Page 15 of Pay the Price

Islept through the day, crashing in Cassie’s guest room while she worked at the coffee shop downstairs.

It was dark by the time I woke up, and I shuffled into Cassie’s cute little kitchen and told her everything over her signature lavender chamomile tea and an assortment of baked goods from the shop that tasted like buttery heaven after all the health food I’d been forced to eat over the past ten days.

When I was done talking, Cassie just stared at me, her mouth practically hanging open. I was still in my tracksuit, but she was wearing matching pajamas in forest green that made her eyes look more green than blue.

She looked young with her copper hair pulled up into a messy bun, her face free of makeup, and I realized shewasyoung.

We both were.

Too young for all this drama and trauma.

“Wow,” she said. “That’s… that’s a lot, Daze. I’m not even going to ask if you’re okay, because it’s crazy to think anyone could be okay after what you’ve been through.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I could even answer that question right now.” It had been harder to walk away from the Beasts than I’d expected.

Harder than it should have been.

“You didn’t want it to be true,” Cassie said, like she could read my mind.

“I guess not.”

I hadn’t realized exactly how much I’d wanted it not to be true until I’d found out it was. There were things you could come back from and things you couldn’t, and knowing the men you were falling for had murdered your brother seemed pretty solidly in thecan’t come back fromcolumn.

“They had to have a reason, right?” Cassie asked.

I looked at her in surprise. “What reason could they have for murder? For murdering Blake?”

I wasn’t oblivious enough to think Blake had been perfect. We’d had our differences — when we were young and he hated the way I wanted to tag along, and later, when he got broody and secretive — but he hadn’t been a rabid dog that needed to be put down.

I saw his body, the way it had looked on the riverbank, the glint of his ring in the moonlight, the blood seeping through his shirt.

The Beasts had been hisbest friends. How could they do that to him?

“I’m not saying any reason is a good enough reason for murder,” Cassie said. “I’m just saying…” She trailed off like she was trying to find the right words.

“What?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. Jace, Wolf, and Otis have always been obnoxiously sure of themselves, and okay, they’re brawlers, but I’ve never bought them as psychopaths, not even right after they confessed to killing Blake.”

I couldn’t argue with her perception because I’d had the same one. It was why I’d concocted the plan to invite the Beasts to work with me on the house. Even after they’d spent five years in prison for killing Blake, I hadn’t been sure. It just hadn’t felt right.

Except now I knew itwasright. On a moonless night five years earlier, while everyone else had been partying inside Troy Morton’s house, the Blackwell Beasts had stabbed my brother to death.

What was more psychopathic than that?

“Except now we know they did it,” I said.

“True, but think about it like a court case, like an episode ofLaw & Order.” Cassie lovedLaw & Order.

I shook my head. “What doesLaw & Orderhave to do with the Beasts?”

“Well, there are the people who commit murder in cold blood and the people who commit murder for some other reason — maybe they have an insanity defense or they were actually defending themselves — and the court sees them differently,” she said, warming to the topic.

“Yeah, but the Beasts aren’t crazy and there’s no way Blake posed a threat to all three of them, so that eliminates the whole self-defense thing too,” I said.

She chewed her lower lip. “True, but maybe there’s something else. Some other reason.”

I tried to think of one and came up empty. “Nothing can change the fact that they killed him.”

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