Page 48 of To the Grave

Chapter 34

Jace

Isat on the sofa in the living room, half listening to Wolf on the phone while Otis worked on the old mantle clock he’d been trying to restore. I probably looked normal to them — at least I hoped I looked normal — but I didn’t feel like myself.

Actually, I wasn’t even sure what normal was. It had been a long time since anything had been normal.

Before the fire, I still felt in control. Sure, I’d killed my best friend, had gone to prison for five years, but none of it had broken me.

But being apart from Daisy, knowing what I’d put her through, that broke me.

I’d been sheltered from the worst of it while I’d been away. In the insane two minutes Wolf, Otis, and I had in the fire to make our half-assed plan, we’d settled on a supply drop off the High Falls trail in the Blackwell Preserve and had agreed on two things: I would play dead and there would be no contact between us.

It was the safest way to make sure we weren’t discovered, the safest way to make sure Wolf and Otis didn’t slip up. But it also meant I hadn’t known that Daisy had been in bad fucking shape.

I’d known she was suffering, had listened to her talk to me when she visited the marker she’d placed for me in the family cemetery, a gesture that had pretty much rocked my world when I’d discovered it because nobody but Wolf and Otis had ever cared enough about me to call me family.

But Daisy… well, Daisy had made me a grave in her family cemetery. She’d thought I was good enough to be there, and I knew because I‘d heard her say it in the long conversations she’d with my dead spirit or whatever the fuck she’d thought she’d been talking to.

Which blew my fucking mind.

Because I’d been called a lot of things in my life — some of them hadn’t even been that bad — but no one in the fucking world had ever thought I was good, and I was at the very top of that list.

She was wrong. That was obvious. But the fact that she thought I was good, well, that fucking meant something, even if it wasn’t true.

And I’d fucking decimated her.

How could I ever expect her to forgive me?

I picked up my phone to check location tracking on Daisy for the hundredth time that day. Wolf and Otis usually went everywhere with her, but that wouldn’t fly at Daisy’s dad’s place. I didn’t love having her out of our sights, but according to my phone, she was still at Charles Hammond’s house, the little dot with her picture a reassuring reminder that she was okay even though one of us wasn’t with her.

“Yeah… okay… fuck,” Wolf said, winding down his call. Otis was still focused on the clock. “Thanks.”

He set his phone down and dropped onto the sofa.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Brandon Miller,” Wolf said.

“Why were you talking to that asshole?” I asked, because Brandon Miller was a fucking dickhead who’d gotten girls drunk in high school so he could fuck around with them.

“I heard he knows Derrick Mayer,” Wolf said.

Now it made sense. Derrick Mayer wasn’t a ghost — not exactly — but he wasn’t exactly high-profile either. A PO box in Blackwell Falls and an inactive social media profile was the extent of the information we’d been able to find without bothering Aloha — and we really didn’t want to bother Aloha because we were starting to get the feeling that we were wearing out our welcome.

“What did he say?” Otis asked without looking up from the clock.

“He’s a Barbarian,” Wolf said.

“Who, Brandon Miller?” The Barbarians were rough but I couldn’t see them fucking with a rapist.

“No,” Wolf said. “Mayer.”

I sat back on the sofa as I processed the revelation. “So my dad founded the Blades and one of his best friends joined the Barbarians?”

“Weird right?” Wolf asked.

“Think they had a falling out?” I asked. “With Michael White too?”

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