Chapter 4
ETHAN
I watched from behind my mask as Bram approached the girl named Maeve and I knew immediately that there was something between them.
It wasn’t a total surprise. Anton had dug deep on Maeve Haver since she’d been spotted by the security cameras idling outside the iron gates around my house on the mountain. We knew she’d been staying with Bram, Poe, and Remy.
The fucking Blackwell Butchers.
We also knew she’d left and was now living in an apartment with a friend named Bailey Alvarez, an apartment with Maeve’s name on the lease.
I’d assumed she’d just been a fuck for the Butchers, a Hunt girl who’d lost.
One of many.
But I was good at seeing things other people missed. Especially in people.
I knew when women — even confident women — were insecure.
Knew when they had a black hole that needed filling, preferably by a man.
I knew how to convince them I could fill that hole, knew how to coax them along, make them feel seen.
Knew exactly when to start turning the wheel, bringing them around to my way of thinking, to doing the things I wanted them to do.
After that it was easy to get them working in the cam rooms or farming them out to in-person clients. That was the thing most people didn’t understand. For the women who worked in my operation, it wasn’t about the money.
It was about the approval.
It was about pleasing me, making me like them, which was the funniest fucking part of the whole bit. I liked them — some of them — in the way I liked a good pen or a warm jacket.
I liked them when they were functional, when they served a purpose.
But I did see them. I saw what they needed from me to become another instrument in the toolbox of my underground empire.
And now I saw Bram Montgomery, saw the way his body tightened as he approached Maeve Haver, his gaze locked on her face like a missile homing in on a target.
They had fucking chemistry.
I could almost see it rippling through the air between them, could almost feel the energy Bram put into maintaining the three feet of distance between them as he handed her the clipboard.
He felt something for her, and I tilted my head to look at Poe Killborn and Remy Taft, looking for signs in their body language that would mimic Bram’s hunger.
But Poe and Remy stood stock-still, their faces hidden by their creepy fucking animal bone masks and the fact that they were in profile.
It didn’t matter. If Bram had a thing for the Haver girl, I was willing to bet Poe and Remy had a thing for her too.
The Butchers were younger than me by ten years, but they’d been a package deal even when I’d left Blackwell Falls almost a decade earlier, although they’d just been getting started then.
I scanned the other teams: groups of three in an assortment of creepy fucking masks.
And Anton and me — together with Nick Perez, an eager kid we’d picked up a year earlier who was eager to learn and even more eager to do some damage when the situation required it — in Scream masks.
Getting in hadn’t been as hard as I’d expected.
Roman, Brock, and Milo, the original members of the team, had been low-key followers of the Ethan Todd channel, three in a burgeoning group of men who watched my videos and found themselves nodding and thinking fuck yeah when I explained all the ways they were being neutered by the women in their lives, by women they didn’t even know.
We’d been prepared to use force to get the original Scream team out of the picture for the next Hunt. Turned out, they were more than happy to help when Anton told them he was working on my behalf.
Now I watched Maeve Haver hand the clipboard back to Bram, a light of defiance in her eyes. It was a little surreal, and I wondered if this was what it was like for all the fanboys who mobbed me at events, asking for autographs and saying I was a hero.
I’d been studying Maeve through Anton’s reports for the past three weeks.
Thanks to Nick, I knew she usually worked Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
I knew she and her roommate ordered takeout — pizza usually, but sometimes Chinese — on Friday.
I knew she saw her family for dinner on Sunday.
I’d seen pictures of her getting out of the dumpy black Honda that had belonged to her dead sister.
I’d seen the way she’d wrapped her arms around herself as she’d crossed the empty mall parking lot after a shift at the tacky fast-fashion store where she worked.
I’d caught the pensive expression on her face when she’d stared out the window of the Daily Grind, a small coffee shop off Main, while Bailey talked animatedly across from her (I could guess why Maeve didn’t get her coffee from Cassie’s Cuppa).
I’d seen her running on the track at Blackwell High as the sun set behind the mountain. I’d even seen pictures of her entering and exiting the firing range outside of town. That had been the most interesting part of all.
And it wasn’t only the stuff she did in person.
I knew she’d been studying old plans of the town because Anton had one of our tech guys mirror her computer.
I knew she rarely had more than a hundred dollars in her checking account.
I knew she spent more money on ammunition than she did on clothes or shoes, unusual for a twenty-two-year-old girl.
Her research on the old plans for Blackwell Falls, starting in the late 1800s and continuing to the present, was what had clued me in that she planned to take part in another Hunt.
I hadn’t been sure it was this one — not so soon — but it had been worth a try, and now I felt like I was seeing a long-admired celebrity up close for the first time.
Except this was better because Maeve was a lost girl and there was nothing I liked more than a lost girl, except maybe a lost girl who’d just consented to all the things I normally did to women without consent.
It was like finding a winning lottery ticket.
Of course, there was still the Hunt.
But Bram wasn’t done with Maeve Haver, and I watched with fascination as he drew his knife across his palm, then reached out to smear his blood on her cheek.
I knew what it meant, understood why the masked men around me shifted as that understanding made its way to them.
Bram had marked the girl as his. Theirs.
The Hunt hadn’t even started and she already belonged to the Butchers.
The other men might not like it, but no one who made Blackwell Falls their home was going to fuck with Bram Montgomery.
And the truth was: I got it. I would have been lying if I’d said Bram didn’t freak me out a little. I would have been lying and I would have been stupid, because I knew what Bram was capable of, knew the power he wielded in Blackwell Falls.
But I didn’t call Blackwell Falls home — not anymore — and the prospect of taking something from Bram, something he coveted, made the Hunt a hell of a lot more interesting.
And the prize, with her glossy black hair, ruby lips, and the defiant light in her eyes — a light that would be fun to extinguish — was every bit as enticing.