Page 61 of Rule the Night
Except salmon mixed with ground beef was way worse than vegetables, and Remy actually liked vegetables.
I dropped my fork and backed away from the meatloaf like it might come to life. “This is… this is an abomination.”
“We know,” Remy said.
Poe picked up the meatloaf and started scraping it into the disposal. “Now you know why we need you.”
“But… why don’t you just hire someone else?”
Remy looked offended. “It would hurt Reva’s feelings. Besides, she does a good job cleaning the house.”
I shook my head, feeling like I’d landed on another planet, one where it made more sense to engage in an elaborate underground hunt of women just to get a cook rather than firing someone who most definitely couldnotcook.
Then I remembered what Poe had said in the parking lot:It’s a vice.
It wasn’t just about the cooking. They liked the killing.
And I had no idea how to reconcile that knowledge with the fact that I was starting to actually like them.
36
BRAM
I waitedfor Remy and Poe to be out to walk the three blocks to Aloha’s headquarters. I told myself it was because they were busy. One of the Barbarians had been caught selling drugs outside their designated area — and within the buffer zone I’d instituted around schools to boot — and while I could have gone to the MC’s president to issue a complaint, dealing with the rule breaker directly was more effective. Remy and Poe would deliver the message that he’d been caught.
So yeah, they were busy, but deep down I knew that wasn’t why I found myself walking alone to meet with Aloha. It was because I didn’t want Remy and Poe to know what I was doing, didn’t want them to know how preoccupied I’d become with Maeve Haver in the nearly three weeks she’d been living with us.
I’d never been distracted by one of the Hunt girls before. We hunted them, they came to cook if they lost, sometimes Remy or Poe flirted with them, and I avoided them.
The end.
But somewhere between that fucking gun Maeve had tried to bring into the Hunt — the gun she still carried under her sweatshirt around the house, like she was going to shoot one ofus dead while we ate her lasagna — and the way she filled the fridge with home-cooked meals, I’d started to obsess over her in a way that was more than a little uncomfortable.
And I couldn’t even think about the desserts. I could only assume she’d been sent by the devil to tempt me, because the only thing that could make the stubborn dark-haired beauty more tempting was the way she filled the house with the smell of mouth-watering muffins, chocolate cookies, and vanilla-laced cupcakes.
I didn’t eat any of them on principle, but that didn’t mean I didn’t dream about them — about her — when I was in my room, satisfying my sweet tooth by powering Snickers bars two at a time.
Fuck.
I pushed Maeve from my mind as I made my way back toward the heart of Southside. The loft was at the edge of town, where Main Street dead-ended at the Blackwell Preserve. I liked it because it was quiet, the two blocks surrounding our building empty by design.
We’d been buying up the surrounding property over the last few years, creating a quiet empire of old warehouses and factory buildings.
We weren’t alone. The Kings had bought up a few Southside properties, and the Blades owned one or two, but the three blocks around the loft were owned by the shell corporation set up by Remy, Poe, and me.
We could have made a mint selling to some developer who would have turned the old buildings into overpriced residential units or hipster eateries, but the whole point was to make sure Blackwell was owned by Blackwell people.
It was debatable whether the Kings — the rich fucks who’d come here for college and set up residence outside of town —qualified, but they had a kid now, had settled down enough to make it seem like their move here was permanent.
Plus, they contributed to the town in their own way, running the drug trade — among other things — between Aventine University and the town.
With my permission of course.
I reached Aloha’s building, an old brick warehouse with a BLACKWELL WIRE sign on the roof, intact from the days when floral wire had been manufactured there and shipped all over the country.
I didn’t have an appointment, but that didn’t matter here or anywhere in Blackwell. The town belonged to me, had since I’d started working to make it safe for Cassie while making enough money to make sure she’d never want for anything even though we’d lost both our parents when she was just a kid.
That she spent her days at the coffee shop on the north side of town, far away from the drugs and gangs that dominated Southside, was one of my only points of pride. I’d bought the coffee shop and the apartment units above it to give her a safe place to call home, and no one was happier than me that she rarely stepped foot on the south side of town.
