Pay the Price: A Dark New Adult Romance

66. Otis

The box was full of pictures. There were newish ones where Mac looked almost like he looked now, with his beard and the wrinkles around his eyes, and older ones where he looked the way I always saw him in my mind — young and happy.

Wolf handed Jace a stack, then handed me one. We started flipping through them.

It was weird, like seeing a movie of Mac’s life without sound. I hardly noticed the heat creeping into the building as I watched Mac age from a guy who was about our age to a middle-aged dude with creases in his forehead and more facial hair.

“Look at this one,” Wolf said, holding it out for me and Jace. In the photo, Jace was a toddler, sitting on Mac’s knee. Mac had a beer in one hand while he balanced Jace with the other, both of them blond, both of them happy. “He even wrote on the back.”

Jace took it and flipped it over: Me and Jace (four YO).

My chest felt funny thinking about Mac writing on the back of the picture, caring enough to do it.

Jace let out something like a grunt and handed the picture back to Wolf. “We’re looking for Daisy’s mom.”

I wondered if Jace’s chest felt funny too.

I was almost to the bottom of the stack when I came across the first picture of Daisy’s mom. I knew it was her because she looked almost exactly like Daisy, and I would know Daisy anywhere.

“Got one.”

Jace and Wolf huddled around me, all of us staring at the picture. Daisy’s mom was draped across Mac’s lap, her arms around his neck, her head tipped back.

Laughing. Like Daisy.

Mac’s arms were around Daisy’s mom’s waist. He was looking at her, and there was something in his eyes that I didn’t have a name for even though it felt important.

“He loved her,” Wolf said softly. “He fucking loved her.”

“How do you know?” I was always fascinated by the things other people seemed to just… know. The things I couldn’t see. The things I couldn’t feel.

Not the way everybody else did anyway.

“It’s the way he’s looking at her,” Wolf said.

I flipped it over and saw Mac’s handwriting: Nory and me.

“Give me that stack,” Jace said.

I handed it over and he flipped through it while Wolf and I watched.

Nory and Mac having a playful water-balloon fight, both of them dripping and laughing.

Nory and Mac in the river, their tubes tied together with a rope like the one Wolf had used to keep Daisy close during Summer Shit.

And then Nory in bed, clearly naked under a sheet that barely covered her tits.

“Holy fuck,” Wolf said.

We looked at the back of the pictures, all labeled Nory and Mac, except the last one where she’d been naked in bed.

That one just read Nory.

There was a kind of weight in the name on the back of the photograph. It felt like a goodbye, even though that didn’t make sense at all.

“Mac was fucking Daisy’s mom even after she was married to Charles Hammond,” Wolf said.

Jace didn’t say anything — hadn’t said anything — and we sat there in the attic in silence, all of us so busy thinking about what it meant that it took us a minute to realize something.

The heat in the attic had gotten intense.

And there was something else.

“Do you smell smoke?” I asked.

Jace looked at me, his eyes clouded. Then he shot to his feet. “What the fuck?”

He stalked to the door that led out of the attic and pulled.

It only took me half a second to realize something was wrong.

“Someone fucking locked the door,” Jace said.

Now I could really smell the smoke, and not just smell it. It was starting to leak in under the door, through the floor.

I coughed and Wolf dropped to the floor, put his palms against the old floorboards.

He looked up at us. “They’re hot. This place is on fire.”

And then I heard the roar and crackle, the creak of the beams under our feet. They weren’t the sounds of a small fire: they were the sounds of an inferno.

Jace stalked to the tools that were stacked in one corner of the attic. A cough tore through his throat as he started tossing stuff aside. Wolf and I joined him, all of us moving fast.

Looking for something, anything, that would get us out of there.