Page 44 of Pay the Price

“Ugh!” I tugged my shirt down and grabbed the towel I’d dropped on the floor, then hurried past him to my room. “You guys are theworst!”

Otis called after me, sounding genuinely wounded. “Just trying to help, doll.”

Chapter 26

Jace

“He has to die.” I said it because it was true, because of all the things I didn’t know, this was one thing I did.

“We can’t kill Daisy’s dad,” Wolf said. “Not yet.”

We were sitting at the edge of the cliff next to the falls, the water coursing faster as it approached the edge. It was too dark to see it — almost midnight — but I could hear it rushing as it spilled into the pool below.

“I’m not talking about Hammond,” I said. “Although he’s on the chopping block too as far as I’m concerned. I’m talking about Calvin.”

The location of our conversation was intentional. Out here, Daisy couldn’t overhear our conversation, and we were still in the practice of protecting Daisy.

Fuck. I couldn’t think about her without getting hard. My fingers still smelled like her pussy, our almost-fuck in the hall replaying in my mind like the world’s hottest porn.

I tried to push it aside, to focus on the conversation or anything at all other than the fact that my need to fuck Daisy was growing to a fever pitch.

I’d been so close. So fucking close. And I still didn’t know if it would have been a good thing or the worst mistake of my life.

And hers.

“Agreed,” Otis said. "He drugged Daisy. Scared her. Kidnapped her.”

“I’m as eager to get rid of Calvin as anybody, but we have to be smart about it,” Wolf said. “Right now he’s our only connection to Daisy’s kidnapping. We can’t kill him until he gives us the proof we need to send Daisy’s dad away for a long time.”

What was left unsaid was that none of us was eager to kill Charles Hammond. We’d already taken Blake from Daisy, and even though it had felt justified — even though it still felt justified — none of us wanted to be responsible for making Daisy an orphan.

I cracked my knuckles. “Fine. Let’s grab him. Take him to the warehouse. Work him over.”

I wasn’t the cool, calm, and collected type under the best of circumstances, and my pent-up sexual energy wasn’t helping. If I couldn’t fuck Daisy, hurting someone was the next best thing.

“If we kill him, our connection is gone,” Wolf said.

“We know Hammond is behind it.” I couldn’t hide my frustration. Between Wolf’s sense of reason and Otis’ obsessive attention to detail, we’d still be standing around jerking off when we were thirty if I didn’t push to make a move. Call me a hothead, but I was for getting shit done, and by “shit" I meant showing Calvin he couldn’t fuck with Daisy. “What are we waiting for?”

“I’m just saying,” Wolf said. “When Daisy asked if Blake was into prostituting girls, we corrected her, right?”

“Because trafficking isn’t the same as prostitution,” Otis pointed out.

“Exactly,” Wolf said. “Trafficking takes planning. It takes resources. We know the assholes from Aventine were hunting girls in the woods, but except for Alinari, those guys are in prison.”

“So what are they doing with the girls?” Otis asked, like he was starting to understand and thank fucking god because short and to the point wasn’t Wolf’s specialty.

I was past ready to get to the fucking point, or better yet, curb stomp Calvin’s head and call it a day.

“What are they doing with the girls…” Wolf muttered. He looked from Otis to me. “We want to shut them down. Not just take out Hammond.”

I took a deep breath of the pine-scented air. This close to the water, it was laced with the metallic tang of the mineral-heavy river. My head cleared and I started to see where Wolf was going. “They’re being taken somewhere. There’s some kind of system in place, a system for moving the girls, selling them, getting them to their final destinations.”

I hated the sound of it. Hated the idea of a girl like Daisy being sold like cattle, disappearing into the ether to be used and thrown away like a piece of trash.

“Don’t we want to know?” Wolf asked. “Don’t we want to pull it all apart?”

We did. I did. But even more than that, I wanted to expose Charles Hammond.

---