Page 33 of Pay the Price

I was glad she hadn’t phrased it as a question. I wasn’t a good liar and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that unless Cassie was a deep sleeper, she was probably on to the fact that Daisy had just gotten fucked within an inch of her life in the guest bedroom.

I tightened my arms around her instead of saying anything because there was no point in making her self-conscious about the fact that her moans of pleasure had been anything but quiet.

We stayed like that for so long I thought she’d fallen asleep until she spoke again.

“What now?”

I kissed the top of her head. “Now you come home.”

“What about… what about Blake?” she asked.

“Anything you want to know, we’ll tell you,” I said. "Just come home so we can talk. So we can keep you safe.”

Chapter 20

Wolf

Istrummed my guitar on the sofa, trying to ignore the way Jace paced the room while Otis played a video game. I was already nervous. I didn’t need Jace’s wired energy.

The music was good. Helpful. I didn’t know what it was yet — I was still shaping it into the song I heard when I looked at Daisy — but the guitar strings under my fingertips were familiar and comforting.

Soothing.

And right now I needed soothing. We all did, even though Jace would have denied that he was nervous about Daisy coming home.

That was Jace’s trip: denial.

He pretended he didn’t care whether Daisy came home, that he didn’t care whether shewantedto come. He pretended he didn’t care what she thought of us just like he’d pretended he hadn’t cared what Charles Hammond had thought of us when we’d been tight with Blake. He pretended he didn’t care that Daisy was a rich girl — a “good” girl from a “good” family —and he was poor and parentless and everyone knew he had no business with Daisy Hammond.

Except he did have business with her. We all did.

In fact, it had been our entire business to keep Daisy safe ever since she was a kid. We hadn’t expected that edict to become so complicated when she got older, but here we were.

“Pacing isn’t going to get her here faster,” I said, still strumming. The song was soft and haunting, winding its way through my head whenever I looked at her. Trying to recreate it was like trying to define Daisy, to define what she meant to me, to all of us.

Impossible. But also somehow important.

Maybe that was what the song was about: defining my feelings for Daisy, which felt too big for words.

Jace shot me an annoyed glance and opened his mouth to say something, then seemed to think better of it, probably because he knew there was no point denying he was on edge.

It was what we’d wanted: for Daisy to come home. But when she’d texted Otis (not gonna lie: that hurt, but I understood it since Otis was the one who’d been stationed at Cassie’s like a fucking stalker every night) that she was coming home to talk, it had taken all of two seconds for my initial happiness to morph into fear.

She hadn’t said she’d come home for good. Only that she wanted to talk, that she had questions.

And that meant it was time to come clean. About everything.

Daisy already knew we’d killed Blake, but we couldn’t keep the details from her anymore, and telling her what had happened — why we’d done what we’d done — would either cement what we’d been building together or ruin it forever.

“She said she’d be here at two,” Otis said, his eyes on the TV as his video game character, dressed in battle fatigues, killed a zombie. “It’s not two.”

“Close enough.” Jace’s expression was murderous as he looked at Otis, serenely playing his video game. “And don’t act so superior. Some of us haven’t been fucking Daisy for the past month while she’s been gone.”

Otis shrugged. “Not my fault you and Wolf took the day shift.”

“We didn’t exactly talk about it,” I said, more annoyed with myself than with Otis. We’d just fallen into a natural rhythm, Jace taking the morning shift, me in the afternoon, and Otis — naturally — taking the night shift.

But even if wehadtalked about it, Otis still probably would have gotten the night shift. Otis was the one who skulked around like a cat on silent feet, the one with a penchant for breaking into places “just to have a look around.”

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