35. Cassie
CASSIE
We left everything from the storage unit with Bram, including the FOIA documents. We’d been looking at them for over a week and hadn’t come up with anything. Maybe Bram, Poe, and Remy would have better luck.
In the meantime, I had Alina Volkova’s social media accounts to keep me busy, and I hadn’t given up finding a connection that might lead us to Dimitri. Plus, I still had the phone from the paper mill, and I had a weird feeling I wasn’t done with it yet.
Or maybe it wasn’t done with us.
Still, I was glad we’d spent the time with Bram. Glad and relieved.
I wasn’t sure my brother would ever be best friends with the Hawks, but at least they weren’t trying to kill each other.
I was sleepy as Vigo navigated the G-Wagon through the dark streets of Blackwell Falls on the way home — it hadn’t helped that Maeve had stuffed me full of so much good food — and I’d started to doze off in the back seat next to Hawk when a ringing alarm made me jerk upright.
“What’s that? What’s wrong?”
Hawk was staring at his phone. “It’s the alarm at the house. Someone’s there.”
“What the fuck…” Jagger said.
Vigo tightened his hands on the wheel and the car shot forward as he accelerated, the G-Wagon’s engine roaring in the night.
“Who is it?” Vigo asked, looking at Hawk in the rearview mirror.
“Don’t know,” Hawk said. “They’ve cut the camera feed.”
My stomach turned, and adrenaline flooded my body as Vigo tore through the rural roads surrounding Blackwell Falls. The Hawks’ home had become my home. The thought of anyone breaching that private space, the private space where so much had happened, felt almost sacrilegious.
“The police will come right?” I asked. “Doesn’t the alarm send them an alert or something?”
“Not if I call them off,” Hawk said, tapping at his phone.
I stared at him in disbelief. “Why would you call them off?! Someone’s breaking into the house! Isn’t that the whole point of the alarm?”
“No,” Hawk said. “The point of the alarm is to let us know when someone is there so we can take care of them ourselves.”
“We don’t need the cops digging around in our shit,” Jagger said from the front seat.
And then I remembered: the Hawks were thieves.
They’d been sidelined by my arrival and our hunt for Imperium Fratrum, but I got Jagger’s point.
It was obvious something was wrong as soon as we pulled up the long driveway.
The door was flung wide open and it looked like every light in the house was on.
Hawk swore, flung open the door of the car, and reached under the back seat.
I widened my eyes when I saw the gun in his hand, not a small handgun but a giant, vicious-looking weapon.
“You’ve had a gun in the car this whole time?”
“Guns.” Jagger dug under the passenger seat and emerged with a second gun. “Plural.”
Vigo turned around to reach into the back seat and grabbed his bat off the floor.
“You’re not bringing a gun?” Hawk asked with a scowl.
“We already have guns,” Vigo said, jumping out of the car with his bat. “I’m diversifying.”
I started to get out of the car but Hawk barked an order.
“Stay here with the doors locked until we come and get you.”
I didn’t dare argue, both because it was obvious someone had broken into the house — someone who might still be inside — and because of the wrathful expression on Hawk’s face.
I watched Jagger peel off toward the fenced patio on one side of the house while Vigo took the other.
Hawk headed straight for the front door, looking like a vengeful angel as he stalked up the steps to the porch, not even bothering to slow down or make sure someone wasn’t waiting for him.
My heart raced when he disappeared into the house. I’d just gotten the Hawks back after what had happened at the paper mill. The possibility of losing them again made me sick with dread.
I leaned forward in the back seat, watching the house, listening for gun fire.
But it was quiet, and I realized the only cars parked at the front of the house were Jagger’s bottle-green Aston Martin, Hawk’s Hellcat, and the bland rental I’d been driving since my accident on the mountain (I’d finally gotten the insurance money but hadn’t had time to replace my Subaru).
Whoever had broken into the house had approached on foot.
Either that or they were already gone.
I held my breath, then exhaled when Vigo exited the house, his bat in hand.
He opened the back door and I realized he was furious, realized I’d never actually seen him mad.
Vigo was an agent of chaos, but his chaos wasn’t usually driven by emotion.
He just liked chaos.
“All clear, mouse.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Someone breached the security system,” Vigo said as I got out of the car. “Wiped the cameras.”
“Were they still in there?”
He shook his head, then looked around, like he didn’t trust that someone wasn’t about to jump out of the trees surrounding the house. “Let’s get inside.”
I got out of the car and realized he was covering me, shielding my body with his as we made our way up the steps of the porch and into the house.
I didn’t get more than a couple feet inside before I stopped cold.
The foyer had been torn apart, the console table where we kept our mail and keys turned over and splintered into pieces.
The pegs that hung on the wall for coats had been torn out, the drywall exploding around the anchors.
“It gets worse,” he said when I finally started moving again.
And he wasn’t kidding.
The living room was destroyed, the TV and gaming systems smashed. Stuffing spilled out of the sofa from deep slashes across the leather upholstery, and there were deep gouges in the once pristine wood floors.
My mouth hung open. “What were they looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Vigo said. “Maybe nothing.”
I turned to stare at him. “Maybe nothing? They tore the place apart.”
“You’ll see what I mean in a minute,” he said. “Let’s go.”
We left the living room behind and continued deeper into the house. Everywhere I looked it was the same: furniture destroyed, holes in the drywall, gouges in the floors.
My shoes crunched over broken glass and my mouth dropped open when I got to the kitchen.
The refrigerator door was open, a gallon jug tipped over on the top shelf, milk dripping onto the floor, covered with food.
The glass doors leading to the patio were shattered, shards of glass littering the floor like fallen stars.
Hawk and Jagger returned to the room.
“Upstairs?” I couldn’t formulate more than the one word.
“They left it.” Jagger hesitated. “Except for this.”
He held out a picture, the old fashioned kind, big and glossy.
I took it from him and stared down at the image.
The picture had been taken through the front window of the coffee shop. It was late afternoon, the evening lights on in the shop, Daisy and Sarai standing at the counter.
But Daisy and Sarai, slightly blurry, weren’t the focus of the picture.
I was.
Clearly visible between Daisy and Sarai, I stood behind the counter, and I knew immediately the picture had been taken ten days earlier, on the day I’d told my two best friends about PrincessA and the phone.
But I only knew it was me from the clothes I was wearing and the apron tied around my waist, the fact that I was behind the counter instead of in front of it.
Because someone had sliced a violent X over my face.