“Fuck,” Poe said, dropping into one of the dining room chairs with his coffee.
“Yeah,” I said. “Bailey texted for an update.”
Poe sighed. “Double fuck.”
We’d debated telling Maeve’s parents about her kidnapping. They deserved to know their daughter was in danger. But none of us had met them, and we had no idea how much Maeve had told them about our living arrangement or if Maeve would even want them to know.
Her family had been through a lot after June’s murder, and I knew from my conversations with Maeve that her parents’ pain was something that weighed heavily on her.
In the end we’d decided to give it one week — one week to find Maeve — but we’d agreed to tell Bailey, who’d lost her shit.
Once we’d talked her down from calling the police (Blackwell Falls PD didn’t have the best reputation for finding missing girls), she’d agreed to give us the week, and then only because we’d sold her on all the resources we had to work with between Aloha, Rafe and his friends, and the Kings.
After that, Bailey was going to Maeve’s family with or without us.
“We still have four days,” I said.
Poe nodded, but his expression was morose. Finding Maeve felt like looking for a needle in a haystack. Just because we’d tracked Todd’s plane to Romania didn’t meant they were still here, and even if they were, Bucharest was a labyrinthine city surrounded by wild country, countless villages, and abandoned castles.
Todd could be anywhere.
I didn’t let myself think about the other possibility: that Todd might have already done something to Maeve.
The thought unhinged me, made it impossible to think straight.
No, she was out there, alive. I knew it.
But I also knew Todd had been charged with trafficking in Hungary, that he ran cam rooms that were rumored to be involuntary. The possibility that he’d sold Maeve or put her to work in some other fashion was real, and I felt the ticking clock like a bomb on our need to find her before it was too late.
“We’re going to find her,” Poe said, like he was reading my mind.
He was saying it as much for himself as for me. I could tell because I recognized the desperation in his voice, the same desperation in my own inner voice:we’re going to find her, she’s Maeve, she’s strong, she’ll be okay.
The door to the apartment opened and Bram walked in, his face set in stone. I hadn’t realized how much Maeve had changed him until she was gone. His expression had softened — around us at least — in the month that Maeve had been back.
That was gone now. He looked like a gargoyle, his coldness carved in granite.
“I still don’t get how these fuckers have all this shit,” he grumbled, pulling off his leather jacket.
He was talking about the apartment Jude had arranged (we didn’t know if Rafe, Nolan, and Jude owned the place or if they’d borrowed it, but they’d given it to us on a dime) and the luxury jet owned by the Kings.
Poe took a drink of his coffee. “They have money. A lot of it.”
“We have a lot of it,” Bram said, dropping onto the sofa in the apartment’s living room.
The place wasn’t fancy, but it was nice enough, the kind of place where you could hole up and work with a fair amount of anonymity.
“We haven’t spent it the way they have,” I reminded him.
Possessions hadn’t been that important to us. Blackwell Falls was our kingdom, and we owned it lock, stock, and barrel.
What else mattered?
Except now we had something —someone— real to protect.
The resources that had been tapped by the Kings and by Rafe and his friends had helped us get to Maeve faster.
“We need to get serious when we get Maeve back,” Bram said.
