Chapter 3 Maeve
MAEVE
I woke up to the clanging of metal on metal followed by footsteps on the stone outside my cell.
I was groggy, more out of it than I wanted to be, but I scooted back against the stone wall and waited while a figure in jeans and a T-shirt approached the iron door to my cell.
I was happy to see it wasn’t the older beefy guy. We’d already tussled twice, and the scratches I’d left on his face and my kicks to his obviously bad leg had earned me a gag, zip ties around my wrists, and a black hood that had almost obliterated my sanity.
After that, I’d promised to “behave,” if only to avoid the zip ties and the hood. I couldn’t escape if I was bound and blind.
They’d started sending the younger skinnier guy in with my meals, and I couldn’t help feeling a little satisfied that I’d spooked the beefy Russian (I assumed he was Russian from his accent) enough to keep him away.
“Don’t be stupid,” the young guy said, entering my cell with a tray.
He had brown hair and a face that might have been nice if he hadn’t been one of Todd’s incel flunkies. He was more hesitant than the Russian, and I had the sense that he was unsure, that there might be a thread of uncertainty in him about what he was doing.
And there was another thing: I recognized them. They were the guys who’d taken the Ghosts’ place in the second Hunt, the team who’d stripped me and chained me to the wall, who’d cut my neck.
Meathead and Mr. Skinny.
The realization had come to me in the moment before I’d lost consciousness outside the loft, when Ethan Todd had spoken to me.
There you are.
I’d recognized his voice immediately, had known he’d been in the tunnels during the second Hunt. The Ghosts had been wearing masks, but the terror of their taunting voices when I’d been stripped and hung from the chains lived in my bones.
I would have recognized them even if they’d still been wearing masks, but now I knew that Meathead had thinning brown hair, a crooked nose, and a fleshy, pockmarked face.
I knew that Mr. Skinny was young, maybe even younger than me, with a smooth baby face that made me think, uncomfortably, of my little brother Simon.
“If you help me, the Butchers might not kill you,” I told Mr, Skinny as he stepped into my cell.
“Shut up,” he said, setting the tray on the floor.
“You don’t even have to do anything to help me get out of here.” I was desperate to plead my case while I had the chance. “Just contact them, tell them where I am. They’ll reward you.”
I might have been talking out of my ass, but I didn’t think so.
If I closed my eyes, I could see the way Bram had looked at me in bed, the love in Remy’s eyes when he’d started to confess his feelings at the overlook, the way Poe took my hand whenever we walked together like we were an old married couple.
“I’m not going to help you,” Mr. Skinny said. “You don’t need help, remember?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re all girl bosses now, right?” Mr. Skinny sneered. “You’re independent. You’re high-value women.”
I recognized the bullshit as coming from Ethan Todd, had heard Todd spew the same bullshit in his videos.
And yeah, some women did use words like that to describe themselves now, but I couldn’t help thinking it was typical for a bunch of men who went around calling themselves “alphas" to resent women who used words to empower themselves.
I resisted the urge to argue. I needed a way out. Winning a debate with one of the guys keeping me in an underground prison wasn’t a priority.
“Being strong doesn’t mean you never need help.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re stuck here. You’d probably spit in my face if I tried to hold a door for you, if you even looked at me at all.”
My mind was spinning, trying to find a way to use what he was saying. And the thing was, I recognized the sentiment, had heard it play out even in mainstream conversations online about the modern dynamic between men and women.
“I wouldn’t.” I was careful to keep my voice from sounding desperate. “But I might hold the door for you too, if I got there first. There’s nothing wrong with just being nice to each other, is there?”
I caught a flash of confusion in his eyes, like I’d thrown him off, like he didn’t know what to make of the conversation. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking, because a second later it was gone and he was backing toward the door.
“Wait!” I said when he removed a set of keys from his pocket.
“What?” He sounded like a sullen teenager.
“Will you come back? Just to… I don’t know, just to talk?”
I had zero interest in talking to a guy who would do what Mr. Skinny was doing, but I needed to find a way to get him on my side, or at least plant enough doubt that he might give me a break somewhere along the way.
“I’m not your friend.” He stepped through the iron door and closed it with a clang. “You should eat. You’re going to need the strength.”