The thought chilled my blood. It was terrifyingly easy to imagine disappearing into the black hole of Ethan Todd’s sex trafficking enterprise, becoming just another girl on the bulletin board at Cassie’s coffee shop, behind the announcements aboutpancake breakfasts at the firehouse and local teenagers looking for babysitting gigs.
It would kill my parents. It would ruin Simon and Olivia.
Exactly. So stop thinking about all the things you can’t control and start thinking about the things you can, M.
I was relieved to hear June’s voice in my head. She’d been quiet since I’d woken up in the stone cell, like Ethan Todd had scared her away.
Where have you been?
I’m always right here.
I wanted it to be true, but I knew it wasn’t. June was gone, her voice a figment of my imagination. Still, she was right: I couldn’t assume the Butchers would find me, and it was the thought of my parents — of all they’d been through with June — that got me to stop obsessing about the possibility of rescue.
I needed to find a way out on my own.
But first, I’m going to hunt,Ethan had said.
He was going to set me loose in the dungeon, hunt me like he’d done in the tunnels under Blackwell Falls when he and Anton and Mr. Skinny had taken the Ghosts’ place.
The thought of it sent a wild thrum of fear through my body. This wouldn’t be a hunt like the one I’d opted into under Blackwell Falls. I didn’t know this place, had no idea what lay in the tunnels around me or on the ground above me. And there was no time limit, no clock silently ticking down the hours to my freedom.
Todd could keep me down here forever if he wanted to.
Panic clawed at my throat. No, I wouldn’t let that happen. There was at least one way out because Ethan Todd, Meathead, and Mr. Skinny had been using it to bring me food.
I took long deep breaths, waiting for my head to clear of the fear that made it impossible to think straight.
Now think,June said.
I would use what little I knew about the dungeon to escape it. But first, I would need weapons, something to fight off Todd and his goons, something to buy me time, give me a chance to run again if they caught me.
I looked at the blinking red light on the camera near the ceiling and tried to gauge its range. Then I crawled toward it, waiting until I was out of its line of sight to start scrabbling for loose stone on the floor of my cell.
This was bad — really bad — but I would rather die than disappear inside Ethan Todd’s dark web.
And if I was going to die, I was going to die fighting.
8
ETHAN
I watchedher on the camera feed, the fire crackling in the hearth of the big room where Anton, Nick, and I congregated when the damp of the rest of the castle became too grim.
I wasn’t surprised Dimitri had kept the crumbling ruin. Men like Dimitri Kaprolov needed places to hide from the world.
I focused on Maeve, so still with her back against the wall that I wondered if she’d fallen asleep, and watched her face for clues about her mental state.
She’d become a source of fascination in the weeks leading up to her capture outside the Butchers’ loft, but after three days of watching her on the camera — of knowing she was close enough to touch, to hurt — she’d become an obsession.
I’d expected her to beg once she regained consciousness. It was what they usually did when they realized they were helpless, hidden away so completely from the rest of the world that they’d never be found again.
But the most Maeve had done was try to persuade Nick to help her.
I could see why the Butchers wanted her. Why they’d invaded my property in the mountains outside Blackwell Falls for her.
She was pretty, yes, with glossy black hair and blue eyes as sharp and bright as a chip of ice.
But the world was full of pretty girls. Pretty alone wasn’t interesting. It was like wandering a museum for the day and finding that after a while, none of the paintings looked like masterpieces. They were all just paint on canvas, their sheer abundance transforming them from something special to something mundane.
