Chapter 28 Bram
brAM
“I’m going to need you to explain this again,” I said, leaning against the kitchen counter.
Maeve was sitting at the island with Bailey and Poe. Remy — who’d been inexplicably covered in purple liquid when I got in — had gone to change his shirt.
“Maeve said Ethan’s in hiding right?” Bailey asked.
I folded my arms across my chest. “Right.”
“So if you want to… hurt him or whatever— ”
“I want to end him.”
“Right.” Bailey drew in a breath, like she was about to dive into some very deep waters, which I guess wasn’t far from the truth. “I don’t want to know the details, but if you want to do… whatever you want to do, you’re going to have find him.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“She thinks we can stir shit with him online,” Poe said. “Goad him into showing himself.”
“I don’t do online.”
I wasn’t a social media kind of guy. I was a break-your-face-in-person kind of guy.
“You don’t have to do it,” Remy said, walking back into the kitchen in fresh sweats and a clean T-shirt. “None of us do. Bailey said we can hire someone.”
“To stir shit online?” I was still missing something. “Won’t we have to tell the people we hire what we’re doing?”
Bailey shook her head. “Trust me, this is a thing people do. Businesses, political organizations, even governments. The bot farms don’t care. You give them a mission and they go to work.”
“What kind of mission would we give them?” Poe asked.
Bailey chewed her lower lip. “What would piss Ethan Todd off enough to draw him out of the woodwork?”
“Have a woman call him a pussy, make him feel weak and pathetic,” Maeve said. “He won’t be able to resist putting us in our place. It’s what gets him off.”
Her expression had turned dark, and I wondered if she was thinking about what Ethan had put her through in Romania, what he’d said to her during his rants.
“Making him feel weak and pathetic is a start,” Bailey said. “But that just gets him mad enough to reply. You need to get him out IRL.”
“What the fuck is IRL?” And why did I feel like I’d landed on another planet? One where words like “bot farm” and “IRL” meant something?
“In real life,” Bailey said. “You need to do more than piss him off. You need to… challenge him to show his face somewhere.”
“Challenge him how?” Remy asked.
“Apex,” Maeve said.
“What’s Apex?” Poe asked.
“Manosphere circle jerk,” Remy said, loading the blender for the second time in the last hour.
I looked at him in surprise. How did he know about this shit?
He shrugged. “I’ve done some online digging.
Todd has been a keynote speaker at Apex in the past. He’s not slated to speak this year, but he’s a fixture at their debates.
It’s where he gets a lot of his content, all curated of course.
He doesn’t repost videos where he gets his ass handed to him by a woman who’s a hundred times smarter. ”
I shook my head, trying to make sense of it. “How can a bot farm challenge him to a debate?”
“The bot farm will create character profiles,” Bailey explained. “One of them can goad Todd into a debate at Apex.”
“A feminist,” Maeve said. “One who sounds like she knows her shit.”
“Red meat for his core followers,” Poe said.
Bailey nodded. “That makes sense. So we create a feminist profile to taunt him, challenge him to a debate, plus a bunch of bros who say they can’t wait to watch him own her at Apex.”
I understood why she rolled her eyes. The posturing was so fucking juvenile, so fucking embarrassing. How were assholes like Todd not embarrassed every minute of every day for needing this shit?
“He’s not on the list of attendees at Apex this year,” Remy said, looking at his phone. “And it’s next month.”
“Can he get on the schedule this late?” Poe asked.
“He’s Ethan Todd,” Remy said. “They’ll let him come if he wants to come, especially if there’s a dustup online. One sec.”
Poe shook his head as Remy started the blender.
I rubbed at my jaw, trying to see it: the fake women calling Todd a pussy and challenging him to a debate, the fake bros cheering him on, telling him they couldn’t wait to see him demolish her at Apex.
It could work.
Remy turned off the blender and started pouring his smoothie into his glass.
“Fucking finally,” I grumbled. “So how do we get our fake feminist on the debate schedule at Apex?”
It was the one piece of the puzzle I couldn’t figure out.
“That part doesn’t actually matter,” Maeve said. “It’ll be a wet dream for him if she doesn’t show.”
“So Ethan shows up at the debate, the woman won’t be there since she doesn’t exist, and Todd crows that she was too afraid to face him because she knew her arguments were weak,” Remy said.
Poe nodded. “And then we know where to find Todd.”
Everybody stopped talking, and I knew they were doing what I was doing: walking through it in my mind, seeing it all, looking for holes in the plan.
“What if he doesn’t take the bait?” I finally asked.
Maeve’s jaw hardened. “He will. He won’t be able to help himself.”
I hated that she knew Todd as well as she did, that she’d had to stew in his toxic bullshit for so long. I promised myself that when it was all over, I’d spend the rest of my life making hers beautiful and bright.
Yeah, the rest of her fucking life. If she’d let me.
But first, I was going to wipe Ethan Todd from the face of the earth.
And I was going to burn everything and everyone who’d ever helped him.