Pay the Price: A Dark New Adult Romance

9. Otis

We couldn’t keep Daisy safe at Cassie’s.

The thought had beat like a drum all the way into town and all the way back to the house. I’d watched Daisy get out of the car, walk up to the unmarked door next to the entrance to Cassie’s Cuppa, and disappear inside.

I’d never been to Cassie’s apartment, but I knew she lived above the coffee shop in the building Bram had bought for her after their parents died.

I didn’t like that I couldn’t picture it in my mind, that I couldn’t assess the danger Daisy might be in there. How many exits were there? Did the coffee shop’s employees have access to the second floor? Was there a fire escape in the back, someplace an intruder could enter the building unseen? What about security cameras?

The questions unrolled in my mind. I would find the answers, do whatever I had to in order to make sure Daisy stayed safe this time.

Wolf had left the Mustang parked at the curb and we’d driven home in the Corvette, both of us silent. What could we say? Daisy was gone and neither of us was surprised.

It had always been a matter of time before she confirmed that we’d killed Blake.

Now we were sitting in the kitchen with Jace, a pall even I could feel hanging over the room.

“We can’t keep her safe at Cassie’s,” I finally said.

“No shit,” Jace said. “We shouldn’t have let her leave.”

“We can’t keep her prisoner here,” Wolf said.

“The fuck we can’t.” Jace’s face looked funny but I couldn’t tell if he was upset or mad or scared.

Could someone be all three?

“We should just tell her everything,” I said, because that seemed like the easiest way to move past the fact that we’d killed Blake.

Jace glared at me. “You want to tell Daisy that her brother was threatening to sell her — to sell his virgin little sister — to the highest bidder?”

“She has to know eventually, right?” I asked. “Especially if her dad was in on it.”

We’d suspected that part years before the Aventine alumni were caught trafficking girls: that Blake was working with his dad, that the two of them were involved in something dark and deadly for the girls of Blackwell Falls.

We’d just assumed Blake’s dad would stop after we killed him.

“It will kill her.” Wolf said it softly, like he didn’t want anyone else to hear even though there was no one in the kitchen except us. I already missed Daisy. Missed the way she laughed and the way she saw me, like I was an actual person and not a fucking freak.

“She’s strong,” I said, because it was true. “Look at all the shit she’s been through.”

“Everyone has a breaking point,” Wolf said.

“Isn’t it better for her to know Blake was a piece of shit?” I asked. “Better than her thinking we’re the pieces of shit?”

“Only if you’re a selfish asshole,” Jace said.

Wolf cut him a glance. A warning? “Hey.”

“It’s true and you know it,” Jace said. “The entire reason we didn’t tell Daisy about Blake in the first place was to protect her from knowing Blake was a piece of shit. We did five years in the joint to protect her from knowing Blake was a piece of shit. Now you want to tell her?”

“The situation’s changed,” I said.

“Otis isn’t wrong,” Wolf said. “We thought getting rid of Blake would protect her, but it’s pretty obvious whatever he was into is still happening.”

“You think Daisy’s kidnapping is tied to the two missing girls?” I couldn’t see the connection but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

“I don’t know,” Wolf said. “But I don’t buy that her dad kidnapped her just to teach her a lesson.”

I looked at him. “But that would mean— ”

“Charles fucking Hammond is trafficking girls,” Wolf said. “Still.”

We’d known something was up in the year before we killed Blake. He’d been spending even more money, had been cagey about some of his side hustles when we’d thought we were partners on everything.

Then he told us he had a line on some men — rich ones — who wanted girls.

Young ones.

That was a hard no from us — thinking about rich dudes wanting to buy my sisters or Daisy or any girl made me want to set fire to something — but Blake had made it clear he saw it as an opportunity.

Then he’d started talking about Daisy, about how much a sheltered virgin, a “rich bitch,” would fetch on “the market.”

It turned my stomach — then and now.

Jace’s eye twitched and his hands became fists on the table. “We should have known.”

“Blake never gave us a name,” I said. He’d called the man who wanted the girls Mr. X. How could we have known he’d meant Charles Hammond? That Hammond would agree to sell his own daughter?

No wonder the asshole hadn’t wanted to see us when we’d gone to the house to tell him Daisy had been kidnapped. No wonder he hadn’t held a press conference or said anything at all about his missing daughter.

Jace pounded his fist on the table and the coffee in my cup sloshed over the side.

The room felt even quieter in the silence that followed.

“I’m going to kill him,” Jace finally said.

“You won’t be alone,” Wolf said.

And that meant I was in too, because it didn’t matter that Daisy didn’t want to see us or talk to us, that she might never want to see us or talk to us again.

She belonged to us, even if she didn’t know it.

And we protected what was ours.