4. Wolf
Chapter 4
Wolf
I finished adding stuff to the blender, then turned it on. It didn’t matter that it was noisy.
We were done letting Daisy hide.
I’d agreed to let Otis wake her up because I knew that would be the hard part. I didn’t want to see the pain in her eyes when she first woke up and realized Jace was still gone.
It was easier for Otis. He knew Daisy was hurting and he hated it, but in his mind, feeling like shit wouldn’t change anything, so why bother feeling like shit?
He came back into the kitchen as I turned off the blender.
“She’s up,” he said.
“You sure she won’t go back to sleep?” I had to ask, because sleep was about all Daisy had done since Jace’s wake.
She ate. She showered when she had to work. She went to Cantwell looking like a ghost, although I had no fucking idea how she functioned there. But mostly she visited Jace’s grave and slept, dozing on the couch until it was time to go to bed at night.
Even the sound of the house had changed, the song I heard when I looked at Daisy growing heavier and sadder by the day.
“She knows I won’t let that happen,” Otis said. “She was getting dressed when I left.”
I nodded and opened the cupboard to find a thermos for Daisy’s smoothie. She’d been eating nothing but shit, and while I didn’t usually care what Daisy ate, I knew all the processed food wasn’t helping her depression.
“You really think this will help?” Otis asked.
“It has to.”
Daisy had been a shell of her former self for almost three months. It had been fine in the beginning — we’d understood — but now I was starting to really fucking worry about her.
We’d been working in the background — trying to figure out who Mr. X was and who was responsible for the fire at the Blades compound — while she grieved. Calvin’s work with Daisy’s dad had been aboveboard. We knew that now. But the text messages on his phone proved that he’d been moonlighting for Mr. X.
And Mr. X was still out there.
Another girl had gone missing just two weeks earlier, this one a bartender in Carlton. The media said the FBI was working on it, that they were investigating the disappearances as the work of a potential serial kidnapper or murderer, but so far it didn’t look like they were doing shit.
We’d found next to nothing on the clone we’d made of Calvin’s phone, just a single mention of a dive bar in a blink-and-you’d-miss-it town a half hour from Blackwell Falls. Otis and I had taken turns casing the place, but so far we’d seen nothing but a series of locals coming and going in various states of drunkenness.
I’d just poured the smoothie into the cup when Daisy appeared at the foot of the back staircase leading to the kitchen. She looked sullen and beautiful even with the shadows under her violet eyes. She’d pulled her chestnut hair into a ponytail and was wearing yoga pants and a workout top instead of Jace’s sweats, a defeated slant to her shoulders that hadn’t been there before.
I wanted to pull her into my arms and never let her go, absorb all the pain I knew she was feeling, take it as my own.
She glared from me to Otis and back again. “I hate you.”
I bent to kiss her forehead, then handed her the smoothie. “I know. Let’s go.”