Chapter 4 Remy
REMY
I paced the living room in the rented apartment in Bucharest and tried to mentally send a message to Maeve.
We’re coming for you. I love you.
I hadn’t said it after Owen’s winter formal and now I hated myself for it.
Maeve had been spooked by the intimacy of our slow dance, spooked by the realization that I’d already come to: that what was between us — all of us — was more than just an obligation of the Hunt.
I hadn’t wanted to corner her, so I’d swallowed the three words that had been on my lips even though they were big enough to choke the life out of me.
Now she was out there, alone and scared, and she didn’t even know that I Ioved her so much I felt like someone had excavated my heart with a fucking ice pick.
“You’re going to wear a hole in the floors,” Poe said from the sofa in the living room.
“We can’t all be Buddha.”
He held up his hands in surrender and I realized I’d practically bitten his head off, something that was usually Bram’s territory.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
“I get it.” He went to the kitchen and started making a coffee even though it was after midnight in Romania, the city’s lights twinkling on the other side of the windows while its residents slept. “And for what it’s worth, I’m not exactly Zen about this whole thing.”
“I know.”
We were all worried sick and showing it in our own ways. Poe hadn’t meditated once since Maeve had been taken, and Bram had taken to stalking the city at all hours like a vampire looking for blood, like he might stumble across Maeve on a random street corner.
“Any word from Aloha or Rafe?” Poe asked as the coffee machine started churning.
I shook my head. My laptop was open on the dining room table in front of the windows.
Thanks to the Kings and their private jet — only the fucking Kings would have a private jet — we’d left Blackwell Falls less than an hour after we got word that Ethan Todd’s plane had registered a flight plan to Romania.
We’d landed in Bucharest and rented a car to get us into the heart of the city where Jude had arranged for the apartment.
Now we were working every angle to get a lead on Todd’s location.
Aloha had one of his spiders crawling for financial data — credit card charges and anything else traced not only to Todd, who must have had a second passport, but to Anton Vladescu — and he’d set his facial recognition spider to search traffic and security cams for Maeve, Todd, and Anton.
We were sitting on Todd’s socials, waiting to see if he’d post a new video or comment, anything that might give us a clue that he was up and running again, anything that might give us a clue where he was, although Aloha said Todd usually uploaded his videos through a VPN.
“Fuck,” Poe said, dropping into one of the dining room chairs with his coffee.
“Yeah,” I said. “Bailey texted for an update.”
Poe sighed. “Double fuck.”
We’d debated telling Maeve’s parents about her kidnapping. They deserved to know their daughter was in danger. But none of us had met them, and we had no idea how much Maeve had told them about our living arrangement or if Maeve would even want them to know.
Her family had been through a lot after June’s murder, and I knew from my conversations with Maeve that her parents’ pain was something that weighed heavily on her.
In the end we’d decided to give it one week — one week to find Maeve — but we’d agreed to tell Bailey, who’d lost her shit.
Once we’d talked her down from calling the police (Blackwell Falls PD didn’t have the best reputation for finding missing girls), she’d agreed to give us the week, and then only because we’d sold her on all the resources we had to work with between Aloha, Rafe and his friends, and the Kings.
After that, Bailey was going to Maeve’s family with or without us.
“We still have four days,” I said.
Poe nodded, but his expression was morose.
Finding Maeve felt like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Just because we’d tracked Todd’s plane to Romania didn’t meant they were still here, and even if they were, Bucharest was a labyrinthine city surrounded by wild country, countless villages, and abandoned castles.
Todd could be anywhere.
I didn’t let myself think about the other possibility: that Todd might have already done something to Maeve.
The thought unhinged me, made it impossible to think straight.
No, she was out there, alive. I knew it.
But I also knew Todd had been charged with trafficking in Hungary, that he ran cam rooms that were rumored to be involuntary.
The possibility that he’d sold Maeve or put her to work in some other fashion was real, and I felt the ticking clock like a bomb on our need to find her before it was too late.
“We’re going to find her,” Poe said, like he was reading my mind.
He was saying it as much for himself as for me. I could tell because I recognized the desperation in his voice, the same desperation in my own inner voice: we’re going to find her, she’s Maeve, she’s strong, she’ll be okay.
The door to the apartment opened and Bram walked in, his face set in stone. I hadn’t realized how much Maeve had changed him until she was gone. His expression had softened — around us at least — in the month that Maeve had been back.
That was gone now. He looked like a gargoyle, his coldness carved in granite.
“I still don’t get how these fuckers have all this shit,” he grumbled, pulling off his leather jacket.
He was talking about the apartment Jude had arranged (we didn’t know if Rafe, Nolan, and Jude owned the place or if they’d borrowed it, but they’d given it to us on a dime) and the luxury jet owned by the Kings.
Poe took a drink of his coffee. “They have money. A lot of it.”
“We have a lot of it,” Bram said, dropping onto the sofa in the apartment’s living room.
The place wasn’t fancy, but it was nice enough, the kind of place where you could hole up and work with a fair amount of anonymity.
“We haven’t spent it the way they have,” I reminded him.
Possessions hadn’t been that important to us. Blackwell Falls was our kingdom, and we owned it lock, stock, and barrel.
What else mattered?
Except now we had something — someone — real to protect.
The resources that had been tapped by the Kings and by Rafe and his friends had helped us get to Maeve faster.
“We need to get serious when we get Maeve back,” Bram said.
I nodded because he was right. I wasn’t sure about a jet, but we definitely needed more security. We needed an exit plan to get Maeve out if things went sideways, a hideaway somewhere, like the loaned apartment in Romania, somewhere we could send Maeve if things got bad in Blackwell Falls.
And we needed to make sure Maeve was taken care of if something happened to us too. Make sure she would never have to worry about money or a place to live.
“Happy Birthday by the way,” I said to Bram.
He pulled out his phone, looked at the screen, and put it back in his pocket. “Thanks.”
We sat in silence for a minute. I knew we were all thinking about Maeve, about how different things would have been if we were at home on Bram’s birthday.
Maeve would have gotten him presents and made us get him presents too.
She would have made him his favorite dinner — a steak as big as his face and garlic mashed potatoes and homemade rolls because in Bram’s opinion you could never have too much meat or too many carbs — and a birthday cake.
She would have made us sing to the fucker, and even though Poe and I would have grumbled about it, we would have been secretly happy we were doing it. We would have been happy because Maeve had pulled us all into the land of the living without even realizing it.
Poe’s phone buzzed and he picked it up off the table, then sat up straighter.
“What?” Bram said.
“It’s Nolan. They think they found Todd.”