Page 67 of To the Grave

I could almost feel his disappointment through the phone and I hurried to keep him on the hook. Lacrosse finals? Jesus, I probably seemed like a baby.

Yeah. We could hang out in the park again after school?

And by “hang out” I meant “make out.”

I’ll take whatever I can get.

I bit my lip when he added the devil emoji, then breathed a sigh of relief and threw my phone in my bag as I started the car.

This was all Daisy’s fault. I wanted to be alone with McSexy.

Wanted to sleep with him.

But Daisy’s words echoed in my ears from the time she’d caught me playing hooky in bed with one of the Blades. Her lecture had been annoying, her interruption totally embarrassing, but it had also been kind of a relief.

Because deep down, I was definitely feeling a little scared. A little out of control.

Which was pathetic.

I put on my sunglasses and put the car in gear. Being scared was fine, but letting everyone know you were scared was lame.

Which was exactly why I was going to sleep with McSexy sooner rather than later — and there was nothing my annoying sister could do to stop me.

Chapter 45

Jace

Ipeered at the dive bar through Benji’s windshield and sighed as another couple left, stumbling with their arms around each other. “This is a waste of time.”

“Maybe,” Wolf admitted, “but it’s one of the few things we’ve got.”

Staking out the dive bar with Wolf or Otis was one of the few times I got out of the house.

Being a fucking ghost sucked.

Wolf or Otis went with Daisy into town — we still had a tracker on her phone, but no way were we letting her out of our sight — while I paced the house, working on the punch list and wondering how my life had gotten so fucked that I couldn’t even show my face in the town where I’d been born and raised.

“Do we though?” I asked. “We’ve been doing this for weeks, and that doesn’t even count the time before I came back when you and Otis took turns.”

We’d found the mention of the dive bar on Calvin’s phone but had no way of knowing if it was important. It had just beena single meeting spot with the man named Mr. X in the weeks before Calvin had kidnapped Daisy.

“Everyone has their favorite spots,” Wolf said, idly tapping the steering wheel.

He wasn’t wrong. We had a handful of places we used to meet people in secret. Humans were creatures of habit, especially when they felt threatened, which ironically was the worst time to be a creature of habit.

“Still,” I said, shifting in the car. “This blows.”

“You could have stayed home. Otis would have come,” Wolf said.

“I’ve got fucking cabin fever. This just isn’t my favorite way of getting rid of it.”

Wolf turned to look at me. “You can come out of hiding anytime.”

“Not yet,” I said, looking back at the neon sign over the bar:Mo’s. “We’re not close enough yet.”

Derrick’s revelation at the Strike had rocked our world: Michael White had lived at the Blackwell Home for Boys with my dad.

And they’d been into some shit.

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