28. Cassie
CASSIE
It was the least I could do. I couldn’t have kept the shop open without them, and if it was one thing I’d learned over the past three months it was that it wasn’t good business to make myself a bottleneck for keeping the shop open.
Kaylee and Drew had proven themselves more than capable of keeping things going. I wanted to make sure they felt appreciated and well compensated because the truth was, I was kind of enjoying having a life outside of the shop.
I wiped down the front counter and leaned against the one behind me to look at my phone.
It had been a week since we’d found my parents’ storage unit, and I was still trying to sort the information my parents had left there about their investigation into Imperium Fratrum.
I’d spent countless hours researching names and places listed in the FOIA requests pinned to the board and just as long doing reverse image searches on the photos.
So far everything I’d found could be categorized into five buckets: rich people who were alive, rich people who were dead, people I couldn’t locate because their names were too common, places whose relevance was still in question, and everything else.
I wasn’t surprised some of the people mentioned on the board were dead. It had been over ten years since my parents had been killed, and let’s face it, there was a higher than average injury and death rate among anyone even loosely associated with Imperium Fratrum.
The others, the ones who were alive, were an assortment of politicians, celebrities, and business titans, and I already had long search histories on every one of them, looking for connections between them that might lead me to the biggest players behind Imperium Fratrum.
I wasn’t working alone. The Hawks were focused on the locations, both the ones depicted in pictures on the board and the ones mentioned in the FOIA requests, looking for connections to Dimitri or anyone else mentioned in the documents.
And then there was the phone taken off the dead guy in the paper mill. I knew the texts word for word, but I still hadn’t gotten a clue worth pursuing. I kept going back to it, refusing to believe that something as valuable as the phone could be worth absolutely nothing to our cause.
The bell on the door of the coffee shop shook me from my stupor and I looked up to see Daisy and Sarai.
“Hey!” I set down my phone. “What are you doing here?”
They looked bright and carefree, their cheeks pink from the October chill, and I was suddenly jealous that they were out there, living their lives without the fear of someone running them off the road or throwing a grenade their way.
It wasn’t fair — Daisy had suffered more than her share of heartache before everything had settled down and Sarai had plenty of crosses to bear with her conservative Indian parents — but I was only human.
“Coming to see you!” Daisy said.
She looked as pretty as ever, her glossy brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, the hourglass of her body pronounced in form-fitting jeans and a deep blue sweater that set off her violet eyes.
“We figured it was the only way we could snag you long enough to catch up,” Sarai said, blowing her black bangs out of her eyes. “And we made appointments at the Springs. I’m dying for a trim.”
She wore a short dress with tights and knee-high boots, a denim jacket and an assortment of gold jewelry finishing the outfit with trademark panache. I knew she’d paid for the short dress — her parents would have given her an earful — but Sarai was slowly pulling away from their expectations.
“You should come,” Daisy said. “They take walk-ins.”
“Can’t,” I said. “I gave Kaylee and Drew the day off.”
There was nothing I would have loved more than to play hooky and spend the day getting my hair and nails done at Blackwell Springs, the new-ish day spa that had opened up a couple years earlier.
But somehow life had gotten both simpler and more complicated in the four months since the Hunt.
Simpler because now I knew what — or more accurately who — I really wanted.
Complicated because there was a lot of scary stuff — a lot of scary people — standing between me and a possible future with them.
I held on to the fact that Daisy had made it through her own rough patch, and now she had a baby, plus Jace, Wolf, and Otis.
I was a little freaked out to realize my envy had grown with the thought.
Wait… did I want a baby? With the Hawks?
“Helloooo,” Sarai said, breaking into my thoughts. “You still with us?”
“What? Oh… yeah. Sorry. What was that?”
Sarai laughed. “I was just saying that I miss you! We miss you.”
“I miss you too. I’m sorry. It’s just been crazy.” Crazy didn’t do it justice but it was the simplest way to describe the last few months.
