Page 7 of Gather the Storm

“I’m out.” She smelled like sage and coffee. Like home.

She pulled back to look at me and I was glad she wasn’t all weepy like Otis’s mom, even though Otis’s mom was really nice. “You look good, Wolf. But you need sun, some fresh air.”

My mom was into holistic health — an interest passed down from her Native grandmother — and she could always tell what someone needed, even if they didn’t know it themselves.

“I won’t argue with that,” I said.

She turned to Jace and Otis and gave them each hugs. She looked like a dark-haired leprechaun swallowed in Jace’s embrace.

She peered up at him, squinting in the sun. “My god, you’ve become a giant!”

I guess we looked different in the wild too.

Jace shrugged. “Not much else to do in there but work out.”

She nodded. “Let’s get you boys home.”

We climbed into the car, me in front with my mom, Jace and Otis climbing into the back, which wasn’t easy since the Malibu only had two doors and they had to fold the front seat down, then cram their big bodies into the back seat.

I waited for my mom to start the car, but she just sighed, then reached in front of my knees for the glove compartment. When she closed it, she was holding three thick envelopes.

“I’m supposed to give you these.” She didn’t sound happy about it, but she handed one to me, then twisted in her seat to give the other two to Jace and Otis.

“What the fuck…?” Jace said.

“They’re from Daisy,” Otis said.

My mom started the car as I touched the thick wax seal,DHpressed into the paper in a font I recognized from the iron gate outside the Hammond estate.

He was right: the letters were from Daisy.

The tiny daisy tattoo worked into the images inked on my chest burned, a reminder of what I’d done.

Of why I’d done it.

Otis had one too, under his hair at the back of his neck. Only Jace had refused, blaming Daisy for everything that had happened when we all knew none of it had been her fault.

“Fuck,” I muttered, slouching down in my seat and staring out the window.

Forgetting about Daisy in prison was impossible — who could forget about Daisy Hammond? — but at least I’d been able to set aside the shit storm that had been unleashed with Blake’s death.

Now we hadn’t been out an hour and the whole fucking thing came crashing back like a freight train.

I heard the rustle of paper behind me and knew Otis was opening his letter.

If Jace was a metal/screamo symphony, Otis was a jazz riff, chaotic on the surface but elegant and logical underneath in a way that made you surprised you hadn’t seen it before.

He was rational, literal. If you told him to do something, he did it. If you handed him a letter, he opened it, because what else was he supposed to do with it?

“Fine,” Jace said, tearing open his own letter as my mom pulled out of the visitor’s lot. “Fuck.”

I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to know what was in the letter. Didn’t want to read Daisy’s pretty slanted writing, familiar from all the times she wrote me — us — in prison.

She probably wouldn’t know my handwriting if it was emblazoned on a neon sign. I’d never written her back.

None of us had.

A minute later, Jace cursed again from the back seat, a string of long low swear words that didn’t faze my mom. I knew immediately that whatever was in the letter was bad, not that I needed to see what was inside to know that.

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