Page 108 of Bleed the Shadows
What can I say? My brothers could be dumb assholes but they were my dumb assholes.
“Your funeral,” Rafe said, stepping away. “You ready for this?”
“Let’s do it,” Poe said.
“Follow the plan,” Jude said, moving toward Poe. “Stay in your teams.”
He and Poe moved to the left. I fell in with Bram and we headed to the right.
Nolan followed Rafe in a straight line through the trees.
We were in their world now, silent and deadly. No one said another word.
68
MAEVE
I textedBailey on and off while I dozed on the couch. She’d ended things with the guy she’d been dating and was feeling pretty depressed about the state of the dating world. It was nice to be close again, to talk about things that had nothing to do with June or Ethan Todd or the fact that the three men who held my heart in their bloody hands were at that very moment putting their lives on the line for me.
Any other time I would have invited Bailey over for a girls' night, but I didn’t have the energy to pretend it was just another night, and I wanted to be alone with the Butchers when they came home.
Our texting tapered off as it got closer to one a.m. and I pulled the blanket off the back of the couch and snuggled in, the TV casting flickering shadows over the room. I was glad we hadn’t taken down the Christmas tree yet. There was something cozy and comforting about the glow of its lights and I closed my eyes with a sigh, Ray’s head on my legs at the other end of the couch.
I thought about the Butchers, wondered where they were and what they were doing. They were the last thing I thought about before I drifted into sleep.
69
POE
Gettingthrough the guards was easier than I’d expected. Jude called the guys “amateurs with guns” with a derisive snort, and we’d taken out the four that had been posted on one side of the main house right after we heard gunfire from the direction of the guest houses.
That would have been Bram and Remy.
I knew because that had been the plan, and we’d been warned by Rafe, Nolan, and Jude more than once to stick to the plan.
Jude had alluded to the fact that they weren’t using comms because of us, because we were also “amateurs with guns” and we’d make too much noise and muddy up the streamlined communication he, Rafe, and Nolan had been trained to use in the military.
He wasn’t a dick about it. It just was what it was and I guessed when you were trained to kill by the military industrial complex even we would seem like amateurs.
Once the guards were down, I followed Jude through a glass door at the back of the house. If I’d been alone — or with Bram and Remy — I would have broken it and kept moving, but Juderemoved a small tool from his bag of tricks and cut a hole into the glass, popped the piece out, and let it fall silently into his hand.
He pocketed the piece of glass and slipped his hand through the door to unlock it.
The alarm blared when he opened the door.
“First ones in, he said with a note of pride.
He hurried to punch in the code. I had no idea how they’d gotten it because when we’d asked they’d told us “don’t worry about it,” but the alarm went quiet and we moved forward.
We didn’t stop when gunfire sounded from the front of the house. We just moved through its huge, minimalistic rooms until we ran into Rafe and Nolan in the main hall leading to the front of the house.
“First floor’s clear,” Rafe said to Jude. “We’ll take the second floor while you hit the tunnel.”
It had all been planned. Bram was determined that we would be the ones to take out Ethan for Maeve.
And Maeve had been right: Dimitri Kaprolov had built a tunnel under the house.
It had clearly been built as an escape tunnel, one long run from the house to the road, and it wasn’t a stretch to think its existence was one of the reasons Ethan Todd had purchased the house from his old mentor.
