40. Daisy
Iwoke up with a slamming headache and vowed never to drink again. I’d had more hangovers in the past three months of my life than the entire twenty years prior combined.
Why did I do this to myself?
Then I had a flash of Wolf’s dick in my mouth while Otis fucked me and Jace jacked off next to us and knew exactly why I’d done it last night.
I also knew it had totally been worth it.
I lay in bed for a few minutes, birds singing outside my open windows, a soft breeze fluttering through the curtains. I could already feel the heat of the day and I wished again that I’d started with the pool. The company I’d hired was scheduled to start digging next week, but by the time they finished the pool and hot tub and built the blue stone patio, summer would be almost over.
Oh well. At least we had the river. Maybe I could talk the Beasts into cooling off with me under the falls.
The Beasts.
A storm of feeling blew through me at the thought of them. Lust was at the forefront after our night at the Velvet Rope, but there was more than that. A lot more.
I was falling for them. All three of them.
And who could blame me? Okay, lots of people would blame me.
They’d killed my brother. They weren’t good men by society’s standards.
But I was starting to wonder if society was full of shit. Blake had been planning to sell me, not because he was destitute and desperate for money, but because…
Why?
That was where I always got stuck. Was Blake just a sociopath? Or had there been something else? Some other reason he’d secretly hated me?
I was as in the dark about the Blake situation as I’d been since the Beasts had told me why they’d killed him, except now I had new reasons to be confused because that apparently wasn’t a deal breaker for either my heart or my body.
If Blake had been trying to sell me, the Beasts had killed him to protect me. Did that make them bad? Was Blake inherently good because he’d been born a Hammond? Because he knew which fork to use for shrimp at dinner? Because he wore a suit coat to the country club and kept his hair short and neat? Because he didn’t have dirt or motor oil under his fingernails?
It didn’t seem right, and I was starting to question society’s biases, the ones I’d known were there and new ones that were making themselves more apparent by the day.
The Beasts had been painted as monsters, but the people of Blackwell Falls had been asking all the wrong questions: not who killed Blake Hammond, but why.
No, that wasn’t right. The people of Blackwell Falls hadn’t asked any questions at all. They’d just been happy to find a place to hang the murderer sign, happy it could be hung on the necks of seemingly bad men.
I always knew they were trouble.
I wasn’t even surprised.
Poor Blake.
All things that were said in the wake of the Beasts’ confession.
But those people had been wrong.
A hazy memory swum to the surface of my mind: Jace, sitting on the edge of my bed after carrying me in from the limo last night. his expression a mixture of loneliness and sadness.
I see you.
I don’t know why I’d said it, except that in that moment, it had felt true.
My phone buzzed from the nightstand and I picked it up to find a text from my dad.
This is childish, Daisy. You can’t ignore me forever.
Watch me, I thought, setting my phone back down.
He’d been texting and calling ever since the ground-breaking ceremony, but I had absolutely nothing to say to him.
I sighed and sat up slowly, then washed my face and brushed my teeth before heading downstairs.
I was happy to find the Beasts in the kitchen. It had been strange to wake up alone in Cassie’s apartment, Cassie already downstairs at the coffee shop. I’d only lived with the Beasts a couple of weeks before I’d been kidnapped, but it had been enough to reprogram my brain.
The truth was, I liked having them around. I could admit that now, even if I didn’t know what it meant.
“Morning, sunshine,” Wolf said. He was wearing jeans and one of his sleeveless T-shirts, and I was totally okay with the fact that he seemed to wear them like some kind of uniform. Who could be mad with all that ink on display, all those muscles, the super-sized package between his thighs? He handed me a cup of coffee. “Thought you might need this.”
“And this,” Otis said, pointing to a glass of water and two Advil on the kitchen table with a bakery box from Cassie’s Cuppa.
“Ugh,” I said, taking the coffee and sliding into the chair across from Jace, “my heroes.”
I tried not to stare at Otis’ chest, bare over gray sweats, but it wasn’t easy. Apparently my body didn’t realize it was an unseemly hour for lust.
“Good morning,” I said.
Jace’s eye twitched. “Morning.”
I had no idea how he managed to make faded jeans and a slightly too-tight T-shirt look so good. Maybe it was the stubble that shadowed his brow? It was either that or the brooding.
Jace was always brooding. It was kind of his thing.
“How are you feeling?” Otis asked.
I felt my cheeks heat when I remembered the night before. Was he asking how I was feeling physically? Or was this about our sexcapades at the Velvet Rope?
