Chapter 31 Cassie
CASSIE
“What the fuck, Cass? Are you serious?”
Daisy stared at me from across the table in my apartment, her violet eyes wide with shock.
Not that I blamed her: I’d just told her about the Hunt, about how I’d lost to the Hawks.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
She made motherhood look good. It was more than just her face, always so pretty but fuller now than it had been before the baby. She was more relaxed, more at peace with all the things that had tormented her since her brother Blake’s murder.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I figured you’d try to stop me.”
She sighed. “I probably would have, but you know I would have supported you in the end.”
And she would have. Daisy, Sarai, and I had been best friends since high school. There was nothing we wouldn’t do for each other, which was why I’d invited her to my place for lunch so I could spill my guts.
She’d stopped to pick up sandwiches and we’d come upstairs to eat while Kaylee managed the shop.
“I think maybe I was afraid I might actually let someone talk me out of it.”
“I don’t blame you,” she said. “It sounds terrifying, even the sex stuff.”
She’d been silent when I’d told her about being chained to the wall naked, when I’d told her what the Hawks had done to me in the tunnels.
“It was,” I said. “But also kind of… exciting.” I watched her face for judgment and didn’t find any. “Does that make me sick?”
Daisy shook her head. “If it’s one thing I’ve learned from the guys, it’s that nothing is sick between the sheets. Everything is allowed if it feels good and you want to do it.”
She was speaking her truth, relevant since she’d been worried about judgement in Blackwell Falls when she’d hooked up with the men known as the Blackwell Beasts and was now in a relationship with all three of them.
It had been a real scandal for a hundred reasons, not the least of which was the fact that Daisy’s family was practically local royalty.
“You might not say that if you knew what they were into,” I said.
She took a bite of her sandwich “What are they into?”
“I’m still figuring it out,” I said. “But they seem to like… toys.”
She stopped chewing. “Like… toys toys?”
“Yeah. There was the chain thing with the clamps in the tunnels, and then when I was with Jagger the other night he blindfolded me and used some kind of… wheel on me.”
“What kind of wheel?”
I laughed. “I don’t actually know since I was blindfolded, and I was too… relaxed after to ask to see it.”
Daisy laughed. “Oh I bet you were super relaxed. How does it compare?”
I took a swig of my iced tea, pilfered from the shop. “How does what compare?”
“The sex!” Daisy said. “It sounds like they know what they’re doing.”
I bit my lip, not quite sure how to tell Daisy the truth. “Thing is, I don’t actually have anything to compare it to.”
Daisy scowled, clearly confused, which was unsurprising because I’d lied to her and Sarai when I told them I’d lost my virginity in high school.
“But you said… I thought you lost your virginity to Matt Hager junior year? And what about all the guys you’ve dated?”
I took a deep breath. “I lied.”
“You… lied?”
I nodded. “Sarai lost her virginity to that asshole Daniel and I didn’t want to be the last one to fall, so I lied.”
Daisy laughed. “You bitch! You let me think I was the only one.”
I couldn’t help it: I started to laugh too. “Yeah, I’m sorry.”
“And the guys you’ve dated since…?”
I shook my head. “Turns out being a virgin is like having the plague. They all want to talk about it. They want to get it right. Make sure you’re consenting. Which is cool, obviously. But…”
“Kind of a buzzkill?”
I sighed. “Exactly. All that talking took me out of the mood and then I’d start second guessing, wondering if it was the right place, the right person even though by that point I really just wanted to be done with it.”
“So now you’re going to lose your virginity to these… Hawks?”
“I guess so.”
“Shit,” Daisy said.
“Yeah.”
“I mean… do you have to?” Daisy asked. “Because that would be…”
“I don’t think so.” I stopped her before she could say the rest. “There are rules though.”
“What kind of rules?”
“I can so no, but I have to mean it.” I took a deep breath. “And I don’t think I could mean it.”
Daisy sat back in her chair and studied me. “You want to lose it with them.”
I nodded. “I know it sounds crazy. I don’t know them at all.
Not really. But I’m so tired of carrying it around, so tired of it being a big deal.
And the Hawks…” I thought about the way it had felt to have Hawk licking my pussy in the tunnels, the way Vigo’s fingers felt on my clit, the excitement of sucking Jagger’s dick.
And then, Jagger’s words that night in his bedroom: there are lots of other ways we can make you come, lots of other toys we can use.
“The Hawks know what they’re doing. I think I could do worse. And honestly…”
“Honestly?” Daisy prompted.
“I’m so tired of being the coffee shop girl. I mean, I love the coffee shop. But I want to be more than that, more than Bram’s virgin little sister.”
Daisy’s eyes were filled with sympathy. “I’m so sorry, Cass. I had no idea you felt this way. About any of it. I’ve been a terrible friend, too wrapped up in my own shit to ask if you were really okay.”
“You and Sarai are the best friends I could have asked for. It was never about you. I think I just got used to keeping the serious stuff to myself.”
Because of Bram.
I wasn’t blaming him — he had every reason to be closed off — but I’d been raised by him from the age of ten years old. Of course I’d get used to not talking about the serious stuff.
“That’s understandable,” Daisy said. “But I hope you’ll talk to me now.”
“I will.”
She reached across the table and extended her pinky. “Promise.”
I hooked my pinky with hers. “Promise.”
“Good.”
“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.
“I am mad.”
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…”
“Made you what?”
“Stunted.” I realized it was true. “I feel like some kind of medieval princess, except my ivory tower is a coffee shop and my big brother is my warden.”
“Then tell him, Cass.” Daisy said it softly, like she half expected Bram to appear, to be angry we were talking about him this way.
“Easy for you to say.”
She made it sound so simple, but staring down the barrel of Bram’s return, knowing I was going to have to tell him about the Hunt and the Hawks, the last thing I wanted to do was add another touchy subject to the list.
She laughed. “I won’t deny it. I can barely speak to Bram without shaking in my shoes. But at some point you’re going to have to be honest with him about the way you feel.”
“Maybe.” I wasn’t ready to think about what total honesty with Bram would look like.
“Why do you want to know?” Cassie asked. “About the sex trafficking thing?”
“I found some of the flyers of missing girls on the bulletin board in the shop,” I said. “I looked them up but all I could find was a couple statements from the police about an ongoing investigation.”
“I always thought it had something to do with what happened at Aventine.”
I remembered that story too: a bunch of Aventine Alumni who’d been trafficking local girls. “It’s possible.”
Daisy looked at her phone, then stood to take her plate to the kitchen. “It’s weird right?”
“Which part?”
“All of it,” she said. “But specifically the sex trafficking thing and all the people who seem to be involved in it. It makes me wonder about all the other things we might not know about Blackwell Falls.”
“That’s a scary thought.”
Daisy pulled on her cardigan. “When does Bram come home?”
She knew he was in Bali with Maeve and the guys, knew Bailey, Maeve’s best friend was housesitting at the loft, taking care of Ray, Maeve’s rescue dog, and Lucifer, the cat who hated Bram.
“A couple of days, I think.”
She laughed when she heard how miserable I sounded. “Don’t sound so excited.”
“Can you blame me?”
I was not looking forward to my confrontation with Bram. He was going to be apoplectic about what I’d gotten myself into with the Hunt. Add in the Hawks, who were more than a little unhinged, and the situation had all the makings of a certified shit show.