Claim the Dark (Blackwell Butchers #3)

Prologue

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We were quiet when we pulled through the gate and into the parking lot. I was afraid to speak, afraid I would lose my shit after the fiasco at Ethan Todd’s compound. It wasn’t the dead guards that bothered me.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

But it had all been for nothing. Ethan Todd — the sick fuck — had set up some kind of body double to throw us off his trail. Rafe and his friends had been as surprised as we were.

Todd was probably already back in Hungary, which didn’t mean we wouldn’t get him. We would do anything for Maeve, hunt Ethan Todd to the ends of the earth if that was what it took to give her justice for June.

But still. I wasn’t looking forward to telling her we’d gotten it wrong, and I didn’t think Poe and Remy were looking forward to the conversation any more than I was.

“What’s Ray doing outside?” Remy asked.

I followed his gaze to the dog, on his feet and barking into the night.

My blood ran cold.

I didn’t bother pulling the Hummer next to the fence, because I knew Maeve now, and I knew she’d never leave Ray out in the cold.

Not willingly.

We got out of the car with the engine still running.

Poe walked toward Ray and picked up his lead. “Where’s Maeve, boy?”

Ray whined, his gaze trained into the darkness beyond the fence.

I crossed the pavement in that direction, looking around for signs of Maeve, I saw the hole in the chain link before I even reached the fence, but I was so stunned I didn’t entirely believe it at first.

We owned a lot of property in downtown Blackwell Falls. All of it was sacrosanct, but none more so than the loft where we lived.

Where we lived with Maeve now.

I was still processing the possibilities when a glare off the streetlights caught my eye on the asphalt. I bent to investigate and discovered it was a phone.

Maeve’s phone.

I ran toward the loft without thinking, Poe and Remy shouting at me from behind.

I took the stairs three at a time, my footsteps pounding on the treads, my heart beating a mile a minute, adrenaline flooding my body, her name a drumbeat in my mind.

My heart.

Maeve.

The living room was empty, the kitchen too. The TV was on but had gone into sleep mode and the room was lit by nothing but the lights on the tree.

I felt her absence. I fucking felt it.

I felt it the way I felt the absence of the sun when it went behind the clouds.

But I didn’t want to believe it.

“Maeve!” I bellowed, praying to a god I’d never believed in that she’d step out of the bathroom, out of the hall. That she’d throw her arms around me the way she had when I’d given her Ray. That I’d be able to bury my face in her hair, feel her in my arms.

I heard Poe and Remy step into the living room as I stalked down the hall and up the stairs. “Maeve?”

She wasn’t in her room. She wasn’t in our rooms either.

She wasn’t anywhere.

I met Poe at the bottom of the stairs.

“She’s not up there,” I said, pushing past him.

I returned to the living room where Remy stood, Ray sitting next to him.

“Todd,” Remy said.

I looked around, half expecting Maeve to appear, to tell me it was all some kind of sick joke.

But it wasn’t a joke. She was gone.

And Ethan Todd had her. I knew that because it was the only way Maeve would have left Ray outside alone, the only way she would have left without so much as a note.

I heard Poe’s footsteps behind me as he returned to the living room. Silence stretched, dark and ominous, in the moment before my fury erupted.

There was no conscious thought, just a curtain of scarlet rage dropping over my mind as I flipped the sofa.

It crashed onto the coffee table and I tore through the rest of the room, pulling art off the walls, tearing the TV from its outlet and tossing it aside, smashing the gaming consoles under my fists.

I destroyed everything in my path. Everything except the Christmas tree.

Maeve’s tree.

When I was done the living room lay in shambles, the Christmas lights casting a soft glow over the wreckage.

But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered without her.

I was breathing heavy, my chest tight, a strange fullness filling my body, a fullness I’d only ever felt once before in my whole fucking life.

It took me minute to name it as loss.

I walked to the big windows overlooking Main Street. “Check the traffic cams. And CCTV from local businesses. Anything you can find.”

I was relieved to hear that my voice was flat, emotionless. It meant I was in the cold place where I could hurt people.

And by god was I going to hurt people.