“He… got away.” It wasn’t accusatory. If anyone wanted Ethan dead as much as I did, it was the Butchers.
“Remy and I couldn’t find him,” Poe said. “And then Bram called out that he’d found you, and well… that was all that mattered. We wanted to get you out of there before the thermite blew.”
“Was that what caused the fire?” I had no idea what thermite was, but pieces of the last twenty-four hours were coming back to me in flashes.
Remy barked out a harsh laugh. “You could call it that.”
“We burned that fucking place to the ground,” Bram said.
“What about my parents?” I didn’t want to think about Ethan Todd or Anton or Mr. Skinny anymore. “Do they know what happened? Does anyone?”
The realization was starting to hit me: I’d beenthis closeto ending up like one of the other missing girls from Blackwell Falls. Had there been searches, flyers, news coverage?
“We didn’t tell them,” Poe said. “We weren’t sure what you’d want us to do.”
"But we told Bailey,” Remy said. “She gave us a week to find you before she went to your parents with or without us.”
I smiled — that sounded like Bailey — then winced in pain.
“We called her once we had you on the plane,” Poe said. “She knows you’re okay.”
“I’ll need to call her. My phone…”
Poe reached for something on the coffee table and handed me a brand-new phone, still in its box.
“You got me a new phone?”
“We knew you’d need one,” he said. “It’s ready to go.”
I opened the box, removed the phone, and turned it on. It felt good to do something simple, something normal.
“Did you put the tracker on here?” I asked.
“Always,” Bram said.
I raised my eyes to meet the challenge in his gaze. “Good.”
Once upon a time, I’d resented the Butchers’ control. Now I knew that it wasn’t control at all.
It was safety.
It was love.
20
ETHAN
Prague was fuckingcoldin December. I hadn’t thought about that when I’d fled Romania for Dimitri’s compound. I would have preferred a tropical island, somewhere I could lay in the sun and get stupid drunk, forget about the shitshow in the dungeon under the castle, but I hadn’t had time to book a fucking vacation.
I’d just needed to get out, find someplace to lie low, and it wasn’t the first time I’d turned to Dimitri in such a situation.
He was the one who’d set me up in Romania the first time, the one who’d sold me the compound on the mountain in Blackwell Falls, who’d let me hole up in the castle outside Bucharest, although he hadn’t known about Maeve Haver.
Now I walked the city like a ghost, passing pedestrians out for a New Year’s Eve meal or drinks with friends, the atmosphere festive and excited.
Except it was hard to feel excited when I half expected to see Bram Montgomery and his Butchers step out of the shadows and tear me apart like wild animals.
I’d heard them in the tunnels under the castle after Anton, Nick, and I had split up. I’d thought my luck — which was pretty fucking legendary, if I did say so myself — had finally run out.
