Chapter 6 Bram
brAM
“It’s a fucking castle.”
Remy stared at the image on my computer: a giant stone structure rising from a clearing that was surrounded by rolling hills and banks of trees.
“Fuck.” Poe paced away from us. “Fuck.”
My gaze was glued to the satellite image. “It doesn’t matter.”
Maeve could be on the moon and I’d find a way to get to her.
“Shame about Rafe, Nolan, and Jude,” Poe said, dropping into one of the chairs at the dining room table in the Bucharest apartment. “We could use them.”
Rafe and his friends were working, and while I didn’t know exactly what they did for a living, I knew enough to know it involved million-dollar contracts, high-tech weaponry, and the cover of night.
“At least they gave us a leg up,” Remy said.
I tabbed to the attachments Rafe had sent over with the location of the castle.
There was a brief history on the place, pictures taken back when it had been open to the public, and a general idea of the floor plan, general because it had been cobbled together from old pictures and historic accounts of the place, which had been built for a military leader in the thirteenth century.
According to the summary Rafe had attached, the place had been conquered, burned, and rebuilt more times than history could count. It had been abandoned for almost ten years before being bought by a shell company.
A shell company registered in Moscow.
I thought about Dimitri Kaprolov, the Russian mafia boss who’d sponsored Ethan Todd at Aventine University. Were they still connected?
“Did you clock the registration on that shell company?” I asked.
“I did,” Poe said.
“Think Kaprolov is helping Todd?” Remy asked.
I scrubbed at my face, fighting the exhaustion that had been trying to claim my body in the three days since Todd had taken Maeve. “At the very least, he’s giving Todd someplace to crash. The Moscow angle is too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence.”
I stood to pace the room. Beyond the apartment’s windows, Bucharest was waking up, the distant sound of car horns and sirens drifting from the streets below, pedestrians huddled in coats hurrying down the sidewalks like ants on their way to a picnic.
I forced myself to focus on the logistics of getting Maeve out of a fucking castle. Logistics were easier than thinking about Maeve, than wondering if she was scared or hurt or worse.
I wouldn’t let myself think about that.
She was out there, just a couple hundred miles away. We would get her back. We had to because I didn’t think my heart would keep beating without her.
A few months ago, it wouldn’t have mattered whether my heart kept beating. Cassie was taken care of whether I was alive or not, and I’d been passing time, whiling my life away in a series of pleasure hits that made me feel alive: eating, hunting, fucking, killing.
But it had been a shadow of a life. I knew that now.
I knew that because Maeve had descended into our lives like some kind of dark angel, carrying a gun, a planet-sized attitude, and a smile that stopped my heart.
And then, all at once, my life had looked completely different, like one of those old black-and-white movies that were re-released, newly colored with modern technology.
I wanted to stay alive because I wanted more of Maeve’s attitude, more of her smile. And there was something else, something I hadn’t even realized until she’d been taken: I wanted to see what would happen next in my life with her in it.
Because for the first time, I saw a future that might include more than just the same thing day after day, a future that might just hold all the things I hadn’t dared to want: a home and family of my own.
Purpose.
Fucking love.
It was just a glimpse, a shimmer on the horizon. But it was there, and I fucking wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life.
But it didn’t exist without Maeve. She was the one who’d brought it to life.
It didn’t work without her.
Poe finally spoke. “So we go in, we get her out.”
“Obviously,” Remy said.
“We need to do it fast,” I said. “Tonight.”
“Obviously,” Remy said again.
I stood. “Then what are we waiting for?”