“I can see why Madi is afraid of you,” Cas griped, flopping down on the couch.
She began to prowl the apartment again, almost like she was memorizing the layout. “Did somebody trash this apartment, too?”
Cas had cleaned up the mess he’d made days ago but only in the loosest of terms. “Yeah, me.”
“Jonah said you had a temper. I imagine he finds you amusing.” She stopped in front of Cas’s notes scrawled in his messy, frantic handwriting, and leaned against the back of the sofa. “What’s this? Some kind of hit list?”
“W-What?” he stammered.
One full brow shot up. “Is. This. A. Hit. List?” she asked again slowly and with her volume on ten. “I thought Jonah said you were the smart one.”
“And he said you were the bitchy one. Good to know he was right about one of those things,” Cas snarked.
That earned him a toothy grin. A genuine smile, not the smirks from earlier. “Seriously, what is all this?”
Cas sighed. “I’m trying to find some connection between list A and list B.”
“Well, given all the red ink, it looks like you found something.”
He’d discovered just that…something. “Yeah, I did. But it’s rudimentary, and it gets me no closer to figuring out what it all means.”
She tsk’d. “Well, if I were you, I’d figure it out soon. Word on the street is there’s a really big bounty on your head. I bet with both those lists you so kindly wrote on the windows, I could negotiate double that.”
A tiny sliver of fear worked itself under his ribcage, lodging there, until each inhale seemed to burn. “Is that why you showed up at your brother’s house after being away for…however long? To kill me? If so, you’re awfully casual about it. Luring me into a false sense of security?”
“Relax, babyface, I’m not here to kill you,” she said, her tone casually mocking as she continued to peruse his list. “Though, maybe I should after everything you put my brother through by just taking off in the middle of the night like you did.” She turned to look at him. “Do you know how much time and energy he wasted looking for you? Wondering if you were dead in the street somewhere? Now, here you are, very much not dead—yet—and he’s calling in every favor from the few of us he can trust to drop everything and come help keep you safe. You don’t look all that special to me.”
Cas didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He just sat there absorbing Sadie’s words. Had Jonah really worried about Cas’s whereabouts? Had he truly looked for him once he’d left? Madi had said Jonah didn’t love him, saw him as an annoyance, a kid brother always underfoot. And Cas had believed him so much, he’d packed his bags that night and left. What if Cas had made a mistake? What if he’d confronted Jonah that night instead of leaving?
Cas tried to bury the what ifs. None of it mattered now. They were all on borrowed time.
“Who else has Jonah called in?” Cas asked, voice dull.
She gave a shrug. “That’s between you and Jonah. I’m not here to babysit you. I’m here to try to find out who wants you dead and why.”
“Well, I’m open to suggestions about how to narrow that down,” Cas said, shaking his head. “I had originally thought if I could decipher the list, I could figure out who’d kill to keep it safe. But now that I’ve seen these people’s bios”—he pointed to the names he could find information on—“I can’t imagine any of them having the balls to kill anything bigger than a bug.”
“Suits, huh?” she asked. “They always hire out their shit. Don’t want to get their hands dirty.”
Cas nodded. “Yeah, some. The most boring of suits as far as I can tell. I can’t figure out the role they play in all of this. Some of them aren’t suits at all. None of them seem to be major players in anything, just maybe player adjacent.”
“What do you mean?” Sadie toed off her shoes and knelt to face the back of the couch and look at the names on the window panes.
Cas mimicked her posture, even going so far as to thread his fingers and drop his chin on his hands, just like she had. “See that guy at the top? Ken Snow. He’s a junior senator from Ohio. Super lackluster, spotless record, doesn’t even have a single bill of legislation that could be seen as controversial. His father, however, is Nolan Snow, the billionaire who’s always trying to launch himself into space.”
Sadie pointed to the next name. “Okay, what about the next guy?”
“He’s a butler to an A-list actor.”
“And the next?”
Cas began to chew his thumbnail. “His brother-in-law is a well-known defense attorney.”
“So, maybe it’s not the people on the list who are important but the people they represent?” Sadie said, her cheek dropping to her hands so she could look at him.
Could that be it? Could that be what Annie had realized? Could all these people be simple stand-ins for the real names? Were they some kind of middlemen? “The forest for the trees,” Cas muttered, adrenaline spiking through his system like a drug. “That’s genius.”
“It is? Did I just solve something for you? Can I go home now?” Sadie asked, her smirk back.
