Chapter 43 Cassie
CASSIE
We stepped into a wide entryway that looked onto a stylish living room where two guys sprawled on a sofa playing video games.
“The Hawks are here,” she said. “With Cassie.”
The men set their game controllers aside and one of them turned off the TV.
“Yo,” the blond one said, coming toward us. “Welcome.”
“Thanks for seeing us,” Jagger said.
The Hawks introduced me to the two men: the blond with the bone structure of a model was Rock and the brunette wearing an old Pulp Fiction T-shirt was Drago (although Willa seemed to call him Oscar?).
I saw their gazes linger on the silver collar around my neck and wondered if they knew about the Hunt. If they knew the Hawks owned me now.
“Have a seat,” Rock said, gesturing to the living room.
“Can I get you anything?” Willa asked. “Iced coffee? Iced tea?”
We all said no just as another dark-haired man entered the living room, a cherubic gurgling baby on his hip.
“Hi, baby,” Willa said, bending to smooth and kiss the baby’s head. Then she looked up at the man and her voice took on a sultry undertone that made me blush. “Hi, baby.”
“Hi yourself, Jezebel.” The dark haired man leaned in to kiss her, tongue and all, like we weren’t even there. “Little man is cranky. Want me to put him down?”
“God no,” Willa said. “He’s already had a nap. None of us will sleep if he has another. I’ll take him for a swim, get him good and tired.”
“Good and tired sounds good to me.” The innuendo was obvious in the man’s voice as he handed over the baby.
“Me too,” Drago said.
“Thirded. Is that a word?” Rock looked up like he might find the answer written on the ceiling.
We needed to get out of there stat. These people clearly wanted to have sex.
“It was nice to meet you,” Willa said to us. She looked at the baby, who babbled happily and tugged on her long, wavy hair. “Let’s get you in the water, little man.”
The guy who’d been holding the baby watched her go until she disappeared into another room. Then he turned to me.
“I’m Neo.”
“Cassie.”
He nodded. “I know.” He turned his attention to the Hawks. “‘Sup?”
They made small talk while we settled on the designer sofa and chair, a massive marble coffee table between us.
“What can we do for you?” Drago asked, flashing a tongue stud like Vigo’s.
“Need some information,” Hawk said. “About Aventine.”
“What kind of information?” Rock asked.
Vigo picked up a toy from the coffee table, a wooden train with a different animal in each car, and started inspecting it.
I shot him a look that I hoped said stop messing with stuff that doesn’t belong to you and took it out of his hand, then returned it to the coffee table.
“We’re looking into something that happened a while back and some financial transactions got our attention.
” The Kings had good poker faces, which didn’t surprise me given the fact that they were all part of well-known mafia families, something Jagger had filled me in on on the way to the house.
“Transfers from a private bank called Kensington Trust.”
“Why the fuck would we talk to you about financial transactions at Aventine?” Neo asked. “With Bram’s little sister here no less.”
Of course.
Of course even here these guys, who I’d never formally met before, would know I was Bram’s little sister.
Rock shook his head. “Fucking insane.”
“Listen,” Hawk said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “We don’t give two fucks what kind of money laundering scheme — or anything else — is going on at Aventine. We’re just trying to run this down.”
“This for your friends in the Feds?” Neo asked.
Honestly, I was still reeling from the revelation that Hawk had worked for the FBI. It was literally the last thing I would have expected anyone to tell me about him.
“I don’t work with them anymore,” Hawk said. “You know that.”
“Then what’s it about?” Drago asked.
Hawk didn’t miss a beat. “It’s personal.”
I tried to hide my surprise. The question surrounding Kensington and my parents’ deaths had nothing to do with the Hawks.
“What makes you think it’s anything at all?” Drago asked.
“Kensington has ties to Russia,” Jagger said. “A lot of them.”
“Could be one of the Rooks,” Rock said.
I was going to assume the Rooks had something to do with the kids of Russian mobsters, just because it was the only thing that made sense and I was having trouble keeping up.
“Could be,” Jagger agreed. “Could be something else.”
“We’re going to need more before I go digging around in the Bratva’s finances,” Neo said.
“Someone was hired to kill my parents,” I said. “We think they were Russian.”
“Lot of Russians in the world,” Drago said.
“Are all of them connected to Aventine?” Vigo’s voice was so distracted as he looked around the room for something else to mess with that I was surprised he’d been paying attention at all.
Neo leveled his gaze at Vigo. “Probably not.”
Vigo shrugged.
Neo seemed to think about it. “You’d owe us.”
“We know.” Hawk didn’t sound happy about it.
Neo stood. “Send over what you’ve got. I’ll see what I can do.”
He left the living room without saying anything else, and I hesitated before turning to Rock and Drago.
“Could the Russian transfers have anything to do with the Aventine trafficking ring?” I asked.
Drago narrowed his eyes. “Why the fuck would you ask about that?”
I could feel the eyes of the Hawks burning into me. This hadn’t been part of the plan, but it was something I’d been thinking about: the missing girls, the money, whatever my parents had been digging around in.
It was true that my parents’ work — if that was what you wanted to call it — had taken place a decade earlier, but from the research I’d done online it seemed like girls had gone missing around Blackwell Falls for a lot longer than that.
“I’m just wondering,” I said. “It was a lot of money, and I know Aventine…”
I let my voice trail off. It seemed like bad manners to point out that the Aventine alumni — which the Kings’ parents were probably part of — had been involved in an enterprise that involved missing girls and what was probably a whole lot of money.
Like the kind that had been transferred from Kensington to Aventine.
“Fuck,” Rock said, clearly offended.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just… I’m just wondering.”
“We wouldn’t know.” Drago rose to his feet to signal that the meeting was over. “And for fuck’s sake don’t ever mention it to Neo.”