He said it slowly, the words all the more painful for the fact that they were said right in my face, his eyes shining with certainty.
“You’re wrong.” My own certainty was slipping in spite of my words. What if he was right? What if the Butchers didn’t come for me?
I exhaled my relief as he straightened. There was something not altogether sane about the fever in his eyes.
“Am I?”
“Yes.” I heard the doubt in my voice.
He nodded at Meathead, who unlocked the iron door while Todd waited.
He didn’t speak again until he was on the other side, the door locked between us.
“We crossed an ocean to get here,” he said. “No one even knows where you are.”
No one even knows where you are.
My poor parents.
He started to walk away and I launched myself off the floor toward the bars of my cell, my parents’ worried faces swimming in my mind.
“What are you going to do with me?”
He turned around, his face hidden in the shadows of the stone hall outside my cell.
“Let’s just say that in a few days, you’ll just be another dumb bitch fucking rich guys for money.” His eyes gleamed with anticipation. “But first, I’m going to hunt.”
6
BRAM
“It’s a fucking castle.”
Remy stared at the image on my computer: a giant stone structure rising from a clearing that was surrounded by rolling hills and banks of trees.
“Fuck.” Poe paced away from us. “Fuck.”
My gaze was glued to the satellite image. “It doesn’t matter.”
Maeve could be on the moon and I’d find a way to get to her.
“Shame about Rafe, Nolan, and Jude,” Poe said, dropping into one of the chairs at the dining room table in the Bucharest apartment. “We could use them.”
Rafe and his friends were working, and while I didn’t know exactly what they did for a living, I knew enough to know it involved million-dollar contracts, high-tech weaponry, and the cover of night.
“At least they gave us a leg up,” Remy said.
I tabbed to the attachments Rafe had sent over with the location of the castle. There was a brief history on the place, pictures taken back when it had been open to the public, and a general idea of the floor plan, general because it had been cobbled together from old pictures and historic accounts of theplace, which had been built for a military leader in the thirteenth century.
According to the summary Rafe had attached, the place had been conquered, burned, and rebuilt more times than history could count. It had been abandoned for almost ten years before being bought by a shell company.
A shell company registered in Moscow.
I thought about Dimitri Kaprolov, the Russian mafia boss who’d sponsored Ethan Todd at Aventine University. Were they still connected?
“Did you clock the registration on that shell company?” I asked.
“I did,” Poe said.
