Poe brought me a cup of coffee, then returned to the kitchen for the toast.
I sighed when I took the first drink of bitter black coffee, and my head cleared almost immediately. The disgusting taste in my throat disappeared.
I took another drink, then looked from Bram to Remy. “Now I need you to tell me some things.”
19
MAEVE
I waiteduntil Poe came back with the toast to ask my first question.
“Where did Ethan take me?”
Bram and Remy sat next to me on the sofa. Poe had taken one of the upholstered chairs.
“Romania,” Remy said carefully. “An abandoned castle.”
“Romania,” I repeated, trying to get my head around the idea that I’d been drugged and taken halfway around the world.
We crossed an ocean to get here.
The memory of Ethan Todd’s words drifted through my mind like smoke. Was that what it had been like for the girls who were trafficked by Todd and others? Were they just going about their business only to wake up and find themselves in some far-flung place, their average lives upended because some man had decided to use them?
“How long was I gone?” I asked before nibbling at the buttered toast.
“Four days,” Poe said. “It’s the thirtieth of December.”
“It felt longer.”
Remy took my hand. “It felt longer for us too.”
“How did you find me?” I had a million questions and there was no rhyme or reason to their order. My mind was trying to make sense of it all. I was just letting it do its thing.
“Aloha and Rafe mostly,” Bram said. “Anton used his regular passport to get entry in Bucharest, otherwise it would have been harder. Todd must have another passport in rotation, one in another name.”
His mention of Anton brought back a flood of unwelcome memories: his meaty hands grabbing at me the first time we’d tussled in my cell, his coarse features twisted and angry as he charged me in the dungeon, the surprise on his face as his blood flooded over me when I stabbed him with the broken bottle.
“There was someone else,” I said. “A younger guy.”
“He’s dead.” Bram said it without emotion or remorse. “Poe snapped his neck like a twig.”
I felt something weird then, a surge of sympathy I wasn’t sure Mr. Skinny deserved. “He let me go.”
“What do you mean he let you go?” Remy asked.
“He found my hiding place but pretended he didn’t, took Anton in another direction. This was right before…” I drew in a breath. “Right before the end.”
“He participated in your kidnapping.” Bram’s voice was as cold as steel. “He deserved to die.”
I set the plate of toast on the coffee table, my stomach sour all over again. It wasn’t that I wanted to give Mr. Skinny a pass. He’d bought into Todd’s dangerous bullshit, had chased me in the Hunt. And Bram was right: Mr. Skinny had participated in my kidnapping, had maybe done the same with other girls.
But had he been a dumb kid who’d just gotten caught up in Todd’s message? Who’d needed to believe it was someone else’s fault he didn’t feel at home in the world? Or had he been incubating the kind of evil that had grown in Chris? The kind that might lead him to hurt someone like June someday?
I waited for my mind to deliver the answers but none came. It was all so confusing.
“And Ethan?” I hoped he was dead. That part wasn’t at all confusing.
Bram exchanged glances with Poe and Remy. “He got away.”
