Page 96 of Bleed the Shadows
“For us,” Remy said. “Is there room in there forus?”
“No.” Bram threw a pillow at the door. “Now fuck off.”
58
MAEVE
I didn’t even mind remakingthe cake. After sleeping until noon, I felt refreshed and excited for the day, not to mention thoroughly fucked in all the best ways. I got the cakes in the oven and went to work on the appetizers I was serving that night when Bailey came over for Christmas Eve.
Ray lay on the rug in the dining room, watching me move around the kitchen while the Butchers strategized their assault on Ethan Todd’s house the day after Christmas.
I was half-listening to them, my mind in that almost liminal space it went to when I was cooking. Rafe and his friends were going to help the Butchers get into Ethan Todd’s compound. According to Bram, they ran some kind of mercenary business, and they had more experience with high-end security systems and trained guards.
I was glad. If Bram had his way, he’d walk in with guns raised and shoot everything in sight, and after finally breaking down the wall that had been between us I had no desire to see him killed by one of Ethan Todd’s guards.
It was still weird to realize all these people — Rafe and his friends, the Kings — had been in Blackwell all along. It made mefeel hopelessly naive and honestly a little dumb to look back on my life before the Hunt, back when I’d thought Blackwell Falls was just another sleepy town where nothing bad had happened before June’s murder.
The truth was, bad things had been happening all along, and I was starting to think Blackwell Falls needed bad men to keep those things from hurting people like me, like the person I’d been when I’d been going to private school and cooking with my dad and laughing with June, Simon, and Olivia.
Maybe I was just trying to make myself feel better about the fact that the Butchers’ world was starting to feel like my world, but I didn’t think so. I wasn’t wrestling with any of the moral dilemmas I might have expected which meant that I was either so far gone I couldn’t see the truth, or the truth was a lot more complicated than I’d ever expected.
Aventine was part of the town too, and I thought about the gorgeous campus and the abandoned chess room and the underground bunker where we’d gone through the school’s records with the Kings. It wasn’t like any campus I’d ever been to and I wondered how Willa and the Kings had ended up together, if she’d always been one of them or if she’d fallen into Wonderland like me.
“We can go in through the tree line here,” Rafe was saying on Bram’s computer.
It was Christmas Eve and I didn’t blame Rafe for not wanting to come over to talk about their plans. They’d opted for a video call instead and I listened as he pointed out holes in the security and weaknesses in Ethan Todd’s setup.
I was glad the Butchers had help. I wasn’t sure it would have been possible to go after Ethan Todd without Rafe, Nolan, and Jude, and without the Kings, we definitely wouldn’t know as much about Ethan.
I’d spent some time looking up Dimitri Kaprolov online, but it hadn’t been very enlightening. There were a few articles in European newspapers about his alleged ties to sex trafficking and gun running — one article even accused him of supplying arms to a well-known terrorist state — and one thread in a European true-crime forum where the armchair detectives there linked him to a missing girl that had been found dead and badly beaten, but not much else.
The last part had turned my stomach. I’d thought about June, about the pictures the DA had shown in court of June’s body when she’d been found. Chris had hurt her before he’d killed her, and I’d held my parents’ hands, all of us silently crying, determined not to leave even though the pictures of June’s naked and battered body made me feel like I was going to throw up.
We’d stayed for June, because she deserved to have witnesses to what had been done to her.
If Dimitri Kaprolov was that kind of man, the kind of man who would do something like that to a girl like June, he was at least as evil as Ethan Todd.
There had only been one photo of Kaprolov, an older one in black and white that showed him exiting a private jet. In the photo he’d looked fairly unremarkable, an older man well on his way to bald, wearing a dark suit and flanked by two big men in the kind of black gear I’d seen in military movies.
But that had been it. Nothing about where he lived now. Nothing about his family, if he even had one.
I pulled out serving platters while I replayed what we’d learned about him at Aventine: that Dimitri Kaprolov had been indiscreet and also paranoid, that he’d built the underground records room at Aventine, that he’d stayed in Blackwell Falls for a while before fleeing the country.
I froze. He’d stayed in Blackwell Falls for a while before fleeing the country.
My heart raced and I set down the serving trays and picked up my phone. I opened a tab to the Blackwell Falls real estate records I’d used to figure out Ethan Todd’s house had been purchased by a shell company in Hungary and looked up the previous owner’s name.
Another company.
I opened a new tab and entered the name of the company.
It had been incorporated in Moscow.
Ethan Todd had bought the house from Dimitri Kaprolov, and Dimitri Kaprolov had a thing for underground rooms.
I walked around the island, and hovered behind Poe as Rafe, still on the video call, explained that they would split into two-man teams once they were inside Ethan Todd’s compound: Rafe with Nolan, Jude with Poe, Bram with Remy.
“Hold on,” Bram said when he realized I was standing there. His forehead creased with worry. “What’s up?”
