Chapter 44
CASSIE
I wanted to ask questions when Hawk and Vigo stepped outside, but I didn’t want to spook Anna. I was finally here, talking to someone who’d known my parents.
I might not get another chance to learn more about what they’d been investigating when they’d died.
“You were assigned to Kensington Trust?” I asked, my tea long forgotten.
“That’s what happens when you leave Aventine.” Her Russian accent was getting more pronounced as we spoke. “The family sends you where you’ll be most useful.”
“How could you be useful at Kensington?” Jagger asked.
She turned her attention on him. “You must know. You wouldn’t be here if you were stupid.”
“You transferred money for the Bratva,” he said.
“Why did you ask if you already knew?”
He shrugged.
“The money could have been transferred without me,” she continued.
“Kensington is a private bank. Discretion is their primary ethos. But it helps to have someone on the inside, someone who can assure money is smoothly ushered from one account to another, who can change details on the paperwork when required, feed information to the family about other money that’s being transferred to and fro. ”
“So you were like… a spy?” I asked. “For the Bratva?”
She frowned. “You make it sound exciting. It wasn’t. Most of my days were spent sitting at a computer terminal, typing account numbers and processing paperwork. And every now and then, the Bratva would ask something of me. I would do it and go about my day.”
“Except something must have happened,” I said. “Something that made you leave Kensington.”
She studied me. “Are you sure you want to ask these questions? Sure you want the answers?”
“My parents were mixed up in something,” I said. “I think they were killed because of it. How can I turn my back on that?”
“Would it make a difference if I told you it’s my belief your parents wouldn’t want you to ask these questions? That they didn’t leave those papers for you to find but simply because they assumed they’d have time to see through their suspicions before they ever left you and your brother?”
Her words echoed in my mind. What if my parents would want me to leave it alone? What if they’d want Bram and me to live a normal life and forget all about Kensington Trust and Dimitri Kaprolov?
I thought about Bram. His anger and distance.
The violence that ran like an underground river in his veins.
Would leaving this alone — walking away from Irina Sokolov and everything we’d discovered so far — change any of that? And what about the missing girls? Did we walk away from them too?
“I think it’s too late for that,” I said.
“Our lives were changed because of what happened to our parents. We were changed. If there’s a universe where that didn’t happen, where Bram and I can live simple, normal lives, it’s not this one.
” I paused. “And also, we’re not the only ones impacted by what was happening — what I think’s still happening — in Blackwell Falls. ”
Anna’s shoulders sagged in resignation but she didn’t seem surprised. “You’re talking about the girls.”
The front door opened and Hawk and Vigo returned. I wondered if it was my imagination that they both looked grim, but I didn’t want to ask in front of Anna.
Hawk returned to his post at the window, and this time, Vigo didn’t sit either. I could tell from their body language that they were agitated, and I was pretty sure Vigo was sweating in spite of the cool temperatures outside.
I tried to focus on Anna, on getting the information I needed while I was in front of her.
“Did you know what was happening?” I tried to ask gently, to keep any note of accusation out of my voice.
Judgement wouldn’t do us any good here.
“Not at first,” she said. “It was just… money. Money flying from Russia to London to America, sometimes the other way, sometimes to other places. But then…”
Her voice trialed off and she focused on the fire, burning lower in the grate, her eyes clouded with the past.
“Then?” I prompted.
“Then I realized my friends in America — friends like your mother — were talking about missing girls, and it was always right around the time I’d been tasked with funneling money from Russia to America. To Aventine.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I talked to your mother of course. She was already digging in Blackwell Falls, along with your father, collecting what your mother called evidence. So I started smuggling documents from the bank — transaction records showing the transfers from Russia to Aventine — and sending them to your parents.”
“Did you get caught?” I asked.
“Believe it or not, I’ve never been sure.”
“You’re alive,” Hawk said.
“Indeed, but I’ve never been sure if that was luck or the power of my family.
I made it easy for them, ran away in the night, changed my name, went as far underground as I could.
” For the first time, a smile teased her lips.
“This was before privacy was a relic, back when it was still possible — barely — to go into hiding if one was very very careful.”