“Fill us in!” Sarai hopped on the counter and I looked at the door to make sure no one was on their way in. Sarai had a way of breaking rules, and while I didn’t mind it when we were alone, I didn’t want customers thinking they could sit on the counters.
Not hygienic.
I don’t know where to start. We’d texted, so they both knew the basics — about the accident that had left me temporarily blind and the fact that I was trying to find out who’d murdered my parents and the explosion at the paper mill — but even the last couple of weeks were a lot to condense into a coffee shop briefing.
But I tried, starting with the key and the tape recorder left by my parents at the paper mill and ending with everything we’d found in the storage unit.
“So wait…” Sarai’s eyes were like saucers, “… your parents put stuff in storage so that you would find it after their murder?”
“Me or someone else,” I said.
“And it’s been there all this time?” she asked.
“All this time.”
“That must have been so weird.” Daisy’s voice was heavy with sadness. “Just… weird and sad seeing all that stuff left by your parents, like a time capsule. Are you okay?”
I took a deep breath around the heaviness in my chest. “Yeah. It is weird and sad, but mostly I just want to pick up where they left off, put an end to it all for good.”
“Is there anything we can do to help?” Sarai asked.
“Yeah,” Daisy said, “I’m a total online stalker if you need help with anything on that front.”
I laughed. “Don’t I know it.”
Daisy grinned. “You weren’t complaining when I helped you run down Ian Golden’s ex.”
“Touché.” Ian Golden had been my tenth grade boyfriend and Daisy’s deep dive into his ex-girlfriend’s social media had been worthy of a professional private investigator.
“So?” Sarai asked. “What can we do? I could use a little excitement.”
Sarai could always use “a little excitement,” something that had gotten her into trouble more than once.
“Trust me, you don’t want this kind of excitement.” I reached into my bag behind the counter and pulled out the phone from the paper mill. “But since you asked, can you take a look at this? Tell me if anything jumps out at you?”
Daisy took it and leaned over the counter so Sarai could read along. While they read, I refilled the canisters with coffee beans and restocked the milk in the refrigerators behind the counter.
Luckily we were in the mid-afternoon slow period when everyone was at work or school.
“Who’s ‘PrincessA?” Sarai asked.
“I have no idea. That’s part of the problem.”
Daisy met my eyes. “Where did you get this?”
I bit my lip. “You have to promise not to tell a soul.”
“Duh,” Sarai said. “Obviously.”
We’d been best friends since elementary school. It didn’t really need to be said but I’d wanted to say it anyway.
“It was on the guy who died at the paper mill. One of the ones who tried to kill the Hawks and me.”
“How did you get it?” Daisy asked.
I held her gaze but didn’t answer.
“Bram,” she said. “Right.”
“‘PrincessA’ is the only person mentioned by name — or nickname I guess — on those texts. It kind of seems like… they’re working for her?
But that doesn’t feel right either. So far I haven’t found any royal connections to the missing girls in Blackwell Falls, although I guess it’s always possible they exist.”
Daisy looked surprised.
“What?” I asked her.
“Nothing, I just… that’s not where my mind goes when I look at these texts.”
“Me either,” Sarai said.
“Then where does it go?”
“Not to actual royalty,” Daisy said, “but to— ”
“Social media,” Daisy and Sarai said at the same time.
“Social media?” Now I was confused.
“It’s capitalized,” Daisy said. “Even when it’s not at the start of a sentence. PrincessA. Not lower case but upper case as in— ”
“A social media handle,” I said.
Daisy nodded. “Exactly.”
I leaned back against the counter, the reality of the discovery sinking in. I wasn’t big on social media, but Daisy practically lived online as part of her design business, and Sarai had been on social media (in secret since her parents wouldn’t allow it) since she was twelve.
They’d seen something the Hawks and I hadn’t.
The men at the paper mill hadn’t been working for Dimitri Kaprolov.
They’d been working for a woman.
One who used PrincessA as a social media handle.