Chapter 44 Ethan
ETHAN
I lifted the thirty-pound dumbbells over my head and tried to focus on the motion, but it was all wrong. Instead of being in one of the high-end gyms in one of my many high-end homes — or one of Dimitri’s hideouts — I was stuck in a nondescript hotel room.
In a fucking Marriott, of all places.
It wasn’t my usual scene in the city — that would have been the Four Seasons or the Plaza — and as usual it was all Maeve Haver’s fault.
At first, I hadn’t believed my eyes when I’d spotted her through the crowd at Apex. But then I’d seen Barm Montgomery, who was hard to miss, and I’d known it was her.
I’d faltered, had almost tripped over the guards assigned to me by the conference organizers, guards that were required under the conference’s insurance policy because apparently I was a “high-risk asset.”
Then I’d been shuffled to the front of the room and guided onto the debate stage, where I’d been forced to smile and lift my hands in victory since that online bitch New York Nancy hadn’t shown.
But I couldn’t even enjoy it, because Maeve was out there with the Butcher’s, stalking me like fucking animals.
I hadn’t even realized my phone was gone until the debate was over.
Could I have dropped it somewhere along the way? Maybe. But someone probably would have turned it in because what use was a phone with a facia recognition lock?
Unless the culprit wasn’t a petty thief but the Blackwell Butchers, trying to hack my shit.
I’d used the tracking app to try and locate the phone, but it hadn’t been much help. The phone had appeared around the conference center for a while, then in the city, then outside of it.
After that, it had dropped off the map.
I’d broken out into a cold sweat when I realized what had happened, had practically been in a cold sweat ever since.
Because my phone? My phone had all kinds of shit on it.
Bad shit. Shit that could get me in trouble. Shit that could help the Butchers find me if I wasn’t careful.
Which brought me to my present accommodations at the Marriott in Times Square, a location crowded with people 24/7, obnoxious and tacky as fuck but all the better to fade into the crowd. Not that I was doing much with crowds these days. I didn’t even dare go to the hotel gym for fuck’s sake.
And I definitely didn’t dare go to an airport.
All of which explained why I was lifting in my hotel room with weights bought online, the remnants of that morning’s breakfast scattered across plates on the room service tray at the table on the bed.
Fuck.
I couldn’t even enjoy my victory at Apex (the trolls online could say my opponent had won all they wanted but that didn’t make it true).
I put down the weights and grabbed the hand towel I’d been using for sweat. I was pretty sure the room had started to stink — it had been a few days since I’d let housekeeping in to clean — but I had bigger things to worry about.
I checked my smart watch and scowled at the reading. My vitals had taken a hit over the past couple of months. My blood pressure and resting heart rate were up, which probably meant my cortisol was through the roof too.
I’d been able to order my common supplements, but the more exotic ones had been hard to come by while I’d been moving around, and while I’d been able to have the weights delivered to my room, it’s not like I could bring in a treadmill without getting a lot of attention.
And attention was something I didn’t need.
I wiped my face and dropped into the chair in front of my laptop at the hotel desk.
The cam girls occupied three of my four open tabs, but they didn’t excite me like they used to.
Just a bunch of tits and ass, writhing and pouting, all to make sad incels feed more money into the machine of my enterprise.
The girls might as well have been selling cleaning supplies.
I picked up the syringe, already loaded with that day’s dose of T, and jabbed it into my thigh. Then I guzzled half a bottle of water and turned my attention to the fourth open tab.
I’d had a lot of time on my hands since Apex and I’d spent more of a little of it obsessing about Maeve Haver and the Butchers. What was their fucking problem? They had me trapped like a rat, afraid to leave the country, afraid even to leave the hotel.
I needed to get them off my ass, and as I’d dove deep into Blackwell Falls, looking for information on the Butchers, one thing had come up again and again: the missing girls.
There was other stuff too. Tourist stuff. Hiking trails and restaurants and fall festivals. But other than that Blackwell Falls wasn’t exactly a hub of excitement — unless you counted the girls that went missing just often enough to barely catch the attention of the police department.
That was intentional. You could get away with almost anything if you didn’t rub people’s faces in it.
Dimitri had taught me that.
People could live with a certain amount of bad shit as long as it didn’t seem like it could happen to them, as long as it seemed like an anomaly, something that happened to other people.
Dimitri and his friends had been careful around Blackwell Falls, but not careful enough to avoid notice entirely.
I scrolled through one of the articles I’d been reading online, a piece about a girl named Rain Adakai who’d gone missing a couple years before. Her mom was quoted, and her sister, but other than that the only person on record was a name I’d come to recognize: Detective Rodriguez.
I pulled up a video of a press conference she’d given a couple years earlier and pressed Play.
She talked about what the police knew about the girl’s last known whereabouts and what to do if someone watching had information. She was pretty enough, although well past her prime. Probably one of those career woman who went home to an empty apartment and ten cats.
I hit pause when she handed the press conference off to a spokesperson for the department, a young guy in a suit who’s job it was to make sure the Blackwell PD didn’t look incompetent because they couldn’t seem to figure out why local girls kept going missing.
I stared at Detective Rodriguez’s face, an idea forming in my mind, one that would muddy the waters, take the heat off me if the Butchers decided to take my phone to the cops.
One that would give me some cover to leave the country again.
I needed to get out of this fucking place, hole up in a one of the hideouts I’d created for exactly this kind of situation.
I hesitated, then picked up the burner phone I’d bought before I’d checked into the Marriott with my fake passport.
The phone rang twice before a male voice answered. “Blackwell PD, how can we help you?”
“I’d like to talk to Detective Rodriguez.” I sat back in the desk chair, feeling more in control. “It’s about the missing girls. I think I know who’s been taking them.”