Chapter 37
CASSIE
I was still reeling from everything the Hawks had told me when I returned to my room after another hours-long orgy, this time in Jagger’s bed..
They were good at distracting me, and who could blame me for being distracted?
The way they occupied my body left no room for anything else, their hands and mouths probing every inch of me, their toys taking me to new heights of pleasure even when I was sure it wasn’t possible for sex to feel any better than it already did.
This time it had been a thick rubber glove, each finger covered in a different textured surface: thick corkscrew ridges, smooth nubs, even rubber spikes.
The black glove had looked intimidating on Jagger’s big hand, but I gave myself over to the Hawks, and like always, they brought me to new sexual heights, pushing their rubber-clad fingers inside me while burying their faces between my thighs, teasing my clit with the textured surface until I came so hard my eyes watered.
I should have been exhausted and ready to sleep wrapped in their arms, especially since the clock was ticking on my time with them. Instead I’d stared at the ceiling as their breathing turned rhythmic, dropping into sleep one by one.
Now I sat on the floor of my room and removed a lid from one of the boxes from my apartment. Hawk and Jagger had carried them in from my car, but I hadn’t had time to look through them since the Hawks’ revelation about the note on the wire transfer to the Rooks.
I still couldn’t believe it. All this time we’d been running down the same person, a person tied to Maeve’s kidnapping last year.
I remembered the question Daisy had asked me when I’d told her I didn’t think Maeve’s kidnapping had anything to do with the sex trafficking ring in Blackwell Falls: are you sure about that?
The truth was, I hadn’t been sure. I’d known Bram kept things from me, that he tried to shelter me like I was still the little kid he’d had to raise after our parents died.
But Bram’s determination to keep me from anything bad — anything real — had succeeded in making me follow suit. Now I didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t trust him enough to tell him stuff I knew would make him upset or mad.
It hadn’t done either of us any favors to dance around the hard stuff, but that didn’t mean I knew how to fix it.
How did you get someone to talk when they didn’t want to talk? How did you get them to share their feelings when they were just beginning to acknowledge that they had them?
I sighed and closed the first file box. I didn’t even know what I was looking for, maybe something that would connect the dots between my parents and Dimitri Kaprolov or the initials in the wire transfer to the Rooks.
It seemed impossible that my parents would leave all this information behind — interview notes about stories they were working on and copies of letters written to lawmakers and pages and pages of financial records — and not leave anything that might help someone connect the dots.
Then again, it’s not like they’d expected to be driven off the mountain. Not like they’d expected to orphan their two kids.
I moved through the boxes methodically, the house quiet all around me, the Hawks still asleep. My pussy pulsed at the thought of them sprawled out, naked, on Jagger’s bed.
But it wasn’t just my body that responded to the thought.
There was something else, something in the vicinity of my heart that scared the crap out of me, that filled me to overflowing when I thought about the way Jagger held me when he slept, about Vigo’s muscular body finally at rest and Hawk’s long hair falling across his face, his dark lashes casting shadows on his cheeks.
I forced myself not to work through the boxes too quickly even though I felt like I already knew everything by heart.
I’d been through it all so many times, but I didn’t want to miss anything important so I started making piles: things that might have something to do with the sex trafficking ring — because I was pretty sure that was connected to the wire transfers and I was pretty that was connected to my parents’ murder and the person who’d run me off the road — and things that probably didn’t.
It was a lot of speculation, but I had to work with what I had and what I had was a lot of speculation.
Nothing jumped out at me as being connected to either Dimitri Kaprolov or the initials Jagger had found on the wire transfer to the Rooks.
I slumped in defeat.
Maybe it was unrealistic — the people behind the sex trafficking ring were powerful, and Lilah had said they were all over the world — but I refused to believe there was no way forward and I wasn’t ready to talk to Bram.
