“There was something else I wanted to ask you.” I’d wanted to catch up with Daisy, to tell her about the Hunt and the Hawks, but that wasn’t the only reason I’d asked her to come by for lunch.
“Anything.”
“Did you ever hear anything more about that trafficking ring?” I asked.
Daisy had gotten mixed up with some bad people a couple years back, people with connections to Blackwell Falls. Their arrest for sex trafficking had been front-page news for a while, but I hadn’t heard anything about it in at least a year.
Daisy shook her head. “I mean, Lilah and the guys came to talk to us about it a year or so ago, but you know how those guys are.”
I didn’t. Not exactly. No one did.
But I knew Rafe, Nolan, and Jude were into some secretive stuff. Some of the rumors claimed it had to do with their military background. Other people said they were mercenaries.
I had no opinion one way or the other — I was beginning to realize Bram’s purchase of the coffee shop had fulfilled its intended purpose by keeping me away from Blackwell Falls’ more questionable activities — and I didn’t really care. I didn’t know Lilah or the men she lived with. I only knew of them through Daisy and from the few times they’d been in to the coffee shop: beautiful honey-haired Lilah and three guys who looked like they were her private security detail.
“What did they want to know?” I asked.
“Same thing you want to know now: if we’d heard anything new from the detective on the case.”
“Any idea why they were asking?”
Daisy furrowed her brow like she was trying to remember. “I was deep in pregnancy brain fog back then, but I think Lilah might have been mixed up in it somehow?”
“In the sex trafficking?”
“Not that part exactly but… I can’t remember. I think maybe they were looking for the guys who were responsible. Wait! I think it was connected to her old boss or something.”
“And you never heard anything after they arrested Piers?”
Daisy shook her head. “Not much more than what was in the papers. You’d probably know more about it than I would. Jace said Lilah’s guys helped Bram find Maeve when she went missing.”
That part was true, but I’d only found that out later, after Maeve had been found.
I tried to piece it all together: Piers Cantwell and Lilah’s old boss and Maeve’s disappearance.
One of those things was not like the other.
“I don’t think Maeve’s kidnapping had anything to do with the sex trafficking thing,” I said.
Maeve had been kidnaped by Ethan Todd, some manosphere douchebag.
“Are you sure about that?” Daisy asked.
There was a hidden implication in her voice but I didn’t know what it was.
“What are you asking?”
“Would Bram have told you if it did?”
I saw her point. “Shit.”
“You can’t be mad at Bram for trying to protect you,” Daisy said.
“Iammad.”
Daisy gave me a sad smile. “Can you blame him?”
“Actually, yeah. I know it came from a good place, but it’s made me…”