Pay the Price: A Dark New Adult Romance

17. Daisy

“Idon’t believe you.”

I nodded, not at all surprised by Ruth’s reaction. The only person Ruth adored more than our dad had been Blake, and he was gone. “I understand.”

She glared at me from across the table. All around us, people ordered coffee, stirred sugar and cream into their paper cups, shifted on their feet while they waited in line, all of them oblivious to the fact that I’d just torn the sun out of Ruth’s sky.

“Why would Dad do that?” she asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”

I shook my head. “He was mad that I was living with Wolf, Otis, and Jace. He cut off my credit cards, sent Calvin to the house with all my stuff.”

“I knew about your stuff,” Ruth said. “I didn’t know about the cards.”

“He was punishing me, but it didn’t work. I didn’t come home.”

“So you think he kidnapped you?” she asked. “To get you to come home?”

It sounded crazy because it was. I knew it was, which was something that had been bothering me in the days since my rescue. Little by little, my head had started to clear from the trauma, and as it did, I was finding the pieces harder to put together. What had been my dad’s endgame? Had he really thought I’d come home after he’d held me prisoner? But no matter how many times I catalogued the details, I always came back to the same thing.

“How else do you explain Calvin drugging me and forcing me into Dad’s car?”

She bit her lip. “I don’t know.”

“Exactly,” I said.

She folded her arms over her chest and glared at me accusingly. “You’ve always hated him.”

“What?” The words shocked me. “Why would you say that? I don’t hate Dad.”

“You don’t like him either.”

That one was harder to argue. I admired my dad’s ambition, his determination. Did I like him? It felt like a trick question.

“I don’t think he likes me very much.” I turned my coffee mug on the table. “We’re just different.”

I didn’t know how other families worked, but mine had always felt like it was made up of two teams: my mom and I on one side and Blake, Ruth, and my dad on the other. It wasn’t something that had ever been said out loud, and I hadn’t even been able to articulate it for myself until after my mom died, when I’d felt like the last remaining member of a dodgeball team facing down an opposing team of three.

Then Blake had died and it had felt like Ruth and our dad were a club of two.

And it wasn’t like he’d made any secret of the fact that I was a disappointment. While Ruth shored up her extracurriculars so she could apply to the Ivies, I went to community college and spent my time fixing up a decrepit old house.

Not exactly something to brag about to your buddies at the country club.

“And you think he’d kidnap you because you’re different?” Ruth asked.

“No,” I sighed. It sounded crazy now that Ruth was saying it out loud. “I don’t know.”

“Well I do,” Ruth said, glaring at me. “Dad’s not a psychopath. Have you even talked to him since those assholes rescued you?”

She put the words rescued you in air quotes but I didn’t bother pointing out that they weren’t necessary since the Beasts had, in fact, rescued me.

I rubbed an invisible stain on the marble tabletop. “Not yet.”

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Ruth asked. “Just ask him.”

I looked at her and frowned. “I’ve been a little busy recovering from the trauma of being kidnapped and held prisoner.”

It wasn’t untrue, but it wasn’t the whole story either. I was mad at my dad, but I was hurt too. He never in a million years would have locked up Ruth if she’d disappointed him.

It was me. He didn’t like me, didn’t care about me. All of his concern about my future was for him — how it would look to his friends and the business press, which still reported on his tragic widowerhood and the loss of his son, the fact that he was raising his two daughters alone (of course none of the articles ever mentioned Joan and Lenny and the rest of the household staff who kept things running).

Plus, what would I do if he admitted it? If he came out and admitted that he’d kidnapped me to teach me a lesson (I could already hear him in my head: I thought some time in a less than ideal living environment would help you appreciate the one you’ve had)?

I wasn’t sure our relationship would ever recover. For all intents and purposes, I’d be an orphan.

“You need to talk to him,” Ruth said. “He’ll tell you he didn’t do it.”

“That doesn’t mean it’ll be true,” I said.

She glared at me. “This is stupid. You’re being stupid.”

In another universe, one where Blake hadn’t died, where our mom hadn’t died, Ruth would walk out. We’d spend a couple of weeks not talking, licking our wounds (well, mostly I would be licking my wounds since Ruth would be the one slinging all the insults).

But the weight of our aloneness loomed between us. We didn’t have anyone else.

“Maybe,” I conceded, “but I have to do this on my own time.”

“When will that be?” she asked.

It was helping me to be at Cassie’s. I was focusing on myself — working, going to the gym, processing what had happened, not just the kidnapping but Blake”s murder at the hands of the Beasts, and maybe even my mom’s death too.

Cassie was taking care of me even though I hadn’t asked: keeping Sarai away while I got my bearings, cooking for me, bringing me baked goods and coffee and flowers for my room.

She hadn’t even judged me when I’d confessed to the late-night visits from Otis. She’d just told him to use the door, then shook her head when I told her I thought Otis preferred sneaking in through the window.

I was healing, getting stronger.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Soon. How are you?”

I was more than ready to change the subject.

“Fine,” Ruth said, still sulking.

“You’re not seeing that guy anymore are you?” I asked. “The one from the Blades?”

She glared at me. “No, you kind of blew that when you barged into my room while we were fucking.”

I’d gone into all the reasons it was a bad idea for a fifteen-year-old girl to have sex with a twenty-something member of the local MC after I’d caught Ruth in bed with one of them, but I had no idea if the warning had stuck. For all of Ruth’s discipline when it came to school, all of her eagerness to please our dad with big plans for her future, she had a wild streak everywhere else.

She’d had that in common with Blake too.

They didn’t like rules, and their apparent adherence to them had always been more about the appearance of following them than the actual following of them.

I’d never mastered the deceit to be able to fake it, which had left me struggling to follow the seemingly endless set of rules set out by my father, school, the world. Then I wondered why I was so exhausted, why Blake and Ruth made it look so easy when the truth was, they weren’t really following the rules at all.

They just looked like they were.

Still, it shocked me to hear the word fucking come from my little sister’s mouth in the actual context of, well, fucking.

“I’m not going to apologize for sending some guy almost twice your age running from your bed, Ruth.”

“Well, you should,” she said.

“You’ll thank me later,” I said.

“Doubt it.”

I fought my frustration. Was this what it was like being a parent?

I almost envied Ruth. Had I been that certain of everything — of myself — when I was fifteen, before Blake’s murder? I tried to propel myself backward in time, to the moments before that I hadn’t known would become before.

I couldn’t remember, and I wondered if this happened to everyone when they became adults. If certainty was a gift we unwrapped as children, one we outgrew like an old toy.

Or maybe it was just me and my fucked-up history — my mom’s death and Blake’s murder at the hands of the three men I’d come to care about.

How could I be certain of anything now?

“How’s school? How’s debate team?” I asked, because we obviously weren’t going to make any progress on either the family or fucking-older-guys fronts, and Ruth had always been as enthused about her extracurriculars outside the bedroom as she apparently was about the ones inside it.

I listened to her talk about an upcoming competition and felt a rush of love for her. She was still so young, and I suddenly wanted her to stay this way forever — annoying and all.

Someday soon, she’d grow up. She’d realize that no one was as they seemed and everyone was as they seemed.

And it was going to break her heart.