Then I’d been shuffled to the front of the room and guided onto the debate stage, where I’d been forced to smile and lift my hands in victory since that online bitch New York Nancy hadn’t shown.
But I couldn’t even enjoy it, because Maeve was out there with the Butcher’s, stalking me like fucking animals.
I hadn’t even realized my phone was gone until the debate was over.
Could I have dropped it somewhere along the way? Maybe. But someone probably would have turned it in because what use was a phone with a facia recognition lock?
Unless the culprit wasn’t a petty thief but the Blackwell Butchers, trying to hack my shit.
I’d used the tracking app to try and locate the phone, but it hadn’t been much help. The phone had appeared around the conference center for a while, then in the city, then outside of it.
After that, it had dropped off the map.
I’d broken out into a cold sweat when I realized what had happened, had practically been in a cold sweat ever since.
Because my phone? My phone had all kinds of shit on it.
Bad shit. Shit that could get me in trouble. Shit that could help the Butchers find me if I wasn’t careful.
Which brought me to my present accommodations at the Marriott in Times Square, a location crowded with people 24/7, obnoxious and tacky as fuck but all the better to fade into the crowd. Not that I was doing much with crowds these days. I didn’t even dare go to the hotel gym for fuck’s sake.
And I definitely didn’t dare go to an airport.
All of which explained why I was lifting in my hotel room with weights bought online, the remnants of that morning’s breakfast scattered across plates on the room service tray at the table on the bed.
Fuck.
I couldn’t even enjoy my victory at Apex (the trolls online could say my opponent had won all they wanted but that didn’t make it true).
I put down the weights and grabbed the hand towel I’d been using for sweat. I was pretty sure the room had started to stink — it had been a few days since I’d let housekeeping in to clean — but I had bigger things to worry about.
I checked my smart watch and scowled at the reading. My vitals had taken a hit over the past couple of months. My blood pressure and resting heart rate were up, which probably meant my cortisol was through the roof too.
I’d been able to order my common supplements, but the more exotic ones had been hard to come by while I’d been moving around, and while I’d been able to have the weights delivered to my room, it’s not like I could bring in a treadmill without getting a lot of attention.
And attention was something I didn’t need.
I wiped my face and dropped into the chair in front of my laptop at the hotel desk. The cam girls occupied three of my four open tabs, but they didn’t excite me like they used to. Just a bunch of tits and ass, writhing and pouting, all to make sad incels feed more money into the machine of my enterprise.
The girls might as well have been selling cleaning supplies.
I picked up the syringe, already loaded with that day’s dose of T, and jabbed it into my thigh. Then I guzzled half a bottle of water and turned my attention to the fourth open tab.
I’d had a lot of time on my hands since Apex and I’d spent more of a little of it obsessing about Maeve Haver and the Butchers. What was their fuckingproblem? They had me trapped like a rat, afraid to leave the country, afraid even to leave the hotel.
I needed to get them off my ass, and as I’d dove deep into Blackwell Falls, looking for information on the Butchers, one thing had come up again and again: the missing girls.
There was other stuff too. Tourist stuff. Hiking trails and restaurants and fall festivals. But other than that Blackwell Fallswasn’t exactly a hub of excitement — unless you counted the girls that went missing just often enough to barely catch the attention of the police department.
That was intentional. You could get away with almost anything if you didn’t rub people’s faces in it.
Dimitri had taught me that.
People could live with a certain amount of bad shit as long as it didn’t seem like it could happen to them, as long as it seemed like an anomaly, something that happened to other people.
Dimitri and his friends had been careful around Blackwell Falls, but not careful enough to avoid notice entirely.
I scrolled through one of the articles I’d been reading online, a piece about a girl named Rain Adakai who’d gone missing a couple years before. Her mom was quoted, and her sister, but other than that the only person on record was a name I’d come to recognize: Detective Rodriguez.
