10. Cassie
CASSIE
I was barely aware of the people around us, barely aware that we were still in the hospital cafeteria. Dimitri Kaprolov felt like a name from my life with the Hawks, a life that felt entirely separate from my life as Bram’s little sister.
Now those two lives were converging and I could barely breathe for the anticipation of hearing Bram’s side of the story.
“Kaprolov started as a member of the Rooks’ house at Aventine,” Bram said. “After he graduated, he became one of the more powerful members of its alumni. He sponsored Ethan Todd, got him a scholarship even though he didn’t come from one of the crime families.”
My mouth dropped open. Ethan Todd was a manosphere douchebag. June Haver — Maeve’s sister — had a boyfriend who’d gotten really into Ethan Todd’s podcast before he’d murdered June in a fit of rage.
“Why would Dimitri Kaprolov vouch for Ethan Todd? How did they even know each other?”
“Todd was a townie with a big mouth and a lot of smart-sounding words. Kaprolov thought he could use Todd, so he took him under his wing. Turned out he was right.”
“Didn’t Ethan Todd disappear?”
I watched Bram’s face, because I’d had a theory since rumors had started flying about Ethan Todd’s disappearance — a theory about what had happened to him — but it was one I’d never dared ask my brother.
And it wouldn’t matter anyway. Bram never gave anything away that he didn’t want to give away, and he didn’t give away anything now.
He just shrugged.
I knew a lost cause when I saw one.
“Fine,” I muttered. "What else?”
“Kaprolov owns property all over the world, but especially in Eastern Europe: Russia, the Czech Republic, Romania. Rumor is he was involved in some bad shit. Arms dealing, sex trafficking, that kind of thing.” Bram’s gaze slid away from mine for a split second, and I knew there were details he wasn’t sharing.
But I let it go. Old habits died hard.
We were making progress.
“Anything else you want to tell me?”
A rare shadow passed over his features. “Just that I really don’t want you anywhere near him. You or Maeve or anyone else I love.”
I let the silence sit between us while I processed what he’d told me, tried to fit it together with what I knew.
“Your turn,” he said.
I drew in a breath. “I knew Dimitri was Aventine alumni. I found that part out when we— ”
“We?”
“The Hawks and I.”
He nodded.
“… when we were running down the wire transfers from Kensington to Aventine.”
I explained Kensington — how it was a private bank that specialized in discreet international currency, especially rubles — and about how Irina had gone to work for Kensington after graduating from Aventine for the sole purpose of ushering money between the bratva and other clandestine organizations.
“She knew Mom and Dad,” I said.
“Irina?” Bram asked. “Or Anna or whatever her name is?”
I nodded. “They met when Mom was at Bellepoint and Anna was at Aventine. They stayed friends even after Anna moved to London. They weren’t in touch a ton, but Anna came to see Mom after I was born.”
Tears filled my eyes as I remembered my last moments with Anna: I held you once.
Bram reached for my hand. “What?”
“She was murdered,” I said. “We went to see Anna, to ask her questions about what Mom and Dad had been doing before they died. Someone murdered her after we left.”
Bram cursed. “What else did she tell you?”
“Just that Dimitri Kaprolov is more dangerous now than he ever was when he’d been with the bratva, and that he’s part of an organization called Imperium Fratrum.”
I watched Bram’s face for signs that the name was familiar.
“What the fuck is Imperium Fratrum?” he asked.
“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “But I think they have something to do with all the girls that have gone missing around here, girls that have gone missing for years, decades even.”
“What makes you think that?” Bram asked.
“A lot of things. First, Dimitri was Aventine alumni, and we both know what was happening there.”
Three years earlier a trafficking ring had been exposed at the university. At the time it had felt like an isolated thing, but Rain, Jasmine, and Nia — the girls whose flyers I’d found on the bulletin board at the coffee shop — had gone missing after the arrests at Aventine.
I went slow, putting the pieces together as I talked.
“Anna went into hiding when she realized she was being used to funnel money to the sex-trafficking ring through the Rooks, and we know Dimitri was a member of the Rooks’ house when he went to Aventine because he was bratva.
Anna made it clear he wasn’t working alone, that he was part of Imperium Fratrum, which means— ”
“Imperium Fratrum is behind the missing girls.” Bram ran his hand over the top of his head.
“I don’t know, Cass. How do we know this…
Imperium Fratrum isn’t just a private club for rich old guys?
Maybe they just sit around on their yachts smoking cigars and counting their money.
Maybe the sex-trafficking ring is separate. ”
“Do you really believe that?”
“What I believe isn’t the point. We need some connective tissue between Imperium Fratrum and the sex-trafficking ring, something more than a hint dropped by a dead woman.”
I rubbed at the cafeteria table with my fingers, trying to bring myself back to the here and now, away from the world of ultra-rich men in a shadowy organization who thought the world — and everyone in it — was theirs for the taking.
“What if I told you there was a kind of… school, a place where missing girls were taken to prepare for sale?”
Bram’s expression darkened. He looked around and leaned in. “What the fuck are you talking about, Cass?”
I took a drink of my coffee, then chased it with some water when I realized my mouth had gone dry. “I met with Lilah a few months ago and— ”
“Lilah Lilah?” Bram looked as confused as I’d ever seen him. “Rafe’s Lilah?”
I nodded. “Daisy told me Lilah had been asking questions about the Cantwells and their plans to use the resort on the mountain as a hub for rich men who wanted access to girls. So I met with Lilah.”
Bram let out a frustrated sigh. “What the fuck, Cass?”
I glared at him. “We’re not going to do that anymore, remember? We’re not falling back into the old routine where you shelter me from the real world.”
He flipped his hand at me, indicating that I should keep going, probably because he didn’t trust himself to speak.
“I met with Lilah and she told me she’d been undercover at a kind of school where they trained girls to serve the men who would buy them.
I looked it up after we met and found an article about a fire that took place on a compound upstate.
There weren’t a lot of details about what was going on there, which just makes me think it’s connected to Imperium Fratrum.
Because if we’re right, this thing is big, and there has to be some kind of investigation underway. ”
“And you think Mom and Dad were on to this early? On to Dimitri Kaprolov and Imperium Fratrum?” Bram asked. “That that was why they were killed?”
Bram never talked about himself when he referred to the accident that had killed our parents, even though he’d been stuck at the bottom of the cliff — trapped inside the car with our dead parents —for twelve hours before he’d been found.
I thought it was a way for him to disassociate, to make it seem like the accident hadn’t happened to him.
I hesitated, then reached into my bag.
I set the tape recorder I’d found in the ceiling of the paper mill on the table between Bram and me.
“What’s that?” I wondered if it was my imagination that for the first time in my life, Bram looked scared.
I pressed play and watched Bram’s face as our dead mother’s voice filled the space between us.
“If you’ve found this, something has gone wrong…”