41. Cassie
CASSIE
My hair was still wet when I woke up in Vigo’s bed later that night, Vigo passed out at the foot of the mattress (I had no idea why he always ended up there), Hawk’s inked chest rising and falling as he slept.
We’d stripped our cream-and-syrup soaked clothes off at the door and the Hawks had chased me up the stairs into Vigo’s shower, where they’d taken me under the hot water that streamed over our bodies.
I smiled as I remembered our coffee shop fucking. They’d made a massive mess, but true to their word, they’d done all the clean up while I’d sat on the counter, using hot towels to wipe myself down while I ordered them around.
If someone had told me a few months earlier that I’d be bossing around the three giant men who’d chased me in the tunnels, I wouldn’t have believed them, but here we were.
Now I held up the ring on my finger in the shadows of the dark room.
But most of all we love you, Cass.
Which is why I better never see you without that fucking ring…
Get it, mouse? You belong to us now.
I didn’t know what any of it meant, if the words had been said in the heat of the moment and the ring was just symbolic or if it was real.
But I knew that I wanted it to be real.
I reached for my phone to check the time: 3:22 a.m.
I’d assumed Jagger was in the bathroom, but now I wondered.
I reached for one of the Hawks’ shirts, discarded on the floor, and realized it was Hawk’s when I caught the scent of cold air and leather. I thought of the barn, Freya and Ares swooping over the fields.
Powerful. Free.
I carried my phone out of the room and walked into the hall, then headed downstairs.
I found Jagger in the living room with his laptop, a legal pad next to him on the sofa, his handwriting scrawled across it in black pen.
He was in black sweats and nothing else, the tattoos on his chest crawling like shadows in the light from the table lamp casting a soft glow over the room.
His cheeks and jaw were shaded with the whiskers that had scratched erotically at my inner thighs when he’d buried his face in my pussy in the coffee shop.
“Hey,” I said, walking into the room.
He looked up. “Hey.”
“Can’t sleep?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I need to crack this. We have all this shit, all this data. I’m trying to work it into some kind of key that might tell me where Dimitri’s men are headed next.”
“Can I help?”
He set his laptop aside on the sofa and pulled me onto his lap.
He slipped a hand between my thighs and nuzzled my neck. “Can I fuck you again?”
I set my phone on the end table. “I think the whipped cream chafed my lady bits. Maybe I’m lactose intolerant.”
He laughed.
“Seriously,” I said. “There must be something I can do to help.”
“I think I’m close actually.”
“Really?”
He reached for his laptop. “I started building a history, looking for patterns.”
“Patterns?”
He nodded. “It’s what we did on Wall Street.
You start to get a feel for it. It’s like a…
like a rhythm. Sometimes you know something’s going up and down on news or annual reports, but other times, it’s a feeling, and that feeling isn’t as random as it seems. It’s based on the patterns your brain starts to recognize without even realizing it. ”
“I still don’t understand.”
He tabbed to a spreadsheet. “Kaprolov can block the plane’s tail number from real-time tracking — that’s a safety measure, a way to allow private aircraft owners some privacy when they travel — but the flight number isn’t blocked from historical records.”
“What kind of historical records?”
I was glad he’d removed his hand from between my thighs because honestly, it had been distracting.
“Airport movement logs, FBO arrival boards, refueling records, that kind of thing.”
“So how does that help us if it’s stuff that already happened?” I asked. “We need to know where they’re going, not where they’ve been.”
“Unless…” Jagger clicked on a tab at the bottom of his spreadsheet, “where they’ve been points to where they’re going.”
The first flutter of excitement started in my stomach. “Explain.”
“I searched the FBO arrival and refueling records of municipal airports within fifty miles of cities we know Dimitri has a connection to: New York, Moscow, London, Prague. When I found records of the flight landing there, I started to notice something: there was a pattern. Kaprolov — or Alina — travels in a kind of circuit.”
“What kind of circuit?”
“I’m not positive,” he said. “Could be a party circuit or a seasonal circuit — they spend time in certain cities during their good weather seasons for example — but I have a hunch it’s something else.”
“What else?”
“I think it’s based on places Kaprolov has property,” Jagger said. “But I can’t prove that part, so I called Aloha and asked him to crawl through the refueling records of all municipal airports near major cities.”
“And?”
Jagger tabbed away from the spreadsheet to a document. “And we added five new cities to the list of places Kaprolov’s plane frequents.”
I looked at the cities listed on the otherwise blank page.
London.
Prague.
New York.
Paris.
Capri/Monte Carlo.
Moscow.
Santorini.
Ibiza.
“Dimitri’s plane flies into these cities?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“And there’s a pattern? He flies in this order?”
“Not all the time — and it could also be Alina using the plane — but roughly, yes.”
I studied the document. “Why are there two cities after New York?”
“Because sometimes the plane goes to Capri after New York and sometimes it goes to Monte Carlo.”
Shit. If Dimitri’s men flew out of Carlton three days before, they’d probably gone to Paris. How long would they stay there before moving on to the next city?
And how were we supposed to know whether the plane was going to Capri or Monte Carlo next? How could we even be sure — absolutely sure — it would go to either city?
“Do we flip a coin?” I asked, only half kidding.
I was tired of playing defense to Dimitri Kaprolov’s offense. I wanted to move on with my life, because for the first time, I kind of felt like I actually had something to look forward to.
“Either that or hire a psychic,” Jagger said. “See if she can see Kaprolov or his daughter in her crystal ball.”
Wait a minute…
His daughter.
His spoiled, oligarch-baby daughter.
I reached for my phone and pulled up Alina Volkova’s social media profile, then scrolled to a post I’d seen there the day before: Alina beautiful and glamorous in a skimpy black top, her blond hair blowing in the breeze at a rooftop restaurant, the Eiffel Tower in the background.
I looked at Jagger. “I know where Alina is going.”
“Where?”
I held out my phone and knew he was reading the caption.
Au revoir, Paris! Ci vediamo dopo!
“The last part, it’s in Italian.” He met my gaze. “She’s going to Capri.”
I nodded. “She’s going to Capri.”