Page 1 of Pay the Price

Chapter 1

Wolf

Iparked Benji outside a nondescript diner on the outskirts of town and tried to ignore the clock ticking in the back of my brain: nine days, fifteen hours, forty-five minutes, give or take.

That was how long Daisy had been missing, how long it had been since someone had taken her from the side of the road. The clock had been ticking ever since, like I needed the reminder that Daisy was gone when I felt her absence like a hole in my fucking heart every second of every day.

The police had refused to open an investigation, even though it had been clear from the scene by the side of the road that Daisy had been taken by force, and Charles Hammond still hadn’t made a statement about his missing daughter (we’d had to pass a letter to the housekeeper through the gate when Daisy’s dad refused to see us, which… fair).

We were on our own, turning the town upside down trying to find her.

Hence the diner.

“Still don’t know why we couldn’t have met at Joe’s,” Jace grumbled as we got out of the car.

“Do you want the info or not?” I asked.

We were all dealing with Daisy’s kidnapping in our own way. Otis spent hours looking at maps of the town — abandoned buildings and hunting cabins and even mineshafts — while I turned over every rock in Blackwell Falls to see if someone had heard anything through the grapevine.

In between, I played my guitar, tinkering with the song I’d been writing since Daisy invited us to live at the house, the only music that came close to feeling like the girl who’d been living rent-free in my head for as long as I could remember.

And Jace? Well, Jace had become an even bigger asshole, his temper a hair trigger that had already sent one of the Barbarians — the Blades’ rival MC — to the hospital after a confrontation at the Orpheum.

It had gotten harder to turn down the raging metal/screamo mash-up that always played when I looked at him, one of many reasons I wished he’d calm the fuck down.

We were all fucked without her. Another girl had gone missing one town over and we hadn’t even been able to look into it. Had Daisy become one of them, snatched randomly as part of the dark underworld operating in and around Blackwell Falls? Or was Daisy’s kidnapping something else?

We didn’t know. All that mattered was getting her back.

“I want the info,” Jace said. “Just don’t know why we’re wasting time all the way out here.”

Out herewas just a few miles outside town, but it was where Crash, a member of the Barbarians MC, had wanted to meet, and at this point, I’d have gone to the moon to find out what had happened to Daisy. A few miles outside town was no big deal. Jace was just being a pain in the ass.

I’d forgotten the name of the place by the time we stepped inside, but it looked like any other diner in any other small town — linoleum floor, counter lined with old-timers nursing cups of coffee and plates of scrambled eggs, and chrome tables littered with sugar packets and bottles of ketchup.

“There,” Otis said, flipping his hair out of his eyes. “In the back.”

The biker named Crash was hunched over a cup of coffee, his gaze darting over the diner, one hand under the table. He was gaunt, his shoulders bony through the thin fabric of his T-shirt, his face almost skeletal. He looked sick, either from fear or drugs, and the first thrum of disappointment echoed through my body. In the days since Daisy had been kidnapped, we hadn’t had a single lead.

Not one.

And this one wasn’t looking promising.

Crash sat up straighter as we approached. I saw it for what it was — an attempt to look in control — but there was no hiding the fear in his gaze or the nervousness that caused his leg to bounce under the table.

He swiped a hand through his greasy brown hair and I wondered why he wasn’t wearing his Barbarians cut over his gray T-shirt.

I shook off the discordant melody — like a middle-school band having their first rehearsal — that filled my head, pushed it under my psyche the way I’d learned when I was young. My mom had always said my synesthesia was a gift, a way of seeing the world, of hearing it, like no one else, but most of the time it was just fucking annoying.

“Yo,” Otis said, sliding into the booth next to Crash.

He didn’t ask Crash to move over or even give him a warning that he planned to sit — just made himself at home, forcingCrash to slide to the far side of the booth until he was smashed against the window while Jace and I took the other side.

“Where is she?” Jace demanded.

Crash’s eyes grew wide and he threw up his hands in surrender. “I don’t know, man! I swear!”

“Then why are we here?”

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