24. Cassie
CASSIE
S&S Security wasn’t in Carlton exactly. It was on a stretch of rural road — next to a Tractor Supply on one side and a vacant lot with chain link fence around it on the other — half a mile from the suburban town.
It was the kind of place I’d probably driven by without noticing: just a series of rectangular one-story structures with silver roll-up doors and a small sign on the first building that read Safe and Sound Storage.
The information you need to pick up where we left off will require you to uncover long-stored treasures.
Vigo parked the G-Wagon in the empty lot, and we got out of the car and looked around.
“Wow,” Hawk said, taking in the peeling paint and rusted metal, “this place has seen better days.”
He’d suffered for our sex at the barn that morning, and he’d been moving more carefully, taking it easy on his burn and the incision that was still healing from his surgery.
His dark eyes were hidden by sunglasses, his broad shoulders testing the seams on the clean white T-shirt he’d changed into before we left Blackwell Falls for S&S Storage.
I knew exactly how his long black hair felt in my fingers, exactly how his powerful body felt moving over mine, and desire still thrummed between my thighs like a wakened beast.
“This look like a place where your parents would store stuff?” Vigo’s blond hair was spikier than usual, making him look a little like a mad scientist as he scanned the empty parking lot.
The fact that he was holding his bat didn’t help. I had that sense I always had with the Hawks: that anything could happen, that it could be good, bad, or even catastrophic.
But it didn’t scare me anymore. They’d pulled me into their madness, and I had no desire to leave, no desire to return to my former, ordered world.
“Not really,” I said. “But there were a lot of things I didn’t know about my parents so that might not mean much.”
Jagger tugged on one of his eyebrow piercings. “Are we sure this place was even here ten years ago?”
I didn’t blame him for asking. S&S was the kind of place that could have been here fifty years or five, the kind of place that had been forgotten since the day it opened.
“I’m not sure of anything.”
I touched the silver key in my pocket.
If you’ve found this, something has gone wrong.
We started walking toward the small sign marking the office, but we only got a few feet before a voice called out behind us.
“Cassandra?”
I turned around, surprised to hear my full name, and found a slim elderly woman in a navy dress, heels, and pearls staring at me from next to a black car with tinted windows.
I recognized her immediately, although I hadn’t seen her in person in years.
“Mrs. Prescott,” I said, walking back toward her. “Hello.”
“My dear! I didn’t recognize you at first!” She took off her sunglasses and I caught a whiff of her expensive perfume when she leaned in to kiss my cheek. Her silver hair was flawlessly styled, her lined face carefully made up. “You’re all grown up.”
“It’s been a long time,” I said.
Miriam Prescott had sent a huge flower arrangement to my parents’ funeral, but it had been at least five years since I’d last seen her.
She must have been at least seventy by now, but she was still the most influential citizen of Blackwell Falls.
I had no idea how she’d made all her money, but her husband had died years ago and she routinely appeared at local ribbon cuttings and awards ceremonies.
She’d even been featured on the cover of a prominent news magazine, complete with a full interview that I hadn’t read. (Daisy had told me, I thought, or maybe Sarai).
“Indeed.” She smiled. “You look even more like your mother than you did when you were young. And you have your father’s smile. They were such good people.”
“Thank you. What are you doing out here?”
Her gaze traveled to the empty lot next to the storage facility. “We’re developing the lot next door. Just inspecting the site before we start building.”
“Oh wow,” I said. “What’s it going to be?”
“An upscale retail outlet,” she said. “We already have some marquee retailers under contract. It should bring a lot of business to Carlton, improve home values.”
“It sounds really nice.” I said it even though it sounded awful and I knew Bram would hate it. That kind of development was exactly why Bram had spent the last ten years buying up old buildings in Blackwell Falls.
Southside might not be upscale, but at least it was still affordable for the people who lived there.
Still, Miriam Prescott was a good person. She gave tons of money to charity through the Prescott Foundation, and every year she paid off the school lunch bills of underprivileged kids in Blackwell Falls. She’d even funded a domestic violence shelter in Carlton.
“How is Bram?” she asked.
“He’s good,” I said.
“Wonderful.” She put her sunglasses back on. “Tell him hello.”
“I will.”
I started to walk away, then turned around. “Mrs. Prescott?”
“Yes?”
“How long has this storage facility been here?”
“Oh…” She touched her chin. “At least twenty years, maybe twenty-five. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering.”
She smiled. “I hope to see you again, Cassie. Please let me know if there’s ever anything I can do for you or Bram.”
“I will, thank you.”
“You know Miriam Prescott?” Hawk asked when I’d walked back to where he stood with Jagger and Vigo.
“Not really, but I think she was a friend of my parents. She said this place has been here at least twenty years, so I guess it really is possible my parents rented a storage unit here.”
“Let’s go find out, mouse.” Vigo started for the office, twirling his bat.
I wasn’t naive enough to hope the storage unit was still rented under my parents’ names. I knew what happened to storage units when the bill wasn’t paid, knew the owners of the facility sold off the stuff inside.
But I had so few connections to my parents and their investigation into Imperium Fratrum. I was willing to follow every trail that led back to them, dig for any piece of information I could find, even if the chance of finding something was infinitesimally small.
We followed the arrow on the office sign and stepped into a small room at the front of the building with a single window overlooking the parking lot.
Not exactly an inspired view.
A middle-aged man with curly gray hair and glasses sat behind a desk, reading a book whose title I couldn’t make out and listening to classic rock on, get this, an actual radio.
Not a music app on his computer or phone, a real-life radio with an antenna and everything.
He looked up when we approached, then did a double take before setting the book aside.
“Hello,” I said.
I’d expected a drawn-out explanation: my parents’ death, the key, the possibility that they’d left something behind over ten years earlier.
Instead he got to his feet and looked at me with something like recognition.
“You found the key.”