Pay the Price: A Dark New Adult Romance

35. Daisy

Awoman in nothing but thong underwear and a bustier smiled from behind the half door of a small room. “Cell phones please.”

The Beasts stepped up and handed over their phones and the woman handed them each a ticket with a number printed on it before turning to place the phone in a metal locker.

She looked at me expectantly, and I hesitated. I hardly remembered what it was like to be without a phone. It was a safety net, especially in a strange place.

But the woman was looking at me expectantly, and it wasn’t like I was alone.

I had the Beasts.

I dug my phone out of my bag and handed it to her.

“I can take your bag too if you’d like,” she said.

I thought about what was inside: lipstick, powder, and a tiny wallet with my driver’s license and credit cards that either had been canceled by my dad or were almost maxed out.

I pushed it across the counter. “Thanks.”

She handed me a ticket and I put it in Wolf’s hand. He stuffed it in his pocket with his number and we headed down the hall.

And now I really heard the music. Not just one beat but several. Classical music was the loudest, but underneath it was something more sensual, the thump of bass from an underground club, the synth of techno from a rave.

I found the source of the classical music in the first two rooms off the foyer, rooms I recognized as original parlors from the research I’d done on old houses like the one I’d inherited.

People of all ages mingled on velvet sofas and upholstered wing chairs, the music playing softly in the background, the murmur of conversation civilized.

No one was fucking. No one was even undressed, although everyone was dressed to the nines.

“Want a drink?” Otis asked.

“Sure.” I was already a little buzzed from the champagne in the limo, but I was in a sex club with the three hottest guys on the planet, so I might as well go all in.

We headed for a bar at one end of the room and the guys ordered drinks. A minute later, Wolf handed me something pink and pretty in a cut-crystal glass half-filled with ice, then leaned against the bar to sip the amber liquid in his own glass.

I took a sip of the pink drink and fought a grimace. It was fruity but strong.

“What is this place?” I was beginning to think we’d wandered into the wrong building, a charity event or dinner party instead of a sex club.

“It’s the Velvet Rope,” Otis said.

“No, I get that,” I said. “But what is this place? This room?”

“It’s like… a reception area,” Wolf said.

“A reception area?”

“Think of it as a locker room,” Otis said.

“A locker room?” I was doing that thing again, that thing where I just repeated what they said because none of it made sense, like repeating it would make it make sense when really it just made the making-sense part take longer.

“People hang out here before and after they fuck,” Jace said, cutting to the chase.

I raised my eyebrows and looked around the room. An older man in a traditional tux sat on a scarlet sofa with carved legs and talked to a young woman with swingy black hair. Her pale pink slip dress barely covered her tits, but the man looked genuinely interested in whatever she was saying.

Near the fireplace (filled with an assortment of candles instead of a fire, probably because it was almost July), two women were sitting in wing chairs, engaged in conversation as they nursed drinks, one of them in a suit, the other in a slinky red dress.

I guess I could see it. Maybe everybody needed a place to warm up and cool down, even in a sex club.

Or especially in a sex club. Not that I’d know.

What I did know was that this looked a lot nicer than St. Andrew’s, the allegedly gross sex club on the outskirts of Blackwell Falls that had burned down over the winter.

“So the sex part is in another part of the building?” I asked.

Wolf grinned down at me. “You’ll see.”

I cursed the jealousy that washed through me. Wolf was talking like he knew the place, like he’d been here before. And if Wolf had been here, so had Jace and Otis.

Had they come here when they were teenagers? How well did they know the place? And why did I suddenly want to burn it down?

I took another drink and told myself to get a grip. I didn’t own the Beasts. Besides, we weren’t here to have fun. We were here to see if Jace could get into the back rooms, wherever they were, and find out if they were connected to the trafficking ring responsible for the kidnapped girls in and around Blackwell Falls.

I looked up at Jace and felt the familiar tingle between my thighs. He was a major dick, but there was no denying that he was also beautiful. His jaw was sharp enough to cut glass, and I knew if he looked at me his green eyes would flash with either hate or lust because those seemed to be the only two emotions either of us could manage when it came to the other one.

To someone who didn’t know better, it probably looked like he was just out for a night on the town, but I could see him calculating, taking in information, filing it away for later.

I should probably be nervous about our plan (be ready to run) or at least about the sex club part, but now that we were here, I was actually pretty relaxed, probably because of the champagne in the limo and the empty glass in my hand.

“Want another?” Wolf asked.

I shook my head. I was riding a nice buzz and I was pretty sure the drink hadn’t totally hit me yet. After what had happened at the Mill, I didn’t want to get sloppy drunk, especially at a place like the Velvet Rope and especially when we were on a mission to get information about the trafficking ring.

Wolf eased the empty glass out of my hand and set it on the bar behind us. “Then let’s go, sunshine.”