Page 107 of Pay the Price

Otis was still watching Hammond on the screen of his own phone.

“Calvin just got a text,” I said.

Wolf craned his neck to look. “From who?”

“Mr. X.”

Daisy’s eyes widened. “But… my dad…” We were all thinking the same thing, replaying the last fifteen minutes, trying to put it all together. “He didn’t even take out his phone while we were talking.”

“Your dad isn’t Mr. X,” Wolf said.

Otis blinked. “But… if Daisy’s dad isn’t Mr. X… who is?”

Chapter 64

Wolf

“Where did all this shit come from?” I asked, opening another box.

We were in the attic of the Blades’ storage building, digging through boxes of old papers, looking for something that might explain the connection between Daisy’s mom and the Blades.

“Take twenty years and multiply it by all the assholes who’ve come through the club in that time,” Jace said. He was sitting in an old office chair, head bent to a stack of papers.

“Remember Chains and how he used to call us the Little Assholes?” I couldn’t count how many people had come and gone through the Blades during our lifetimes.

Jace laughed. “Fuck that guy.”

“And Lips?” Otis asked. “Her tits always fell out of her tops. Like she’d be walking around with her tit hanging out for an hour before someone told her. I think she was my first naked tit.”

“Maybe this was hers,” I said, holding up an old bra that had been tossed into a box with a bunch of makeup and jewelry.

Jace shook his head. “Nah, Lips didn’t wear a bra, hence the tits.”

We all laughed and I wiped the sweat from my forehead. It wasn’t even noon but the heat of the day was starting to creep into the attic. There were no windows, just a small attic vent near the ceiling that allegedly helped heat escape.

I called bullshit. It was going to be a hundred degrees up here in under two hours.

It was dusty and dark, a single beam of light shining from an old work lamp Otis had found with some tools in the corner.

Daisy had wanted to come, but she had work, and honestly, it was better that she wasn’t here. We attracted too much attention with Daisy, and we were trying to keep our search of the attic on the down-low. Plus we didn’t know what we’d find out about Daisy’s mom. Whatever it was, if anything, we wanted to find it first, then figure out how to present it to Daisy.

I didn’t know why we were doing preemptive damage control. It wasn’t like Daisy’s mom had been some kind of villain. Odds were, she’d hung out at the club for exactly the reason Mac had given Jace: she’d just needed space from her constrictive life with Charles Hammond.

Who wouldn’t?

But I had a weird feeling about it all — Daisy’s mom and the trafficked girls and the mysterious Mr. X. We’d thought we had everything figured out: Charles Hammond was Mr. X and had been trafficking girls, Blake had gotten old enough to join in, they were funneling the girls through the Velvet Rope (maybe), and Calvin was Hammond’s henchman.

Except now we had to eliminate Charles from the equation and add in the fact that Daisy’s mom used to hang out at the compound, that she’d routinely disappeared from her married life, which may or may not have been related to everything else.

It was enough to make my head hurt.

Otis dragged another box to the center of the room. “So the people who bail just leave their shit?”

“Sometimes,” Jace said. “Mac doesn’t keep it all, just paperwork related to the club, old furniture he thinks someone might be able to use, shit like that.”

“So why did Wolf find a bra?” Otis asked.

“Sometimes Mac keeps stuff when he thinks someone will come back, then forgets about it,” Jace said. “When I was a kid we did a cleanup of this building every year, but it’s been a while.”

---