Chapter 45
CASSIE
I stared out the window of the plane even though there wasn’t anything to see. The night was moonless and dark, broken only by the flashing light on the jet’s wing.
I was still processing everything Anna had said earlier that day, everything she’d told me about my parents.
They’d always been frozen in my mind at the ages they were when they’d died, but hearing Anna talk about them had given me a glimpse into their earlier lives.
Now I imagined my mom as a girl even younger than me, attending Bellepoint and going to a party at Aventine, looking for fun or maybe a cute boy.
I could see her standing in the woods at the quarry (I’d never been but I’d heard about it), introducing herself to Irina Sokolov. And I could see the rest of her life unfolding too, meeting my dad — a cute engineer who’d graduated from a bigger school — and getting married and having Bram and me.
There were still missing pieces: how my mom and dad — and English major and an engineer — had become activists and independent investigative journalists, what had drawn them to the missing girls and the financial transactions at Kensington, how they’d met up with the people I remembered filling our living room when I’d been a kid.
But I could see them as people now, real people with past, with lives that didn’t begin when they’d had kids.
It made me even sadder that their lives had been cut short — even more angry — and I pulled out the picture Irina had given me and stared at the couple smiling into he camera, the little boy frowning next to our dad, like he knew what was coming.
“You kook like her,” Jagger said, coming over to sit next to me. He leaned in to get a closer look. “It’s in the eyes, the mouth.”
“You think?”
He nodded, his eyes still on the picture. “The hair is obvious, but I can see you in the way she smiles. She was a smokeshow, like you.”
I laughed softly, trying not to wake up Hawk and Vigo, who were sprawled out, fast asleep, in other seats. “Thanks.”
He took my hand, like he always did when he knew I was struggling. It was one of the many things I loved about him. He had a way of letting me know he was there when I needed it most, a way of being with me that was quiet but made e feel safe.
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “I think so. It’s just… a lot.”
“Understandable. Did it help? Talking to Anna?”
“It did,” I said. “It gave me a fuller picture of them, of what they were like. And know we know about Imperium Fratrum, and we know that Dimitri Kaprolov is one of them.”
Jagger’s brow furrowed with worry.
“What?” I asked.
“We found out something else,” he said. “Or we confirmed it. The sex trafficking ring didn’t die with the Cantwells. It’s bigger than that, bigger than them. And Dimitri is part of it.”
“That’s a good thing though right?” I asked. “Because now we know and we can really dig into Dimitri.”
He nodded but I could tell there wa something he wasn’t saying.
“What? Just say it.”
“Maybe we should take Anna’s advice, back off. You heard her, Dimitri is powerful and dangerous, and according to her, he’s not even the only one we have to worry about,” Jagger said.
I pulled my hand away. “We can’t back off. What about Rain and Jasmine and Nia? What about all the other girls who are still out there?”
“We can take everything we know to the police,” Jagger said. “Lilah told you there was still an active investigation right?”
“And how much good has that done the missing girls? How much good did it do me on the mountain?”
The men behind Imperium Fratrum weren’t just dangerous to the girls they kidnapped and sold. They were dangerous to anyone who got close to knowing what their were doing, who they were.
How many more people — people like my parents, people like me — would die because they tried to find the missing girls? And how many more girls would be ripped from their lives, from their families, only to disappear into thin air?
“Investigations take a long time,” Jagger said. “Especially when the feds get involved. You can ask Hawk about that.”
“We don’t have time,” I hissed, trying and just about failing to stay quiet.
“The girls who have gone missing don’t have time.
And what if another one is taken? Won’t you feel responsible if we don’t do something?
Because I will. I’ll wonder if maybe she would still be free and with her family if only I hadn’t quit. ”
Jagger sat back and stared at me.
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I didn’t know your parents but I can’t help but think you sound just like your mom must have sounded when she brought what she knew to Irina.”
“Is that supposed to scare me? Make me stop?”
He reached for my hand again, clearly trying to diffuse my rising anger.
“I never want to scare you, Cass. But I have to admit I wouldn’t mind if you stopped all of this because I’m starting to feel like I can’t imagine my life without you and what these people can do — what they’ve already done — scares the shit out of me. ”
My shoulders sagged as the fight left my body.
Because how could a girl be mad when one of the three men of her dreams said he couldn’t imagine life without her?
I swallowed the emotion that rose in my throat. I wanted to tell him I felt that way too, that I wanted to stay with them when my three months was up next week.
That I wanted to stay with them forever.
But I couldn’t do that. Not without talking to Bram.
“It scares me too,” I said. “But they took something from me, from those girls. And for the first time in my life, I feel… awake enough to do something about it. Don’t ask me to spend the rest of my life in the coffee shop, safe but asleep while bad things happen all around me. Please don’t ask that of me.”
He let go of my hand and pulled me against him. Thanks to the plush leather seats, it was easier to sink against his side than it would have been in a regular plane.
“You scare the shit out of me, Cass.” He kissed the top of my head. “For more reasons than one. And I don’t scare easily.”
“I’m sorry. I just… I need you to let me be myself. My real self.”
It was a relief to say out loud the thing the Hawks had made me realize: that before the Hunt, I didn’t have the first clue who I was. I’d assumed I was Coffee Shop Cassie because that was who I’d been told I was, because that was who Bram wanted me to be.
Locked up in the shop, safe and sound.
Except I’d never really been that person, and pretending to be that person had put me to sleep, like a princess in a fairy tale who’d pricked her finger on a spinning wheel.
I’d been waiting for something to wake me up. To remind me who I really was.
Braden and Catherine Montgomery’s daughter.
And Braden and Catherine Montgomery’s daughter wouldn’t make lattes and mochas while missing girls were dropping like flies right next door.
She would push, even if it was scary.
Even if it was deadly.
She would fight.