Pay the Price: A Dark New Adult Romance

1. Wolf

Iparked Benji outside a nondescript diner on the outskirts of town and tried to ignore the clock ticking in the back of my brain: nine days, fifteen hours, forty-five minutes, give or take.

That was how long Daisy had been missing, how long it had been since someone had taken her from the side of the road. The clock had been ticking ever since, like I needed the reminder that Daisy was gone when I felt her absence like a hole in my fucking heart every second of every day.

The police had refused to open an investigation, even though it had been clear from the scene by the side of the road that Daisy had been taken by force, and Charles Hammond still hadn’t made a statement about his missing daughter (we’d had to pass a letter to the housekeeper through the gate when Daisy’s dad refused to see us, which… fair).

We were on our own, turning the town upside down trying to find her.

Hence the diner.

“Still don’t know why we couldn’t have met at Joe’s,” Jace grumbled as we got out of the car.

“Do you want the info or not?” I asked.

We were all dealing with Daisy’s kidnapping in our own way. Otis spent hours looking at maps of the town — abandoned buildings and hunting cabins and even mineshafts — while I turned over every rock in Blackwell Falls to see if someone had heard anything through the grapevine.

In between, I played my guitar, tinkering with the song I’d been writing since Daisy invited us to live at the house, the only music that came close to feeling like the girl who’d been living rent-free in my head for as long as I could remember.

And Jace? Well, Jace had become an even bigger asshole, his temper a hair trigger that had already sent one of the Barbarians — the Blades’ rival MC — to the hospital after a confrontation at the Orpheum.

It had gotten harder to turn down the raging metal/screamo mash-up that always played when I looked at him, one of many reasons I wished he’d calm the fuck down.

We were all fucked without her. Another girl had gone missing one town over and we hadn’t even been able to look into it. Had Daisy become one of them, snatched randomly as part of the dark underworld operating in and around Blackwell Falls? Or was Daisy’s kidnapping something else?

We didn’t know. All that mattered was getting her back.

“I want the info,” Jace said. “Just don’t know why we’re wasting time all the way out here.”

Out herewas just a few miles outside town, but it was where Crash, a member of the Barbarians MC, had wanted to meet, and at this point, I’d have gone to the moon to find out what had happened to Daisy. A few miles outside town was no big deal. Jace was just being a pain in the ass.

I’d forgotten the name of the place by the time we stepped inside, but it looked like any other diner in any other small town — linoleum floor, counter lined with old-timers nursing cups of coffee and plates of scrambled eggs, and chrome tables littered with sugar packets and bottles of ketchup.

“There,” Otis said, flipping his hair out of his eyes. “In the back.”

The biker named Crash was hunched over a cup of coffee, his gaze darting over the diner, one hand under the table. He was gaunt, his shoulders bony through the thin fabric of his T-shirt, his face almost skeletal. He looked sick, either from fear or drugs, and the first thrum of disappointment echoed through my body. In the days since Daisy had been kidnapped, we hadn’t had a single lead.

Not one.

And this one wasn’t looking promising.

Crash sat up straighter as we approached. I saw it for what it was — an attempt to look in control — but there was no hiding the fear in his gaze or the nervousness that caused his leg to bounce under the table.

He swiped a hand through his greasy brown hair and I wondered why he wasn’t wearing his Barbarians cut over his gray T-shirt.

I shook off the discordant melody — like a middle-school band having their first rehearsal — that filled my head, pushed it under my psyche the way I’d learned when I was young. My mom had always said my synesthesia was a gift, a way of seeing the world, of hearing it, like no one else, but most of the time it was just fucking annoying.

“Yo,” Otis said, sliding into the booth next to Crash.

He didn’t ask Crash to move over or even give him a warning that he planned to sit — just made himself at home, forcing Crash to slide to the far side of the booth until he was smashed against the window while Jace and I took the other side.

“Where is she?” Jace demanded.

Crash’s eyes grew wide and he threw up his hands in surrender. “I don’t know, man! I swear!”

“Then why are we here?”

A platinum-haired waitress with bright red lipstick appeared at the edge of the table. “Can I get you some menus?”

“No,” Jace and Otis said in unison.

I looked up at her and forced a smile. “Just coffee for now.”

“You got it.” She looked more than happy to beat a hasty exit.

“I heard you were looking for her,” Crash said when the waitress was out of earshot.

“You just said you don’t know where she is,” I said.

“I don’t, but I have… information,” Crash said.

“What do you want?” Otis demanded.

Leave it to Otis to cut right to the chase, because Crash obviously hadn’t invited us out here for breakfast.

Crash shifted in the booth. “I fucked up, skimmed a little extra from our last shipment.”

No wonder he’d wanted to meet us all the way out here, and no wonder he wasn’t wearing his Barbarians cut. What a fucking moron. Ax, the president of the Barbarians, was probably looking for Crash’s head on a pike.

“What does that have to do with us?” Otis asked.

“He wants a favor,” Jace said.

“I just need someone to put in a good word.” Crash’s voice had turned to a whine that was already getting on my nerves. “Smooth things over with Ax.”

I resisted the urge to laugh. Ax shot first and asked questions later. There was no smoothing things over with him.

“What makes you think we can do that?” I asked, because I’d have promised anything if this piece of shit had information on Daisy.

He shrugged. “You seem connected, especially after your time in the joint.”