“I have a headache,” I said. “And I’m dehydrated. So thanks for this.”
I downed the Advil and the entire glass of water, then leaned back in my chair with a sigh. I felt better already.
“Smoothie or pastries?” Wolf asked. He ran a hand through his hair and somehow managed to look sexy as fuck while also looking adorably nervous. “Or, you know, I could try to cook something, but no promises.”
I lifted the box on the pastries and eyed its delicious contents: an eclair with glossy black frosting, a bear claw, two raspberry-and-cheese pastries, a chocolate chocolate-chip muffin as big as my head, and a sticky bun with pecans and gooey caramel topping.
The smoothie would be better, healthier, and after all the alcohol I’d consumed last night, I could probably use the nutrients.
On the other hand, I’d just woken up after fucking two of my brother’s murderers in a sex club while the third one watched, so the “good for you” ship might have sailed.
I reached for the eclair. “Pastry.”
Jace stared as I bit into the chocolate-glazed dough. I didn’t think I was imagining the glint of triumph in his eyes.
He was corrupting me, in more ways than one.
They all were.
And it was getting harder and harder to fight it.
I sighed as the cream hit my tongue. The eclair had definitely been the right call.
Was there anything better than black coffee with a decadent pastry?
“Thank you.” I took a drink of coffee and looked at each of them. “Whoever went out and got these. It was a good call.”
“It was Jace,” Otis said.
Of course it was.
“Well, thank you,” I said, glancing up at him. He shifted in his seat, clearly uncomfortable, and I wondered if it was because he’d watched me with Wolf and Otis at the Velvet Rope or because he’d carried me to bed. I searched for a change of topic to fill the awkward silence and realized I had no idea what Jace had found, if anything, at the Velvet Rope. The rave room hadn’t been ideal for convo and I’d crashed hard and fast when we’d gotten to the limo. “Did you find anything last night?”
He looked at Wolf and Otis, then pulled out his phone. He unlocked it and slid it toward me.
I looked at the list of cities in his Notes app: Paris, Brussels, Sicily, Seattle, Dubrovnik, Minsk, Berlin, Prague, London.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Don’t know yet,” Jace said. “I got into one of the back rooms and found some old flight plans for private charters. Some of them went back ten years, all to these nine cities.”
I looked up. “Ten years? You think this has been going on for ten years?”
“We don’t know that,” Wolf said. “We’re not even sure the flight plans are connected to the trafficking ring. It could be anything.”
“It was all I had time to find,” Jace said. “I almost got caught. I had to memorize the cities and book it out of there.”
“What do we do with this?” I asked. “It’s so… vague.”
I didn’t want to sound ungrateful. Jace had taken a risk while the rest of us had been having fun, but a list of random cities wasn’t exactly the key to the trafficking ring I’d been hoping for.
“It’s just another piece of the puzzle,” Otis said. “Sometimes you have to set those aside until you figure out where they go.”
Wolf nodded. “We’ll give it some thought, see if we can put it together with something from the deep dive Aloha’s still doing on Calvin and your dad.”
I rubbed my temples. My headache was receding, but I was suddenly overwhelmed by how shitty I still felt and all the stuff we didn’t know about the trafficking ring. “I need to get it together. I was going to start on the ballroom today.”
It sounded grander than it was — think half-size basketball court, not Marie Antoinette waltzing — but it was technically a ballroom, and I had the old photographs of my great-grandparents dancing among a crowd of tuxedos and frilly ball gowns to prove it.
I still wasn’t sure what I’d do with the cavernous room (although I was starting to get a few ideas), but whatever it was would require plaster repair and a fresh coat of paint at the minimum. The room was huge, with triple-height ceilings, so even something simple was going to take some time — and a seriously high ladder.
“It’ll have to wait,” Wolf said, putting another glass of water in front of me. “We have plans today.”
I looked up at him. “We do?”
I must be more hungover than I’d thought.
“We do,” he said.
“I don’t remember any plans.”
“That’s because we just made them this morning,” Otis said.
I sighed. “Right. Do I get any say in this? I was supposed to work on the house today.”
“No say,” Jace said. His expression was cold again. If his fevered gaze on my face at the Velvet Rope hadn’t been seared into my memory, I would’ve thought I’d imagined it.
“What Jace is trying to say is that we thought a little fun in the sun would do you good today,” Wolf said. “It’s going to be a scorcher.”
“What kind of fun in the sun?” I asked.
“Cookout and pool time,” Otis said. “At the Kings’ house.”