Pay the Price: A Dark New Adult Romance

68. Daisy

Asingle word beat through my head as I sped to the compound.

No.

No, no, no.

And then, smaller, a plea: please.

I left Main Street behind and took the windy mountain roads too fast, skidding around curves in the Mustang, pushing it to go faster on the straightaways. On the passenger seat, my phone blew up with texts, but they were all from Ruth, Sarai, Cassie.

Where are you?

Are you okay?

What’s going on at the compound?

I’d sent a harried, panicked text to the Beasts before I’d put the car in gear, but none of them replied, and I felt the pit in my stomach grow bigger and blacker.

I was almost to the dirt road leading to the compound when I heard sirens behind me, and I was forced to pull to the side of the road as two fire trucks from neighboring towns sped past me, their sirens screaming.

I felt sick. The Blackwell fire department was calling in reinforcements from other fire companies, something they only did when a fire was too big for the local fire company to handle alone.

I made a hard right onto the dirt road and tried to reason with myself as I sped down the long drive to the compound, nestled in the trees.

The Beasts had been going to search some kind of storage area. The fire was probably in the rec building where Pinky did all the cooking. That made the most sense.

I felt like an absolute shit for feeling momentarily relieved — I liked the Blades and didn’t want to see any of them hurt — but I didn’t have time to have any angst over it because a second later the main buildings came into view.

And they weren’t on fire.

It was total chaos, members of the MC rushing back and forth in their cuts, yelling at the fire crew and at each other, pushing back a couple of people who looked like reporters trying to set up cameras and microphones.

And the fire trucks, the two that had passed me on the road, starting carefully down a path in the woods that looked too narrow to accommodate them.

My heart dropped into my stomach and I gunned the Mustang’s engine and followed the trucks. I caught sight of Pinky as I passed the rec building. She stared after my car, her face pale and drawn.

No, no, no.

The path was wider than it looked, plenty wide for my car, although I could hear branches breaking and snapping as the fire crew in front of me barreled forward. I had no idea where we were going, but they were obviously headed for the fire and I needed to be there too, needed to know the Beasts were okay.

My phone had gone eerily silent and I felt the shadow of dread move over my psyche, like a storm cloud covering the sun.

We’d been driving through the woods for almost two minutes when the trucks emerged into a clearing.

And then I saw it: an old building that looked almost identical to the Blades’ dorms and rec buildings, flames licking from its windows. The entire thing was ablaze, and I didn’t even bother turning off my car before I clawed at the door, practically falling into the dirt when it finally opened.

A wall of heat hit me like a slap to the face, a roar coming from the burning building like it was alive.

“Everybody out and back!” an older man with a radio and a chief patch on his fire coat yelled. “That roof is gonna go!”

A firefighter grabbed my arm as I lurched forward. “Stay back!”

And then, figures stumbling out of the front of the building, their faces black with soot.

Not three men. Two.

Wolf and Otis staggered forward, their gazes disoriented, chests heaving as they sucked in fresh air.

I broke free of the firefighter holding my arm and ran for them.

“Where is he?” I shouted, pulling on their arms. “Where’s Jace?”

Wolf’s eyes watered. Or maybe he was crying. “He got stuck… We couldn’t… we couldn’t get him out.”

“He made us leave,” Otis said, blinking the soot out of his eyes.

“What?” I looked back at the building. The roar was growing louder, a freight train bearing down, about to crash into the life I’d only just started to build. “You have to go get him! You have to go back!”

“He doesn’t want us to go back,” Otis said. “He made us leave.”

“No.” I moved away from them, taking backward steps toward the burning building, my body on autopilot, instinctively moving toward one of the three men I now knew I couldn’t live without. “No!”

I turned to run toward the burning building, then felt Wolf lift me off my feet as the roof caved in on the building with a whoosh of heat that made him stumble backward.

He had me around the waist, my feet off the ground, kicking, thrashing, desperate to break free as I watched the building collapse into a mass of flames.

“No!” A sob broke free from my throat as a pit of despair opened up at the center of my body, the fire devouring the building. I went limp in Wolf’s arms. “No…”