He wasn’t wrong. We’d basically been kids when we’d gone to prison, but we’d already been running our own illegal side hustles, amassing money for expensive toys and a future that had still seemed like a dream. Those side hustles had put us in contact with all kinds of what Daisy’s dad probably would have called undesirables — hell, he probably would have called Jace, Otis, and me that too — and prison had only expanded our circle of contacts in that department.

“That doesn’t mean we’re willing to use those connections to make excuses for your sorry ass,” Jace said.

“I thought you wanted to find the girl?”

The words had barely left his mouth when Otis popped him hard and fast in the face.

“What the fuck?!” Blood dripped onto his upper lip and he lifted a hand to his nose, which was definitely broken.

“That was stupid,” Otis said.

I knew what he meant: it was stupid to stand between us and anything that would lead to finding Daisy. Because after nine days without her — nine days of fear — we would have murdered the fucking Pope to find her.

“I’m sorry! Fuck!” Crash said. He grabbed a napkin off the table and held it to his nose. “I’m just saying, it’s a small favor to ask in exchange for the information.”

I looked around, but if anyone had been paying attention when Otis’ fist slammed into Crash’s face, they’d gone back to their breakfast.

“How about this,” Jace said. “You tell us what you know and we might not put you in the hospital when we leave this place.”

Crash scowled. “You guys are assholes.”

“Tell us something we don’t know,” Jace said. “And I mean that literally, because if you don’t start talking we’re going to drag you out of this place and that broken nose is going to be the least of your problems.”

“You know the old logging road?” Crash asked. “The one by the trailhead to Mossy Glen?”

“We know it,” I said, because the logging road was a good spot to meet up when you didn’t want everyone in town to know you were meeting up.

“I was over there the other day, for about an hour,” he said. “Saw a handful of black SUVs head up and down the road. Didn’t look like locals.”

I thought about it. A bunch of black SUVs wasn’t exactly normal for Blackwell Falls, but I wasn’t sure it was anything to write home about either.

“Is that all?” Otis asked.

I realized the waitress had never returned with our coffee, probably because she’d seen Otis drive his fist into Crash’s face.

“Not really,” Crash said. “Buddy of mine works at this smoothie place in Cold Spring. You know it?”

“No, we don’t know the fucking smoothie place in Cold Spring,” Jace said. His patience was wearing thin. I could hear it in the way his voice sounded like a guitar string strung too tight.

“Why don’t you get to the point,” I said. Crash wasn’t going to be able to tell us anything if he was unconscious.

“I was at the smoothie place, talking to my buddy? This was a couple days after I saw the SUVs,” Crash said. “Anyway, I was standing there, shooting the shit, and this massive dude walks in wearing…” Crash stopped like he was struggling for words.

“Wearing what?” Otis asked.

“Not military clothes,” Crash said. “Not exactly. But… I don’t know, black pants and a black T-shirt. And when he went to pay, I saw that he was packing some serious heat.”

“Keep talking,” I said. There was more. I could feel it.

“So the guy doesn’t look like a local and he’s wearing these…. I don’t know, military-type clothes and carrying a gun. He orders a smoothie and a salad, and when he leaves, my buddy says he’s been in every day ordering the exact same things for the past week.”

I was starting to see it, the pieces shuffling into place like one of those sliding puzzles where you had to move them around to form the picture.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“So he pays, and when he leaves I see him get into a black SUV, like the ones I saw on the logging road. And I don’t know, man…” Crash shrugged. “It felt weird. Like he was some kind of… soldier, or security guard. Not someone from around here. And I thought if there were more of them, if they were out on the logging road, maybe it had something to do with your girl.”

My brain was working the puzzle, sliding the pieces.

“That all?” Jace asked.

“Yeah man, that’s all,” Crash said, clearly annoyed by Jace’s lack of excitement. “You think you can talk to Ax? Put in a word?”

“Why’d you steal from the club?” Otis asked.

It was a fair question, but I’d already moved on, was already thinking about what we’d do with the information Crash had given us.

“I needed the scratch,” Crash said. “Money trickles down slow in the club.”

“And why do you think that is?” Otis asked, like a teacher prodding a student for an answer the teacher already had.

“They say we have to pay our dues, earn their trust,” Crash muttered, leaning back in the booth.

Otis stood. “Doesn’t sound like you’ve earned their trust.”

Jace and I slid out of the booth and got to our feet.

“Thanks for the tip,” I said.

Jace stared down at Crash, disgust written on his face. “Ax’s cousin owns this place, so you might need a new meeting spot.”

“What?” Crash’s gaze darted around the diner, but Jace was already on his way out the door.

I followed with Otis on my heels and we all stepped out into the warm summer morning.

“I didn’t know Ax’s cousin owns that diner,” Otis said.

“He doesn’t,” Jace said.

Otis scowled. “Then why’d you tell Crash he did?”

“Because there’s nothing worse than someone who steals from his own.” Jace’s honor code was militant and unconventional, but it was there.

I walked to Benji’s driver’s side and turned over everything Crash had said.

I looked at Jace and Otis over the roof. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Are you thinking someone might be holding Daisy at the dam downstream from Mossy Glen?” Otis asked.

“That’s exactly what I’m thinking,” I said.

“If we’re all thinking the same thing, then why the fuck are we standing around holding our dicks?” Jace asked, opening the passenger side door. “Let’s fucking go.”