Page 14 of Pay the Price

“She’s strong,” I said, because it was true. “Look at all the shit she’s been through.”

“Everyone has a breaking point,” Wolf said.

“Isn’t it better for her to know Blake was a piece of shit?” I asked. “Better than her thinking we’re the pieces of shit?”

“Only if you’re a selfish asshole,” Jace said.

Wolf cut him a glance. A warning? “Hey.”

“It’s true and you know it,” Jace said. “The entire reason we didn’t tell Daisy about Blake in the first place was to protect her from knowing Blake was a piece of shit. We did five years in the joint to protect her from knowing Blake was a piece of shit. Now you want to tell her?”

“The situation’s changed,” I said.

“Otis isn’t wrong,” Wolf said. “We thought getting rid of Blake would protect her, but it’s pretty obvious whatever he was into is still happening.”

“You think Daisy’s kidnapping is tied to the two missing girls?” I couldn’t see the connection but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

“I don’t know,” Wolf said. “But I don’t buy that her dad kidnapped her just to teach her a lesson.”

I looked at him. “But that would mean— ”

“Charles fucking Hammond is trafficking girls,” Wolf said. “Still.”

We’d known something was up in the year before we killed Blake. He’d been spending even more money, had been cagey about some of his side hustles when we’d thought we were partners on everything.

Then he told us he had a line on some men — rich ones — who wanted girls.

Young ones.

That was a hard no from us — thinking about rich dudes wanting to buy my sisters or Daisy or any girl made me want toset fire to something — but Blake had made it clear he saw it as an opportunity.

Then he’d started talking about Daisy, about how much a sheltered virgin, a “rich bitch,” would fetch on “the market.”

It turned my stomach — then and now.

Jace’s eye twitched and his hands became fists on the table. “We should have known.”

“Blake never gave us a name,” I said. He’d called the man who wanted the girls Mr. X. How could we have known he’d meant Charles Hammond? That Hammond would agree to sell his own daughter?

No wonder the asshole hadn’t wanted to see us when we’d gone to the house to tell him Daisy had been kidnapped. No wonder he hadn’t held a press conference or said anything at all about his missing daughter.

Jace pounded his fist on the table and the coffee in my cup sloshed over the side.

The room felt even quieter in the silence that followed.

“I’m going to kill him,” Jace finally said.

“You won’t be alone,” Wolf said.

And that meant I was in too, because it didn’t matter that Daisy didn’t want to see us or talk to us, that she might never want to see us or talk to us again.

She belonged to us, even if she didn’t know it.

And we protected what was ours.

Chapter 10

Daisy

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