Chapter 27 Cassie
CASSIE
I lay awake, staring at the ceiling and replaying the conversation with the Hawks.
Sounds like you need to let it go.
Hawk’s words echoed in my head like a bell that wouldn’t stop ringing. How dare he?
Seven years is a long time to stalk someone with no proof they intentionally committed a crime.
Filed under: no shit, Sherlock.
Did he think I wanted to live my life this way? That I wanted to call Detective Grabowski every month? To sit on hold when they asked who was calling and know they’d come back and tell me he wasn’t available?
Did he think I wanted to carry around my rage at Travis Dorsey, a lead weight that threatened to stop me from breathing?
And what kind of name was Hawk anyway? Had his parents really named him that? Was it a nickname? Or had he given himself the name after the masks he, Jagger, and Vigo wore in the Hunt?
Either way, it was dumb. Like him.
My stomach grumbled, and I fluffed my pillow and turned onto my side.
It wasn’t that Hawk obviously thought I was crazy. I was used to that. I was pretty sure Detective Grabowski thought I was crazy, and Detective Taber, the detective who’d first had the case, had definitely thought I was crazy.
Even Bram thought I was crazy the one and only time I’d dared to ask if he could at least acknowledge the possibility that our parents had been intentionally murdered. Well, maybe not crazy, but at least grief-stricken and emotionally unwell.
So yeah, I was used to that part.
But not getting anyone to listen to me, that part really pissed me off.
They listened.
Shut up, I told the voice in my head. And okay, the voice was right. Kind of. The Hawks had listened to the story about my parents and Travis Dorsey. And Jagger and Vigo had seemed open to the possibility that I was right.
It was Hawk who was the problem. Stupid, brooding, cold, beautiful Hawk.
I exhaled loudly into the room. My stomach was grumbling again, no surprise since I’d skipped dinner.
The thought of food had made me sick on the heels of the argument with the Hawks, but I hadn’t eaten since lunch at the coffee shop, and my stomach twisted with hunger.
I tapped my phone to look at the time — 1:32 a.m. — and sat up with a sigh. The Hawks were probably either asleep or in their rooms chopping up babies or whatever it was they did when no one was looking.
I needed food.
I opened my door quietly, listening for sound, then stepped into the hall when I didn’t hear anything. I made it past the closed doors in my part of the hall and continued through the sitting area with the window seat and into the other hallway.
I planned to go straight to the kitchen but stopped almost without thinking at the first closed door. Jagger had said their bedrooms were in the second hallway next to mine.
So what was behind these doors?
I’d explored the first floor on my second day at the house and had found a fully outfitted workout room, a library, a media room with theater-style seats, and a laundry room, but I’d been walking past the closed doors in the first hallway upstairs without a thought.
I opened the first door and peered into the darkness, then felt for the light switch on the wall.
A minimally furnished room was illuminated under overhead can lights. In contrast to the other rooms in this house, this one looked almost stark, a large high table at the center with two metal stools.
I hesitated, then stepped into the room, leaning over the worktable to look at the big piece of paper stretched across its surface, three of its corners held down with an empty beer bottle, a bulky utilitarian watch, and some kind of heavy square radio.
Except now I saw that it wasn’t a piece of paper: it was a blueprint.
Rooms were sketched onto its surface, circles drawn in various configurations, but I couldn’t make sense of any of it.
Pulling back, I scanned the room, painted dark gray. There was no art, no shelves, nothing on the walls.
Except… I walked closer to one wall and realized there was something: a constellation of tiny holes, like something had been tacked to it and had since been removed.
In the corner, a shredder stood silent.
Weird.
I backed out of the room and closed the door behind me, then opened the second one to a comfortable room much more in keeping with the rest of the house. This one was painted dark gray too, but it had a sofa and two chairs, a coffee table, floor lamps, even a refrigerator.
Two abstract paintings, the canvases a swirl of chaotic color, made the room feel intentionally decorated rather than utilitarian like the first room.
My gaze swept the room and landed on a cabinet, its contents hidden by doors, running the length of one wall.
I crossed the room without turning on the lights and pulled open one of the doors, then blinked when I saw what was inside: bottles of disinfectant, bleach, and what looked like other cleaning agents. Was this where Reva, the housekeeper, staged her cleaning binges?
If so, it was a strange choice. Why not the kitchen or the laundry room?
I closed the cabinet door and opened another one, then reached in to touch the black duffel bags lined up inside. My mind spun, turning over possibilities, before I closed the door, more loudly than I’d planned.
This was all really weird.
I left the room quickly, my stomach fluttering with the unsettling feeling that I’d seen something I shouldn’t have.
It was stupid. The doors had been unlocked, and I had the sense that the Hawks were more than willing to invite a stranger into their chaos.
They were like sirens, beckoning me into the deepest waters of the ocean. I didn’t know what waited for me there, but the knot in my stomach made me think it would drag me to the bottom before I had time to take even one deep breath.
Back in the hall, I hesitated outside the final unexplored room. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to know what was behind the door, but I reached for it anyway.
I was already under the surface, already drowning. Why fight it now?
And there was something else too, something I didn’t want to acknowledge even to myself: I wanted to know what was at the bottom of the sea. My heart was pounding, my mind swimming with possibilities, but instead of wanting to turn away, I wanted to look closer.
I turned the knob. It was locked.
I rattled it a little harder, wondering if it was stuck since the first two doors had been unlocked.
But nope. It was definitely locked.
Now I was really curious. Why was this door locked? What were they protecting in there?
What were they hiding?
I stepped back, feeling oddly disappointed.
I thought about the first two rooms, my mind spinning, as I made my way downstairs to the kitchen to dig through the fridge for food.
By the time I plowed through half a container of chicken lo mein, an egg roll, and two crab rangoons my mind had quieted. It was none of my business what the Hawks got up to in their regular lives. I was here to do my ninety days and move on.
And I had a bigger problem, namely the fact that Bram was due home with Maeve, Poe, and Remy any day and I was still trying to figure out how to explain what I’d done.
Still trying to figure out how to keep him from killing the Hawks for something that had been my decision or forcing me to leave before I did my time.
Ugh.
I guzzled a glass of water, then headed back upstairs. Hunger satiated, tiredness had finally made my eyelids heavy, and I thought I might actually be able to sleep.
I glanced at the locked door on my way through the first hall but forced myself to put it aside. I had three months to dig deeper into the Hawks.
If I dared.
I’d passed the first closed door in the second hall when a voice stopped me in my tracks.
“You good?”
I followed the sound of it and realized it was coming from the room next to mine.
And this time, the door was half-open.
I backtracked a couple of steps and pushed the door open further.
Jagger was sprawled out against a blocky wood headboard, his inked chest bare over black sweatpants, an open laptop next to him on the bed.
My gaze locked onto his muscled pecs like my eyes had a mind of their own, and my pussy clenched at the sight of his defined biceps.
“Yeah, I was just hungry.” I was almost surprised my voice sounded so normal when raw hunger was coursing through my veins like a flash flood.
His gaze was hungry, his blue eyes as dark as the deepest part of the ocean.
“I’m hungry too.” He licked his lips. “So come here, little mouse.”