23. Vigo
VIGO
“That fucker.” I bounced my ball on the floor of the kitchen and tried to decide if I should have Oreos for breakfast.
“You could have done it first,” Jagger said, scrolling through his phone.
“I was being respectful.” I’d wanted to get Cassie alone to fuck her as much as anyone, but I’d known Hawk was still on the mend.
“Sucks to be you.”
I opened the cupboard to get my Oreo cup. “Sucks to be us.”
“Don’t even pretend you didn’t have a little fun while we were in the hospital,” Jagger said, still scrolling his phone.
“That doesn’t count. It was completely unromantic.”
“Come on now,” Jagger said. “We both know romance wasn’t on your mind.”
“Hey,” I said, offended, “I like romance and shit.”
I wasn’t lying. I loved everything with Cassie, including romance.
But yeah, I definitely wanted to get in her pants. And not just with my fingers this time.
My dick got hard as I crumbled Oreos into the cup.
Not because of the Oreos — although everyone knew Oreos were the superior cookie, period — but because now I was thinking about Cassie.
About getting her naked and spreading her thighs, burying my face in her cunt, fucking her until her tight little pussy came on my dick.
It had been too long, and I was more than ready to play with our mouse.
My dick was still hard, my cup filled almost to the top with Oreos, when I heard the door open.
Jagger frowned at me over the top of his phone. “Now’s your chance, lover boy.”
Cassie and Hawk walked into the room a minute later. I knew where they’d been because Hawk was carrying the cooler and I knew what they’d been doing because Cassie looked windblown and thoroughly fucked.
In the fun way.
But there was something else there too. Cassie’s cheeks were flush with excitement, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t because she’d just gotten fucked.
“He got it open!” she said, holding up a phone. “Aloha cracked the phone from the paper mill!”
“Damn,” Jagger said, putting down his phone.
“Bram called to let us know,” Hawk said, dropping the cooler. “We picked it up on the way home from the barn.”
The barn meant that Hawk had taken Cassie to meet Ares and Freya.
That was big.
Jagger and I had known Hawk for at least a year before he’d taken us to the barn. The hawks were his familiars, their bond almost supernatural. Introducing Cassie to them meant Hawk expected Cassie to stay.
That he wanted her to stay.
Welcome to the club.
We hadn’t talked about the future, and even though Cassie’s ninety days with us were officially over, I knew there was a possibility she was only here until we found Dimitri Kaprolov or whoever was behind the murder of her parents.
“Anything good?” I poured milk over the cookies in my cup. “On the phone?”
It wasn’t the sexy conversation I’d had in mind when I’d been fantasizing about Cassie, but at least my dick was standing down.
Cassie slid onto the chair next to Jagger at the island. “Not sure. I just scrolled through it on the way home from the warehouse.”
Aloha worked with a bunch of other hackers in one of the old warehouses on the south side of Blackwell Falls.
Cassie bent her head to the phone. “It’s a lot of everyday stuff. Jokes and logistical stuff between the guy who owned the phone and the people he seemed to be working with.”
“Tell them about the princess thing,” Hawk said.
“What princess thing?” Jagger asked.
“They keep talking about a princessA.” Cassie read from the phone. “PrincessA is going to the villa, PrincessA wants the boat, PrincessA is in trouble.”
I frowned. “Well, that’s not what I expected.”
“Same,” Cassie said.
Hawk pulled a beer from the fridge and looked at Cassie. “Get you something?”
She glanced up and shook her head, then returned her attention to the phone. “I’m good.”
“Is anyone identified in the texts?” Jagger asked as Hawk as popped the top on the beer. “The guy who owned the phone or the people he was texting?”
Cassie shook her head. “Only their phone numbers.”
I finished chewing the Oreos in my mouth. “That’s weird.”
“Not if these people are members of Imperium Fratrum,” Jagger said.
“They have to be,” Cassie murmured. “Anna was killed right after we talked to her about Dimitri, after she told us he was part of Imperium Fratrum. It can’t be a coincidence that someone came for us at the paper mill right after that.”
“Can Aloha trace the numbers?” Jagger asked. “The locations of the other phones?”
“They only texted over an encrypted app,” Hawk said, taking another slug of his beer.
“Fuck,” Jagger said.
“Yeah.” Cassie sighed and set down the phone. “I really thought this was going to be our break.”
She wasn’t the only one. A lot had been riding on the phone. It was our closest connection to the men who’d ambushed us at the paper mill.
And even more important, whoever had hired them.
“Speaking of breaks,” Jagger said, shoving a piece of paper at Cassie. “This doesn’t ring a bell for you?”
I knew what it was — a payment made from Cassie’s parents to a company called S & S — because Jagger had asked me to take a look at it too.
Cassie looked at the payment record circled on the paper, then shook her head. “It’s from their personal checking account like all the other bills. I assumed that was what it was.”
“I thought so too,” Jagger said. “But turns out the payment was made every month.”
Cassie furrowed her brow. “So?”
“So I checked all the other payments and everything else is accounted for: mortgage, utilities, credit card bills, insurance.”
“So what’s S&S?” Cassie asked.
“I was hoping you knew,” Jagger said.
“I don’t.” Cassie frowned. “I just thought it was a bill.”
Jagger picked up his phone. “I was curious so I did a search.”
He pushed his phone toward Cassie.
She studied the phone. “S&S Storage?”
“It’s a storage facility in Carlton,” Jagger said. “The kind you rent when you have too much shit.”
“Or when you need a safe place to store your shit,” I said.
“Wait…” Cassie looked up. “Do you think this has something to do with the key?”
The possibility hung in the air
I put my Oreo spoon on the counter and looked around at the people who’d become my family.
My real family.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”