PROLOGUE
BRAM
We werequiet when we pulled through the gate and into the parking lot. I was afraid to speak, afraid I would lose my shit after the fiasco at Ethan Todd’s compound. It wasn’t the dead guards that bothered me.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
But it had all been for nothing. Ethan Todd — the sick fuck — had set up some kind of body double to throw us off his trail. Rafe and his friends had been as surprised as we were.
Todd was probably already back in Hungary, which didn’t mean we wouldn’t get him. We would do anything for Maeve, hunt Ethan Todd to the ends of the earth if that was what it took to give her justice for June.
But still. I wasn’t looking forward to telling her we’d gotten it wrong, and I didn’t think Poe and Remy were looking forward to the conversation any more than I was.
“What’s Ray doing outside?” Remy asked.
I followed his gaze to the dog, on his feet and barking into the night.
My blood ran cold.
I didn’t bother pulling the Hummer next to the fence, because I knew Maeve now, and I knew she’d never leave Ray out in the cold.
Not willingly.
We got out of the car with the engine still running.
Poe walked toward Ray and picked up his lead. “Where’s Maeve, boy?”
Ray whined, his gaze trained into the darkness beyond the fence.
I crossed the pavement in that direction, looking around for signs of Maeve, I saw the hole in the chain link before I even reached the fence, but I was so stunned I didn’t entirely believe it at first.
We owned a lot of property in downtown Blackwell Falls. All of it was sacrosanct, but none more so than the loft where we lived.
Where we lived with Maeve now.
I was still processing the possibilities when a glare off the streetlights caught my eye on the asphalt. I bent to investigate and discovered it was a phone.
Maeve’s phone.
I ran toward the loft without thinking, Poe and Remy shouting at me from behind.
I took the stairs three at a time, my footsteps pounding on the treads, my heart beating a mile a minute, adrenaline flooding my body, her name a drumbeat in my mind.
My heart.
Maeve.
The living room was empty, the kitchen too. The TV was on but had gone into sleep mode and the room was lit by nothing but the lights on the tree.
I felt her absence. Ifuckingfelt it.
I felt it the way I felt the absence of the sun when it went behind the clouds.
But I didn’t want to believe it.
“Maeve!” I bellowed, praying to a god I’d never believed in that she’d step out of the bathroom, out of the hall. That she’d throw her arms around me the way she had when I’d given her Ray. That I’d be able to bury my face in her hair, feel her in my arms.
I heard Poe and Remy step into the living room as I stalked down the hall and up the stairs. “Maeve?”
