Chapter 36
VIGO
I hated to admit it, but I was nervous as fuck for Cassie to come home, and I crumbled Oreos into my cup, filling it to the brim even though I knew all the sugar was probably the last thing I needed.
“You’re going to have diabetes by the time you’re thirty-five,” Hawk said, without looking up from his computer at the kitchen island.
“At least I’ll die a happy man,” I said, pouring milk slowly into the glass, letting it fill all the cracks and crevices left by the crumbled Oreos.
“She just pulled up,” Jagger said, striding into the kitchen. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
I took a bite of Oreos and milk. “You were the one who argued yes.”
We’d been arguing about how much to tell Cassie all day. To say we were surprised Dimitri Kaprolov had attended Aventine — that he’d mentored the guy who’d kidnapped Maeve last year — would be an understatement.
That meant that Bram already knew about Kaprolov, although maybe not about Kaprolov’s possible connection to the sex trafficking ring that had been operating around Blackwell Falls.
“I know,” Jagger said as the door opened at the front of the house. “But I’m second-guessing.”
“We’re not keeping shit from her,” Hawk said. “Bram does more than enough of that.”
Hawk was right. If what the Kings said was true — and there was no reason to think it wasn’t — Bram hadn’t told Cassie shit about what had happened with Maeve last year.
Not the details anyway.
Cassie wasn’t a baby. It would be wrong to infantilize her.
“Can you guys help me— ”
She stopped in her tracks when she spotted us in the kitchen. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, mouse. Want some Oreos?” I moved to the cupboard to pull down another cup — not as good as my Oreo cup but it would do — then reached for an Oreo. “You look like you need Oreos. I mean, you look beautiful too but you definitely look like you need Oreos.”
Cassie always liked beautiful, whether she was wearing a fancy dress like the one she’d worn to my dad’s award ceremony or jeans and a T-shirt like she wore now, her copper-colored hair in a ponytail, eyes flashing blue above her lavender T-shirt.
She narrowed her gaze and I suddenly felt like a kid who’d literally gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Sit,” Hawk ordered.
She did because she was a good mouse and she did what we told her to do.
Mostly in bed but other times too. Sometimes.
“Is it about last night with the Kings?” she asked.
“We found the transfer,” Jagger said. “The Kings were right. It went to the Rooks’, and I found a note in the metadata.”
It was the reason he’d gone with Hawk to Aventine: Hawk was the most likely to get into the financial records but Jagger was the one best equipped to read them.
“What kind of note?” Cassie asked.
“Initials,” Jagger said. “IS at KT.”
“IS at KT…” Cassie furrowed her brow. “KT has to be Kensington Trust.”
“Agreed,” Hawk said.
Cassie chewed her bottom lip and it was all I could do not to say fuck this shit and carry her to bed, forget about wire transfers and sex trafficking and murder and make Cassie come until she forgot about it all too.
“So who — or what — does IS mean?” she asked.
“No idea,” Hawk said. “The Kings didn’t know either. This all happened before they were at Aventine. Most of the people associated with it back then are long gone.”
“Maybe there’s someone in the bratva with those initials?” Cassie said. “Someone who graduated from Aventine back then?”
“They couldn’t think of anyone,” Jagger said. “But they said they’d do some digging.”
Cassie nodded. “Okay well… that’s still good right?
I mean at least we know for sure the money that was transferred to Aventine was earmarked for the Rooks.
And that means it probably made its way to the Russian mob, which makes sense if Travis Dorsey was telling the truth about the man who hired him to kill my parents. ”
I nodded, scraping the bottom of my Oreo cup with my long spoon. “Definitely.”
I wanted to kick Hawk and Jagger, who were sitting at the island like doctors about to deliver bad news.
“What aren’t you telling me?” she asked, looking from me to Jagger to Hawk.
“Bram already talked to the Kings,” Hawk said. “Last year.”
Cassie shook her head. “About this?”
“Not exactly, Jagger said.
“Turns out that guy who kidnapped Maeve went to Aventine on scholarship,” Hawk said. “And the guy who brought him in, who mentored him, was the same guy my contact the bureau said is under investigation.”
“Wait…” We waited while Cassie put the pieces together. “Bram knows about Dimitri Kaprolov?”
“He knows of him,” Hawk said. “Undetermined whether he knows that Kaprolov might be connected to the sex trafficking ring.”
“I can’t believe this,” Cassie said. “The whole time? Bram knew the whole time?”
“In all fairness to Bram,” I said, “he probably doesn’t know you know about Kaprolov.”
I knew why Hawk glared at me: why the fuck was I defending Bram?
“Have you told him?” Jagger asked her. “About Kaprolov?”
She sighed. “No, I… I don’t know. It was just a name. And all Bram told me about what happened with Maeve was that she’d been kidnapped by that manosphere guy.”
I took my Oreo cup to the sink. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it kind of sounds like you and Bram need to talk more.”
Cassie rubbed at something on the island. “It’s not that simple.”
Jagger tucked a piece of hair that had fallen out of her ponytail behind her ear. “Sometimes hard conversations are worth having.”
“Easy for you to say,” Cassie grumbled. “You don’t have Bram as a big brother.”
In any other universe, I would be glad Cassie and Bram were at odds if only to fuck with Bram. But now all I could think about was Cassie and what was best for her, which was obviously fixing things with him even though Bram was an epic asshole.
All of which meant I was more than in trouble with Cassie Montgomery.
I was royally fucked.