Page 75 of Rule the Night
I missed June so much it was a physical pain. She’d loved autumn best of all, had laughingly called herself a basic bitch when she was first in line for pumpkin-spice everything and wearing boots and sweaters way before it was cold enough to make sense.
This was my second fall without her, and it seemed impossible that I’d have a lifetime of them ahead of me. How was I supposed to get through them all?
I was feeling morose when the train finally pulled into the station downtown. I exited with the other passengers andstopped to get a coffee, telling myself to snap out of it. A depressive funk wasn’t going to make the day any easier.
It was late morning, the city emptied of early-morning commuters, and I passed students on their way to university, nannies pushing strollers, and dog walkers wrangling multiple pups, plus the occasional business person out for a meeting or an early lunch.
I was two blocks away from the Warwick when the sidewalks got noticeably more crowded. Tension seemed to thicken the air as I got closer to the hotel, groups of men congregating together while groups of women did the same.
I knew what was coming because I’d seen it before: hordes of Ethan Todd men (and the occasional misguided fangirl) cheering him on while groups of women held signs decrying his misogynistic rhetoric.
The noise level grew too: a low hum that turned into shouting and chanting. Police cars lined the streets and cops in riot gear looking nervously on, like they were expecting the whole place to explode at any second.
My stomach tightened, my heart thumping hard in my chest. I’d been here before, back when I’d tried to get justice for June outside the Marquis, and I was still traumatized from the experience.
Now I moved through the crowd carefully, feeling like danger was everywhere as I approached the women picketing Ethan Todd on one side of the hotel entrance. I wasn’t the only one with an ax to grind against Ethan Todd.
The whole scene felt like it was about to blow.
The signs of the women around me passed in a blur as I made my way toward the front of the line:you don’t own us, we are not property, #mensuck.
Okay, let’s not get crazy. Not to #notallmen, but I didn’t believe that last one at all. My dad was the best man I knew,and my little brother Simon was a huge sweetheart. Even the Butchers, who definitely still scared the shit out of me in more ways than one, had never done anything to hurt me.
The world was as full of good male examples as it was bad, but the bad got a lot more airtime, and I think it was safe to say there was a problem among some men.
Case in point: the men across from me on the other side of the hotel entrance.
I skimmed their signs:where is my sandwich bitch?, Todd is King,and“wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.”
I knew that last quote was incomplete not because I was religious, but because I’d looked it up when some gross dude on one of Ethan Todd’s videos had posted it. The rest of the quote was, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”
They always left that part out. And this one too: “[Submit] to one another out of reverence for Christ.”
I checked my phone. It was just after eleven a.m., almost time for the lunch recess at the Men First conference according to the schedule posted online. Ethan Todd was a multimillionaire who liked the finer things in life, and I was banking on him making an appearance when he ducked out of the hotel for lunch at one of the nicer restaurants in the city.
I tried to look past the men across from me, their faces twisted with rage as they shouted counter slogans to the ones the women shouted behind me.
And I tried not to think of June.
Tried not to wonder if Chris had looked like these men in the moments before he’d murdered my sister.
46
POE
I forcedmyself to finish my workout before checking the tracker we’d installed on Maeve’s phone. It had become something of an obsession in the weeks she’d been living with us.
More so once I realized she wasn’t always where she said she was going to be.
At first, she’d gone to work and come home, maybe stopped at the grocery store for an occasional forgotten item or at Cassie’s for a cup of coffee after work. But after a while she’d started making bigger detours.
Namely to the gun range.
That shouldn’t have been a surprise. She’d brought her weapon to the Hunt, still carried it around the house under her clothes.
I was starting to know Maeve, if not understand her — and Maeve wasn’t stupid.
If she had a weapon it was because she’d learned to use it.
