Pay the Price: A Dark New Adult Romance

16. Daisy

It was just before noon when I walked in to Cassie’s Cuppa Saturday morning. The line was almost to the door, the place teeming with hungover locals and perky tourists on their way to the mountain for a day of hiking.

Behind the counter, Kylie and Drew rang up orders, made coffee, and called out customers’ names while Cassie worked behind them to keep everything stocked and clean.

I inhaled the scent of freshly brewed coffee and skirted the customers in line to make my way to the end of the counter — opposite the side where customers waited for their orders — where Cassie was refilling glass canisters with coffee beans from brown bags.

“Hey,” she said, shaking the last of a bag of shiny brown beans into one of the glass canisters. “How was your workout?”

“Good. Hard.” I set my bag on the floor. Over the past couple of weeks I’d gotten used to the feel of my gym bag over my shoulder, had gotten used to walking through town in sweaty leggings and tank tops, my body sore from the workout Locke had devised for me. The gym alone wasn’t going to make me some kind of badass who could suddenly protect myself, but I was feeling more comfortable in my body, more confident. It was a start. I looked around. “It’s packed in here.”

“It’s summer,” she said.

“True.” It was almost the Fourth of July. Blackwell Falls would be busy until after Labor Day, when it would empty out like the Mill after last call, leaving the locals to breathe a sigh of relief until Parents” Weekend at Aventine and Bellepoint.

“Coffee?” Cassie asked.

“Latte, please,” I said. “And one for Ruth.”

I took my coffee black during the week, but after a week of work at Cantwell — still slightly awkward — and brutal workouts, not to mention late-night visits from Otis, I deserved a latte.

Cassie lifted her eyebrows as she started making the coffees. “Finally going to have the convo, huh?”

I nodded. “I still don’t know how much I’m going to tell her though.”

Cassie scowled. “You have to tell her everything. She has a right to know.”

We’d talked about this more than once, usually sitting on Cassie’s sofa or at her kitchen table in the apartment upstairs, but I was still torn.

“I just don’t want to hurt her.” Ruth idolized my dad. What would it do to her to know he was capable of kidnapping his daughter and holding her prisoner just because she’d defied him?

“Not telling her the truth is hurting her,” Cassie said. “What if he does something like this to her someday?”

I huffed out a laugh. “To Ruth? No way.”

It was something I tried not to think about, the fact that Ruth was my dad’s favorite, that she and Blake had been favored by him when he’d always been distant with me.

Because if I thought too hard about it, I could only draw one conclusion: my dad just didn’t love me as much as he loved Blake and Ruth. Or maybe it was more accurate to say he just didn’t like me as much.

I was different. Like my mom.

Blake and Ruth were miniature Charles Hammonds — ambitious, driven, disciplined.

I could cosplay as one of them, but what came effortlessly to them was work for me. It was like playing a part every day of my life, and I hadn’t realized how exhausting it had all been until I’d moved out of my dad’s house.

“I’m just saying, if you don’t tell her now and your dad does something crazy in the future, Ruth will be pissed you didn’t tell her, and you’ll be pissed at yourself for not giving her the heads-up.”

“You’re probably right,” I said. “Ugh.”

I did not want to be the one to tell Ruth that Daddy Dearest was a psycho.

“You got this.” Cassie pushed the coffees toward me. She’d started putting my drinks on a tab so I could pay it on payday. “Good luck.”

“Thanks, Cass.”

I wound my way through the crowd and claimed one of the tables near the back corner, the quietest spot I could find. I was checking my phone — Ruth was late, as usual — when she walked in.

It had only been a few weeks since I’d seen her, but she looked different, more grown up. Maybe it was just that weird thing that happened when you didn’t see someone for a while, when all the little things you wouldn’t have noticed if you’d been seeing them every day added up to make the changes noticeable.

My baby sister looked more grown up than the last time I’d seen her, and that was saying something since the last time I’d seen her she’d been in bed with a member of the Blades who was way too old for her.

I cringed inwardly at the memory as Ruth scanned the crowd. She spotted me in the back and made her way toward me, her head high, steps confident, almost brash as she muscled her way through the crowd.

She’d gotten that from my dad too, another quality she’d shared with Blake.

I stood when she reached the table, biting my tongue against the accusation that rose in my throat when I saw that she’d paired one of my shirts with her jeans.

She hugged me tight. “Asshole.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have a good excuse.”

I’d found my phone on my dresser after my rescue at the dam. One of the Beasts had plugged it in so it would be charged when I came home (my money was on Otis, maybe Wolf, but definitely not Jace), and the screen had been filled with texts, most of them from Ruth.

“You better.” She sat down and looked at the coffee. Her dark hair was pulled back in a casual ponytail but her makeup was perfect as always, her gray eyes rimmed with eyeliner and thick black eyelashes I knew were fake. “This for me?”

I nodded.

“It’s the least you can do,” she grumbled. “I thought those monsters had murdered you and chopped you into a million pieces.”

It took me a minute to realize she was referring to the Beasts. Not very long ago, I would have been worried about the same thing. It was a testament to how much my life had changed that they hadn’t come to mind right away.

“No,” I said. “They’re… they’re not like that.”

What was I doing? Was I defending them? Now? After knowing for a fact that they’d killed Blake?

Her expression hardened. “I’m not going to sit here while you defend them.”

“I’m not defending what they did.” My throat constricted and my eyes stung with tears. I blinked them back, forced myself to breathe. Calvin had stuffed me in his car just minutes after I’d found out the Beasts had really killed Blake. I hadn’t had time to mourn my idea of them. My sadness caught me off guard, but I hadn’t cried over them yet, and I wasn’t about to start now. “I’m just saying you don’t have to worry about them hurting me.”

I hadn’t told her I was staying with Cassie. If I had, I would have had to explain why, and I hadn’t wanted to tell her via text that our dad had kidnapped me. I didn’t want to tell her now either, but Cassie was right: knowledge was power and keeping Ruth in the dark wasn’t doing her any favors.

“Whatever,” she mumbled, picking up her coffee to take a drink. “So where were you? I was texting you like crazy. Even Cass didn’t know where you were.”

“I’ll tell you everything, but first, you have to promise to hear me out. Like, all the way out. Just let me finish and then you can say what you want to say.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Okayyyyy…”

I took a breath and started talking, hoping I wouldn’t regret it.