Page 52 of Gather the Storm

A series of squares populated the camera feed and I scrolled down, making sure all the ones I’d placed were accounted for. I didn’t need a list. For all my weaknesses — and there were a lot of them — keeping track of things had never been a problem for me, especially when it came to stuff like this.

I might not be able to read someone’s expression, but I knew exactly how many miles had been on the odometer the last time I’d changed the oil in the Corvette, knew how much memory was left on my laptop, remembered the part number of the carburetor I’d installed in Daya’s Malibu five years ago.

And I definitely knew how many cameras I’d installed in the house.

I’d placed them carefully, for maximum coverage, wanting to make sure Daisy was protected.

It was all that had ever mattered to me.

It mattered when she was a kid, tagging along while we did all kinds of stupid shit. It mattered when she started going to house parties with us, the guys at Blackwell High suddenly looking at Daisy like she was anything but a kid. And it had definitely mattered when Daisy had been about to go down for Blake’s murder.

I was heading back inside when a rhythmic banging sounded at the front of the house. It took me a second to realize it was the old-fashioned door knocker at the front. The house didn’t have a doorbell, something I hoped Daisy planned to fix because the sound of the door knocker echoing through the old house was creepy as fuck.

Jace had taken off somewhere and Wolf and Daisy were still out running errands, so I let myself back in through the kitchen and made my way down the hall toward the front door.

Except when I opened the door, no one was there. For a couple seconds, I was creeped the hell out, wondering if the old house was haunted after all. Then I looked down and saw a large box sitting on the porch.

It was addressed to Daisy, so I picked it up and took it to the kitchen. It was probably the first of many boxes, judging from Daisy’s blueprints. The footprint of the house was staying more or less the same, with the exception of one wall between the kitchen and the room labeledliving roomon the plans. That one was coming down to improve flow in the main living area.

But there was tons of cosmetic work on the list Daisy had texted us: wallpaper that needed to come down and plaster that needed repair and rooms that need painting.

Daisy was going to need a lot of shit to do all that work and at least some of it was going to arrive in boxes like the one I’d set on the island.

I opened the fridge and grabbed a beer. It was one of the few things Daisy had brought with the round of initial supplies, and I leaned against the counter and took a long drink.

I liked being in the house alone. Jace thought the place was creepy — or so he claimed — but I thought it was peaceful.

Here, at the top of the falls, no one was calling us the Blackwell Beasts. No one was staring, wondering why we’d killed Blake. No one was looking at me like I was a freak they couldn’t stuff into a neat little box.

I’d been lucky, both because I’d always been big and because I’d fallen in with Blake, Jace, and Wolf early on.

But I wasn’t stupid. I knew I was a little different — a littleweird. (This had been said exactly once, by Tony Greco in eighth grade, after which Jace and Wolf had given the kid a black eye. No one had ever looked at me sideways again.)

I liked being in the house with Daisy and my best friends. I felt safe here and I felt capable of keeping Daisy safe too.

The last part was the most important thing. I hated that someone out there was still kidnapping girls — my sisters were scared shitless, and I was scared for them — but the scariest thing of all was what we knew about it.

And what we didn’t know.

What we didn’t know could get Daisy hurt or killed, and as much as I hadn’t been able to stand thinking about it when I’d been eighteen, it was worse now, with Daisy’s shy smile lighting up every room in the house, the smell of her shampoo and soap leaving a trail of roses and vanilla that made my dick hard at the same time it made me want to kill anyone who even looked at her the wrong way.

I’d thought of her a lot in prison, but now that I was living with her, she’d become the star in every one of my fantasies. My dick was fuckingrawfrom beating off to the thought of her.

Jace had told us to keep our distance, but I was already dreaming about the ways I’d renege on the promise, and judging from the look on Wolf’s face when he looked at Daisy, I wasn’t the only one.

Fuck. Less than a week out of prison and we were really in the shit.

The front door opened and I set down my beer and started for the front of the house.

I met Wolf and Daisy — both of them carrying grocery bags — in the hall.

“More in the truck,” Wolf said as he passed.

“You can put the house stuff in the room across from the parlor,” Daisy said. “We’ll use that room as a staging ground for the work.”

Wolf and I worked on the heavy stuff from the home store while Daisy brought in the groceries even though we told her to leave the rest and let us handle it.

It was one of the things I’d always liked about Daisy. Sure, she was a rich kid, but she’d never acted like one. She’d always been willing to get her hands dirty, had never acted entitled.

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