This was the first I was hearing about any VIP villas.
“The resort was a complex,” Daisy explained. “The main hotel, where spa treatments and stuff happened, and ten private villas, which were purchased outright by, well, rich people.”
The tiniest thread was loose in my brain now. I didn’t know what it meant, but I wanted to pick at it, see if I could pull it free. “What kind of rich people?”
“CEOs, tech bros, biotech families, old money, that kind of thing,” Daisy explained. “The villas weren’t cheap. They were custom decorated and furnished to the specification of the owners, so those were the only kinds of people who could afford them.”
“And you told the police all of this?” I was honestly surprised the Bastards were letting me ask questions without interrupting, but maybe they thought I was onto something.
“I was interviewed three different times by Detective Rodriguez.” I recognized the name as the detective who’d given all the press conferences. “I told them everything I knew.”
Jude took another brownie. “Did they ever come back to you with more information?”
“No,” Daisy said, “but to be fair, I wasn’t pushing them for more information. I just…” She took a deep breath. “I just wanted to put it all behind us.”
“That’s understandable,” I said.
“Yeah, exactly, which is why we’re done here,” Jace said. “It’s not good for Daisy to relive this.”
Daisy reached for his hand. “I’m fine.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We’re just trying to put the pieces together.”
Wolf stood. “Those are all the pieces we have, and like Jace said, we have to protect Daisy now. She’s been through a lot.”
I stood, because I wasn’t about to bully Daisy Hammond into continuing to talk to us. And anyway, she’d told us what she knew. It hadn’t been an earth-shattering revelation, but it was something else to work with, another piece in the jumbled jigsaw puzzle on the table.
Jude grabbed another brownie as he stood. “These are really good,” he told Daisy.
She smiled. “Thanks. Family recipe.”
“Thanks for talking to us,” I said.
“Of course. I’ll let you know if I think of anything else. Just…” A haunted expression passed over her violet eyes. “Just be careful, Lilah. I want to believe this is over, that whatever you saw had nothing to do with what Piers and Arlo were doing…”
“I sense abutthere,” Nolan said.
Daisy nodded. “Piers and Arlo, they were dangerous. My little sister even got mixed up in it and… well, it was a close call.”
“And if someone else is still trafficking girls, they’re probably even more powerful than that douchebag Piers and his inbred son.” Otis said it casually, like he was just making an observation as he headed back to the pool.
The words hung in my mind like smoke as Daisy walked us around the house to the front. Because who was more powerful than a billionaire like Piers Cantwell?
Not Vic Lombardi.
Mr. Suit.
45
LILAH
I forcedmyself to stay off my computer that night. I’d been spinning my wheels on the dark web, doing random searches on the regular web, and rereading press releases from the Blackwell PD for weeks.
Enough already.
But giving up my research for the night didn’t mean I could sleep. The conversation with Daisy and the Beasts replayed in my mind, the moody setting of the old house on the hill giving the whole thing a dreamlike quality.
It would be easy to see Daisy as a heroine from an old book, tragic and traumatized, but I’d sensed steel behind her eyes. I didn’t know everything that had happened to her, but whatever it had been, she’d survived it.