Page 35 of Bleed the Shadows
I wondered if it was normal to get hard watching a girl lick her fingers.
Bram pushed away from the island. “The Ghosts.”
24
POE
The cabin satin a wooded clearing just off a small road outside of town. It wasn’t the Ghosts’ house — that was an old Victorian off Main — but it hadn’t taken us long to find them.
They should have known better than to think they could hide in Blackwell Falls.
The town ran like the blood in our veins. We knew everything that happened there, and the Ghosts’ flight from the house downtown to the cabin in the woods was no exception.
“I hate this shit,” Remy said, shifting next to me.
This wasn’t our scene. Our scene was concrete and brick, iron and steel. We usually didn’t have to crouch in the woods to case a place. Our victims were brought to the old barn outside of town. Either that or we brought the fight to them without stealth or apology.
Who was going to stop us?
But this was different. The fact that the Ghosts had decamped to the cabin meant we couldn’t sit outside and wait for them to return without scaring them away. Any car would be noticeable sitting outside the property, which was why we’dparked half a mile away in a lot next to one of the preserve’s trailheads and hoofed it the rest of the way.
It was after midnight and cold, our breath fogging the night air. It smelled like balsam and cedar, like cold and death, the woods preparing for a long sleep over the winter. We could have hired Rafe and his friends to deal with the Ghosts. They were experts at this shit — at hiding, at getting in and out of a place without being seen — and it wasn’t like we couldn’t afford them.
But this was personal. This was about Maeve.
For Maeve.
My heart lifted at the thought of her. She was back at the loft, back with us, and nothing had ever felt as right as resuming our grocery store runs (the farmers market was closed for winter) and coming home to find her cooking.
Her presence at the loft wasn’t about the food anymore, but none of us were ready to broach the subject of what was really happening between us, and it had been easy to slide back into the old pattern of Maeve cooking, living with us because she’d lost the Hunt.
Plus there was the shit between her and Bram, and it wasn’t like I could tell her I wanted her to stay forever when she was so pissed at Bram she could hardly look at him, and vice versa, although I had a hunch the reason Bram couldn’t look at Maeve was a lot more complicated.
But that was his problem. I knew what I wanted: Maeve back in my bed, in my life forever.
I hadn’t made a move toward her in the week she’d been back despite the fact that my fingers itched to touch her and my dick got hard every time I looked at her. I sensed that she was still vulnerable underneath her bravado, and even though it had nothing to do with Remy and me — and everything to do with Bram — I didn’t want to make her feel like she had to fuck us just because we were going to take care of Ethan Todd for her.
Still, the thought of fucking Maeve again, knowing she was under our roof, that I could be in her bed in under a minute, kept me up at night, sweating and desperate like a fucking middle-school kid with a 24/7 boner.
I heard the hum of a car in the distance long before it reached our position. “Someone’s coming.”
Headlights swung through the trees as the car — some kind of black SUV — turned onto the drive.
“Let them get inside,” Bram said, shoving the last half of a Snickers bar into his mouth.
Bro was going to have a heart attack by the time he was thirty.
The car came to a stop outside the cabin and three men got out and hurried inside.
Roman, Brock, and Milo. The original Ghosts.
They were so nondescript I probably couldn’t have picked them out of a lineup, which made their deception even more insulting.
“No neighbors,” I said.
“Dumbfucks made it easier for us by leaving town,” Bram said.
I understood why people were afraid of him. The massive scar that divided his face made him look like the reflection in a fun-house mirror, and his hulking body could have been mistaken for that of a monster in the dark.
