Pay the Price: A Dark New Adult Romance

5. Otis

The dam was letting out water, the sound of it so loud I couldn’t hear Wolf when he turned around to say something to the group.

We huddled around him, but he still had to shout.

“The complex is lit up like a fucking amusement park,” he said.

“We’ll stick to the trees,” Rafe said.

Everybody checked their weapons except for Wolf. His knife was low tech, always ready.

He waved us forward and slipped into the trees that lined our side of the dam.

We followed, still in our original formation, trying to stay on Wolf while he slid through the woods like a shadow.

I’d gotten a handle on the layout of the dam complex when we’d sent up the drone. Now I called it to mind, seeing it like a circuit board, everything in its place: the falls dropping into Blackwell Creek, the water rushing downstream on the outskirts of town, the river getting wider as it approached Blackwell Reservoir, a popular boating and fishing spot.

Then, the dam. Water was released during undisclosed intervals, enough to keep the dam from overflowing and sending a metric fuck-ton of water downriver to another reservoir that fed the city’s water supply.

The dam complex was two concrete buildings on the other side of the reservoir, which seemed kind of dumb since they would be washed away if the dam ever broke. Then again, if the dam broke, the control system inside the buildings would be useless anyway.

But Daisy was there. I could feel it, could feel her. She was in one of the two buildings at the foot of a steep hill leading from the woods to the base of the dam.

I wasn’t sure she’d want to see us — not after finding out we’d really killed Blake — but I didn’t even care about that. I just needed to know she was safe.

Well, not just that. I also wanted a chance to tell her some things. I’d never been good at telling people things, which was something that had never bothered me before. What was done was done. What was the point in beating yourself up over it after the fact?

But Daisy was different. I wanted her to know that she was the only person I thought about when I wasn’t with her. I wanted her to know that what had happened with Blake — what we’d done to him — had been to protect her. Most of all I wanted her to know that when I had that light feeling in my chest, that feeling I was pretty sure most people called happy, it was because of her.

Wolf came to a stop at the tree line above the dam complex. Directly below us, at the bottom of the sloping hill covered with trees, the two buildings sat like squat concrete gargoyles illuminated by stadium lights.

Rafe pulled out binoculars and scanned the complex. “Four guys outside. Might be more on the other side.” He’d become more succinct as we moved through the woods, his sentences becoming shorter and more to the point. He dropped the binoculars and looked at Jace. “You leading us in?”

Something passed between them, the kind of unspoken communication that always baffled me. Jace hesitated, then shook his head. “You lead.”

Rafe stepped forward and looked back at his men. “Watch our six.”

They nodded and dropped back, allowing the rest of us to fill in the space between them.

Rafe waved us forward and we started down the hill.