Page 15 of Hell to Pay

“Who the fuck said anything about fair?” Rafe asked.

Nolan sighed, and I could almost see him rubbing at the corner of his mouth with his thumb, the way he did when he was frustrated. “I did. Lilah’s feelings matter here.”

Now my heart felt all squishy. Dammit.

“You’re thinking with your dick,” Rafe said. “This is why we don’t fuck clients.”

My cheeks burned.

“First of all,” Nolan said, “Lilah isn’t a client. She’s way more than that, to all of us, and I think you know that. Second of all, there’s a lot more than my dick involved with Lilah, and I think you know that too.”

“Speak for yourself,” Rafe grumbled.

I was surprised to hear the bark of Jude’s laughter. “Yeah, okay.”

“Lilah wants to find out what happened to these girls,” Rafe said. “We don’t need her for that, and she’d be safer out of the line of fire.”

“She doesn’t want us to go away and solve this without her. It’s not abstract for her,” Jude said.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Rafe asked.

“Lilahidentifieswith these girls,” Jude said.

I took an instinctive step back from the door, feeling exposed and embarrassed, like Jude had walked in on me while I was trimming my pubic hair.

I didn’t have time to figure out how Jude knew something so personal about me, something I’d never said aloud.

“I think you hit your head on the way off the boat,” Rafe said. “These girls are nothing like Lilah.”

“You’re wrong,” Nolan said. “Didn’t you hear what she said earlier? She’s always been alone. She’s been out there since high school, working her ass off, barely getting by, trying to give her little brother a chance if he needs an escape. You don’t see a parallel between Lilah and the girls who’ve gone missing? The ones the news barely reported on?”

Rafe was quiet, and I wondered if Nolan’s words had hit home.

Then, Jude’s voice. “How many news stories did they do about Ruth Hammond after that shit show with the Beasts?”

I thought about all the times I’d seen Ruth’s picture on the news, her perfect teeth and glossy hair staring back from the TV. I hadn’t even thought about it at the time. Of course the news would report about Ruth’s near miss with Piers and Gray Cantwell. Ruth was the daughter of a rich local man, the great-granddaughter of one of Blackwell Falls’ founders. She was beautiful and popular, someone with a bright future ahead of her (left unsaid:unlike all those runaways and strippers who went missing).

“You think Lilah believes no one would care if something happened to her?” I was surprised by how quiet Rafe’s voice was, how absent it was of its usual bite.

“You think someone would have looked for her before she came to us?” I knew Nolan didn’t mean anything by it, that he was trying to make a point to Rafe, but it stung to hear him say out loud what I’d been thinking for the past two months. Then he spoke again. “It’s a fucking tragedy that no one knows how amazing she is, thatshedoesn’t know, butweknow. And I think we also know that if something had happened to Lilah before she found the house, her disappearance probably wouldn’t have made the news.”

“Lilah wants to find out what happened to them because she thinks she’s like them,” Rafe said quietly.

“And because she’s a good person,” Jude said.

There was a long silence. I felt like it meant something, but I wasn’t sure what that something might be.

“Fuck,” Rafe finally said.

“We have to,” Nolan said.

I didn’t know what he was talking about until Rafe spoke again. “Fine. We help look for these girls until we find answers. Until Lilah is satisfied.”

“And we don’t shut her out while we do it,” Jude added. “But wedokeep her safe.”

“That’s a fucking given.”

Rafe’s voice was so fierce, so raw, that I backed away from the door, feeling like I’d heard something I shouldn’t — not the conversation itself but the undercurrent in Rafe’s voice that said he might not hate me after all.

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