”
“A few minutes ago.”
I pulled up the cameras on the road at the front of the house and rewound the footage.
A small black car eased forward, then stopped in front of the gate. I zoomed in, trying to get a look at the person in the car.
“A woman,” I said with surprise.
“Looks like,” Anton said.
I watched the clock tick at the bottom of the video. The woman remained parked in front of the gate for over four minutes. When she finally put the car in gear, she made a U-turn to go back the way she’d come.
I hit pause and zoomed in on her license plate number. “Run it.”
Who was this little bitch?
63
MAEVE
I parked nextto the Spider and took a minute to collect myself. I’d been shaking when I pulled away from Ethan Todd’s new house, the prospect of being so close to him with no one around enough to set my mind spinning.
I needed to think, figure out the best way to get to him now that he was back in Blackwell Falls, and I still wanted to find out what had happened to him after high school. Where had he gone? And why had he come back here of all the places in the world his money might have taken him?
I pushed the questions aside and started for the loft. Poe had a way of reading my face, knowing when something was up. I needed to be calm when I went inside.
I climbed the stairs from the ground floor, schooling my expression to look as innocent as possible, but when I got to the second floor, the loft was dark and quiet.
I checked my phone, wondering if it was later than I’d thought, but even with the detour to the mountain, it was just after 10 p.m. Weird. Normally the Butchers would be in the living room, or maybe Poe would be in his studio downstairs while Remy and Bram were in the living room.
The Hummer, the Spider, and Poe’s bike were all in the lot, although it was possible they’d walked somewhere.
I set down my bag and tried to ignore the fact that I felt… disappointed. Subconsciously, I’d looked forward to seeing them when I got home, especially after their rescue of Bailey and me the night before. I told myself I was just getting soft on my birthday, but yeah, I’d expected to see sparks of light from Poe’s torch in the studio, to find Remy playing video games while Bram worked on his computer because Bram never allowed himself to have any fun.
They must have gone to bed early.
I stifled a sudden rush of sadness. I could hardly be mad at the Butchers for not knowing it was my birthday.
Then, on my way to the fridge for a bottle of water, I spotted a box on the dining-room table.
A tiny black jewelry box tied with a glossy scarlet ribbon and sitting on top a scrap of folded red paper.
I looked around, half expecting someone to stop me, then pulled it out.
It had my name on it, jagged letters written in black ink. When I unfolded it, three simple words, scrawled in the same black ink, stared back at me from the piece of red paper.
Happy birthday, Maeve.
I stared at it for at least a minute. The Butchers had known it was my birthday after all, probably because of the background check they’d done on me when I’d first moved in.
Had it been six weeks already? Crazy.
I set down the note, untied the ribbon from the velvet box, and set it aside. When I opened the box, I found a delicate gold necklace strung with a red enamel apple pendant.
My cheeks heated as images flashed through my memory: the picnic, Poe’s head between my thighs, Remy looking down atme as he teased my lips with the head of his dick, Bram watching us, his eyes so cold they burned.
I looked around, half expecting the Butchers to appear.
