Even our lives.
33
ETHAN
My blood boiledas I read the comments online. Who the fuck was NYNancy and why the fuck was she coming for me so hard?
Cunt.
I had no idea why the conversation had gone viral, but thousands of comments had accumulated under the post in the forty-eight hours since the bitch had started in on me.
It wasn’t all bad. There were plenty of guys rushing to my defense, parroting the insults I’d been throwing at women from the Ethan Todd pulpit for years. It was always surreal to see the familiar words and phrases pop onto my screen like an echo: childless cat lady, die alone, used up, sloppy seconds, low-value.
Cunt. Bitch. Whore.
Rape.
I’d used them all over the years, planting them like violent seeds into the minds of disaffected men everywhere.
Unfortunately, there was another side, mostly women — and a few dickless, beta-cuck so-called men — taking shots at everything from my voice to my hair to the size of my dick.
My foot tapped incessantly under the desk in my room at Dimitri’s penthouse in Prague. I’d been avoiding my old mentor,sensing his judgment, and had taken to holing up in my suite of rooms when I wasn’t walking the city, frigid with winter.
I was more than a little stir-crazy.
Worse, I was feeling vulnerable, like I was being watched 24/7. Like my enemies were closing in.
I opened the top drawer of the desk and removed the syringe loaded with the testosterone I’d been taking for the past three months.
There were side effects. I was unusually tired, probably due to the sleep apnea that was common with the use of T, and I was a little quicker to get pissed off (although who could say whether that was the T when there was so much to be pissed off about?). And yeah, my balls were a bit smaller, which wasn’t great but didn’t matter much since I’d had to cool it on the bitches while I was in hiding.
But the positives were undeniable. My body was stronger, my muscles bigger and more defined. I was making gains, even with the recent disruptions in my normal routine, and I felt stronger and more confident when I looked in the mirror.
Which was why the online comments got under my skin.
These fucking bitches didn’t know me. How fuckingdarethey?
And then there was the most recent taunt: a gauntlet.
There were multiple tabs open on my laptop screen, including feeds of several rooms in the cam operation in Romania. But it was the social media feed that dominated my attention, and I stared at NYNancy’s most recent post:if Ethan Todd is really such a big man he’d be willing to face me at Apex. But he won’t because he’s a pussy.
There was something about being called a pussy by a fucking woman that was almost worse than having the insult lobbed at me by a man.
I stared at the challenge on the screen. I wasn’t supposed to be at Apex, the first year in the last five that I wasn’t both a speaker and a debate participant.
And all because of that little bitch Maeve Haver and the fucking Blackwell Butchers.
But who were they to keep me from my own country? From mywork?
Because that was what I did. I worked to change the world, make it a better place, like it used to be when men were in charge and women knew their fucking place.
I looked at the dose preloaded into the syringe, then reached for a second. I wasn’t going to let Bram Montgomery and his Butchers keep me from my work.
It was too important.
34
MAEVE
