Page 68 of Pay the Price

Was there anything better than black coffee with a decadent pastry?

“Thank you.” I took a drink of coffee and looked at each of them. “Whoever went out and got these. It was a good call.”

“It was Jace,” Otis said.

Of course it was.

“Well, thank you,” I said, glancing up at him. He shifted in his seat, clearly uncomfortable, and I wondered if it was because he’d watched me with Wolf and Otis at the Velvet Rope or because he’d carried me to bed. I searched for a change of topic to fill the awkward silence and realized I had no idea what Jace had found, if anything, at the Velvet Rope. The rave room hadn’t been ideal for convo and I’d crashed hard and fast when we’d gotten to the limo. “Did you find anything last night?”

He looked at Wolf and Otis, then pulled out his phone. He unlocked it and slid it toward me.

I looked at the list of cities in his Notes app: Paris, Brussels, Sicily, Seattle, Dubrovnik, Minsk, Berlin, Prague, London.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Don’t know yet,” Jace said. “I got into one of the back rooms and found some old flight plans for private charters. Some of them went back ten years, all to these nine cities.”

I looked up. “Ten years? You think this has been going on for ten years?”

“We don’t know that,” Wolf said. “We’re not even sure the flight plans are connected to the trafficking ring. It could be anything.”

“It was all I had time to find,” Jace said. “I almost got caught. I had to memorize the cities and book it out of there.”

“What do we do with this?” I asked. “It’s so… vague.”

I didn’t want to sound ungrateful. Jace had taken a risk while the rest of us had been having fun, but a list of random cities wasn’t exactly the key to the trafficking ring I’d been hoping for.

“It’s just another piece of the puzzle,” Otis said. “Sometimes you have to set those aside until you figure out where they go.”

Wolf nodded. “We’ll give it some thought, see if we can put it together with something from the deep dive Aloha’s still doing on Calvin and your dad.”

I rubbed my temples. My headache was receding, but I was suddenly overwhelmed by how shitty I still felt and all the stuff we didn’t know about the trafficking ring. “I need to get it together. I was going to start on the ballroom today.”

It sounded grander than it was — think half-size basketball court, not Marie Antoinette waltzing — but it was technically a ballroom, and I had the old photographs of my great-grandparents dancing among a crowd of tuxedos and frilly ball gowns to prove it.

I still wasn’t sure what I’d do with the cavernous room (although I was starting to get a few ideas), but whatever it was would require plaster repair and a fresh coat of paint at the minimum. The room was huge, with triple-height ceilings,so even something simple was going to take some time — and a seriously high ladder.

“It’ll have to wait,” Wolf said, putting another glass of water in front of me. “We have plans today.”

I looked up at him. “We do?”

I must be more hungover than I’d thought.

“We do,” he said.

“I don’t remember any plans.”

“That’s because we just made them this morning,” Otis said.

I sighed. “Right. Do I get any say in this? I was supposed to work on the house today.”

“No say,” Jace said. His expression was cold again. If his fevered gaze on my face at the Velvet Rope hadn’t been seared into my memory, I would’ve thought I’d imagined it.

“What Jace is trying to say is that we thought a little fun in the sun would do you good today,” Wolf said. “It’s going to be a scorcher.”

“What kind of fun in the sun?” I asked.

“Cookout and pool time,” Otis said. “At the Kings’ house.”

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