Page 24 of Pay the Price

Except now that he was here, I wanted him to stay.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “Just don’t let Cassie catch you in here. She’s not going to like that you broke into her house.”

“Technically I didn’t have to break in,” he said, sinking lower in the chair. “Window was open in the living room. Right over the fire escape too.”

He said it with a hint of sadness, like Cassie’s lax security was cause for mourning.

I sank into my pillow, my eyes on Otis a few feet away in the chair.

It should have been weird, letting someone watch me sleep. But it didn’t feel weird. In fact it was the closest I’d felt to home since I’d left the house at the top of the falls.

I tried not to think about what that meant. Tried not to think about what kind of person it made me.

Because the truth was, the Beasts had killed my brother — and I still wanted them.

Chapter 16

Daisy

It was just before noon when I walked in to Cassie’s Cuppa Saturday morning. The line was almost to the door, the place teeming with hungover locals and perky tourists on their way to the mountain for a day of hiking.

Behind the counter, Kylie and Drew rang up orders, made coffee, and called out customers’ names while Cassie worked behind them to keep everything stocked and clean.

I inhaled the scent of freshly brewed coffee and skirted the customers in line to make my way to the end of the counter — opposite the side where customers waited for their orders — where Cassie was refilling glass canisters with coffee beans from brown bags.

“Hey,” she said, shaking the last of a bag of shiny brown beans into one of the glass canisters. “How was your workout?”

“Good. Hard.” I set my bag on the floor. Over the past couple of weeks I’d gotten used to the feel of my gym bag over my shoulder, had gotten used to walking through town in sweaty leggings and tank tops, my body sore from the workout Locke had devised for me. The gym alone wasn’t going to make mesome kind of badass who could suddenly protect myself, but I was feeling more comfortable in my body, more confident. It was a start. I looked around. “It’s packed in here.”

“It’s summer,” she said.

“True.” It was almost the Fourth of July. Blackwell Falls would be busy until after Labor Day, when it would empty out like the Mill after last call, leaving the locals to breathe a sigh of relief until Parents' Weekend at Aventine and Bellepoint.

“Coffee?” Cassie asked.

“Latte, please,” I said. “And one for Ruth.”

I took my coffee black during the week, but after a week of work at Cantwell — still slightly awkward — and brutal workouts, not to mention late-night visits from Otis, I deserved a latte.

Cassie lifted her eyebrows as she started making the coffees. “Finally going to have the convo, huh?”

I nodded. “I still don’t know how much I’m going to tell her though.”

Cassie scowled. “You have to tell her everything. She has a right to know.”

We’d talked about this more than once, usually sitting on Cassie’s sofa or at her kitchen table in the apartment upstairs, but I was still torn.

“I just don’t want to hurt her.” Ruth idolized my dad. What would it do to her to know he was capable of kidnapping his daughter and holding her prisoner just because she’d defied him?

“Not telling her the truth is hurting her,” Cassie said. “What if he does something like this to her someday?”

I huffed out a laugh. “To Ruth? No way.”

It was something I tried not to think about, the fact that Ruth was my dad’s favorite, that she and Blake had been favored by him when he’d always been distant with me.

Because if I thought too hard about it, I could only draw one conclusion: my dad just didn’t love me as much as he loved Blake and Ruth. Or maybe it was more accurate to say he just didn’t like me as much.

I was different. Like my mom.

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