I already knew he’d tell me to stay out of it. And yeah, I could ignore him and keep digging with his knowledge, but it would freak him out, and after everything that had happened to our parents — not to mention my accident — I didn’t want to do that if I could avoid it.
I started packing up the boxes, keeping everything in the stacks I’d created: one big stack for everything that was almost certainly not related to the sex trafficking ring, a smaller stack of stuff that might be, and an even smaller stack was probably connected, like the wire transfers from Kensington Trust.
Maybe I could run down some of the other recipients of wire transfers from Kensington. If Kensington was being used to transfer money to Aventine and the Rooks, who else were they transferring money to?
I had all of the boxes repacked but one, and I was reaching in to place the final stack of papers — the ones that probably related to the sex trafficking ring and the story my parents had been working on when they’d been killed — when I spotted a scrap of paper in the bottom of the box.
But when I reached inside, I saw that it wasn’t a scrap of paper at all.
It was a napkin, the flap caught in the crease of the box so that the napkin blended in with the white cardboard.
I tugged at it carefully, not wanting it to rip, and pulled it loose.
It was printed with a logo — a stag’s head — and the words The Black Stag.
And under it, a name: Anna Reed.
There was also a series of numbers. A phone number, I thought, with the country code +44.
A quick internet search on my phone told me it was the country code for the UK.
I hesitated, then dialed the number since it was already morning there.
A woman’s voice answered, British but with the hint of something else.
Russian?
“Hello?” she said.
“Hello, is this Anna Reed speaking?”
Hesitation. And then, “Who’s calling?”
“My name is Cassie Montgomery. My parents were Braden and Catherine Montgomery. They— ”
The line went dead, and I pulled my phone away from my ear and looked at it in disbelief.
Anna Reed had hung up on me.
I redialed but wasn’t surprised when she didn’t answer. She clearly didn’t want to talk to me.
My heart was racing, like I’d just discovered a tiny piece of gold hidden in the rocks at the bottom of the Blackwell River.
I got to my feet and headed back into Jagger’s bedroom.
The Hawks were still asleep but I climbed on the mattress, over Vigo’s body sprawled out at the foot, bare ass up, to the top of the bed where Hawk and Jagger slept, Jagger’s leg thrown over Hawk’s like they were puppies from the same litter.
“Jagger,” I whispered. I don’t know why I woke him first. Maybe because he was the one who seemed most interested in listening and also the one least likely to grab a baseball bat and book a flight to the UK. “Wake up.”
He opened one eyes and wrapped his arm around my waist. “Come here, mouse. Let me cuddle you.”
I shoved him, pushing against his strength, which threatened to topple me back onto the bed until I was horizontal against my will. “Stop. I found something.”
“Found what?” Hawk said behind me.
Great.
I sat back so I could see them both. “I found a phone number in my parents’ things. Something I’d missed before.”
“What kind of phone number?” Vigo mumbled without moving.
“A woman,” I said. “Anna Reed.”
“Never heard of her,” Vigo said into the mattress.
“I know, but I think she had a Russian accent,” I said. “And it’s a UK number, which means— ”
“She might have something to do with Kensington Trust,” Jagger said, fully awake now.
I sighed, relieved they were catching on.
“Exactly,” I said. “But there are a lot of Anna Reed’s in the UK.”
“That’s probably the point,” Hawk said.
I shook my head. “What point?”
“What’s the best way to hide?” Hawk asked. “Move to a major US city and call yourself John Smith.
“Or move to a place like the UK and call yourself Anna Reed,” Jagger said.
“It’s not her real name,” I said, finally understanding.
“Bingo,” Vigo said, rolling onto his back.
I marveled that his dick could be hard when we were talking about hiding and aliases.
“Shit,” I said. “We’re never going to find her real name. Not with so many Anna Reeds.”
“We might not,” Hawk said. “But I know someone who might.”
Jagger sat up. “Aloha.”
“It’s the middle of the night,” I said.
Jagger reached for his phone. “He’ll be up.”