Page 95 of Pay the Price

Mac returned to the papers in his file, but I had the feeling he was stalling, trying to decide what to say while he shuffled the papers around inside the folder. “She was around.”

I leaned against the desk next to the file cabinet. “Was she dating someone here? Before she married Charles Hammond?”

Mac sighed and put the folder down on the file cabinet’s open drawer. He crossed his arms over his chest. “What’s this about, Jace?”

I shrugged, suddenly feeling like I was the one being asked a trick question. “Nothing. I’m just curious.”

Mac stared at me, his skepticism obvious. “Just curious?”

“There’s some weird shit going on,” I said.

“Can you be more specific?”

I didn’t want to get Mac and the club mixed up in the shit with Charles Hammond. All it would take was a phone call from Hammond to one of his lackeys at Blackwell PD and they’d be at Mac’s door with a search warrant for the compound. Mac was careful, but probably not careful enough to withstand that.

“Just… some shit with Daisy. With her dad.” I left out the part about the missing girls and the trafficking ring because it wasn’t relevant to Daisy’s mom.

“And what does it matter if Nory — if Eleanor — was hanging around the club?”

Jesus, talk about pulling fucking teeth. This was just fucking weird. Mac was careful about the MC’s illegal enterprises, but we were talking about a woman who’d been dead for a decade.

If it didn’t matter, why didn’t he just come out with it? He’d obviously been more than casual acquaintances with Daisy’s mom. You didn’t have a cute nickname for a girl you barely knew.

“I’m not sure that it does,” I said. “Daisy was just surprised. I was surprised too. Doc said you and Daisy’s mom hung out so I figured I’d ask you about it.”

“She was here,” Mac said. “Stayed here sometimes actually.”

“Shestayed here?”

Mac scowled. “Don’t sound so surprised. It’s nice here. Quiet.”

“Is that why she stayed here? For the quiet?”

Mac sighed. “Listen, Nory’s life was… complicated, especially after her son was born.”

Blake. Mac was talking about Blake.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means, sometimes Nory needed some fucking space, Jace.” He was getting agitated, his mask slipping to reveal an expression I’d never once seen on his face: pain. “She needed some space from her life and she came here to get it. Then she got pregnant with Daisy and she stopped coming. That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

I nodded because I knew this tone of Mac’s. It was the one reserved for smacking down a rogue member of the club, for settling a dispute between two leather-clad giants with testosterone to spare.

The one that meant that this conversation? This conversation was done.

“Thanks for telling me,” I said. “Sorry if I… Fuck. I don’t know. Sorry if it felt like I was prying or whatever.”

He took a deep breath and his expression relaxed a little. “It’s fine. It was just a long time ago, Jace. I don’t like to live in the past. You know that.”

“I get it,” I said, because I did.

“Cool.” He tossed the folder back in the file cabinet. “Want to go for a swim? It’s hotter than shit up here.”

He was right, it was about ten degrees hotter on the second floor than it had been on the first. Sweat had started trickling down my back during our conversation. The whole building would be ninety-five degrees in under an hour.

“Sure,” I said. “A swim sounds great.”

We headed outside and the conversation turned to more mundane things: an argument over who would become the new treasurer now that Money had left the club, a plan Mac had to set up legit gym equipment in a couple of unused rooms in the rec building, the broken refrigerator in Pinky’s kitchen.

---