“And you were very very careful,” I said.
“I was. I had some family money, plus the money I’d earned from the Bratva, which was no insignificant. I purchased this house with cash under another name and I’ve been here ever since. Alone.”
“You knew what was going on,” Jagger said softly. “Or you suspected. Cassie’s parents were exposed, in danger. You didn’t think you should come forward to help?”
“Jagger…” I didn’t want him to make Anna feel bad.
She’d lost enough.
“No, no…” Anna waved away my protests. “He’s right. I could have gone to the authorities, told them what I knew.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked.
“Because I knew the Bratva, knew they were powerful enough to silence me before I’d even left the police station. And I also knew they weren’t alone.”
“What do you mean they weren’t alone?”
“Imperium Fratrum,” she said softly.
“Imperium…”
“Fratrum,” she repeated. “Empire of the Brothers.”
“What the fuck is Empire of the Brothers?” Vigo asked.
He was spinning a fire poker as casually as a baton, the pointed end coming perilously close to knocking books and knickknacks off Anna’s shelves.
I glared and he stopped spinning.
“It’s the organization responsible for your missing girls,” Anna said. “And it goes far beyond the bratva, far beyond Russia. I was lucky to get out when I did.”
“Yeah well, Cassie’s parents weren’t so lucky,” Hawk said, his voice cold.
“Hawk!” I was horrified.
“It’s all right,” Anna said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She shook her head. “There should be no punishment for speaking the truth.” She drew in a breath. “I was devastated when I learned of your parents’ death, and I must confess, I had a hard time believing it was an accident even then.”
“It wasn’t,” I said. “It wasn’t.”
She nodded.
“What do you know about Dimitri Kaprolov?” Jagger asked.
Her complexion paled. “I was hoping you hadn’t learned about Dimitri.”
“Why?”
“Because in the years since I was at Aventine, Dimitri Kaprolov has risen to a position of power far beyond what the bratva could have offered him. He still has contacts there of course, but his authority is much more far reaching.” She hesitated.
“And Cassie, he’s a very dangerous man. A dangerous man surrounded by other dangerous men, all of them wealthy and influential beyond your imagining. ”
“Imperium Fratrum,” I murmured.
I thought about the flyers on the bulletin board in the coffee shop: Rain, Jasmine, Nia.
Then I thought about the school Lilah had told me about where girls were trained to serve men, the men who appeared on video feed to bid on them, the international auction where men traded women they’d already purchased.
It was the stuff of nightmares. And it was about more than just my parents.
More than Bram and all his scars.
More than me and the accident that had taken my sight, albeit it just for a while.
Anna surprised me by taking my hand. “I don’t want this for you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I know. I just… I can’t just forget about all those girls. It’s not right what this even have done, what they’ve gotten away with.”
She nodded, and I thought i saw resignation in her eyes. “You’re your mother’s daughter. And your father’s.”
Tears stung my eyes. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You must.” She stood and glanced at Hawk by the window. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“What I was looking for?”
“In the car?”
“Oh… no. I must have been mistaken,” Hawk said.
“That’s too bad,” Anna said. “I’m sure it will reappear when we least expect it.”
I had a feeling they weren’t talking about something Hawk had left in the car.
I held out the picture Anna had given me of Bram and me with our parents. “Thank you for showing this to me.”
“Keep it,” she said. “Let it remind you of who you are.”
She wrapped her cardigan more tightly around her body as she walked us to the door.
When we got there, she surprised me by giving me a hug. “Do take care of yourself, Cassie.”
“I will,” I said. “You too.”
She said a cool goodbye to the Hawks and we started toward the back of the house where Hawk had moved the car.
We were just about to the corner of the house when she called my name.
I turned to look at her, a forgotten woman with haunted gray eyes and the regal bearing of a displaced princess.
“I held you once,” she said. “When you were first born. I came to see your mother after she got home from the hospital, and there you were, the tiniest little thing with your mother’s red hair and changeable eyes.”
“I’m glad.”
She returned my smile. “Me too.”
She was gone before we rounded the corner.