Silence settled over the kitchen, all of us lost in our own thoughts.
Finally, I looked from Jagger to Hawk, my mouth still full of Oreos. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
27
CASSIE
I lay awake,staring at the ceiling and replaying the conversation with the Hawks.
Sounds like you need to let it go.
Hawk’s words echoed in my head like a bell that wouldn’t stop ringing. Howdarehe?
Seven years is a long time to stalk someone with no proof they intentionally committed a crime.
Filed under: no shit, Sherlock.
Did he think Iwantedto live my life this way? That I wanted to call Detective Grabowski every month? To sit on hold when they asked who was calling and know they’d come back and tell me he wasn’t available?
Did he think I wanted to carry around my rage at Travis Dorsey, a lead weight that threatened to stop me from breathing?
And what kind of name was Hawk anyway? Had his parents really named him that? Was it a nickname? Or had he given himself the name after the masks he, Jagger, and Vigo wore in the Hunt?
Either way, it was dumb. Like him.
My stomach grumbled, and I fluffed my pillow and turned onto my side.
It wasn’t that Hawk obviously thought I was crazy. I was used to that. I was pretty sure Detective Grabowski thought I was crazy, and Detective Taber, the detective who’d first had the case, had definitely thought I was crazy.
Even Bram thought I was crazy the one and only time I’d dared to ask if he could at least acknowledge the possibility that our parents had been intentionally murdered. Well, maybe notcrazy, but at least grief-stricken and emotionally unwell.
So yeah, I was used to that part.
But not getting anyone to listen to me, that part really pissed me off.
They listened.
Shut up, I told the voice in my head. And okay, the voice was right. Kind of. The Hawkshadlistened to the story about my parents and Travis Dorsey. And Jagger and Vigo had seemed open to the possibility that I was right.
It was Hawk who was the problem. Stupid, brooding, cold, beautiful Hawk.
I exhaled loudly into the room. My stomach was grumbling again, no surprise since I’d skipped dinner.
The thought of food had made me sick on the heels of the argument with the Hawks, but I hadn’t eaten since lunch at the coffee shop, and my stomach twisted with hunger.
I tapped my phone to look at the time — 1:32 a.m. — and sat up with a sigh. The Hawks were probably either asleep or in their rooms chopping up babies or whatever it was they did when no one was looking.
I needed food.
I opened my door quietly, listening for sound, then stepped into the hall when I didn’t hear anything. I made it past theclosed doors in my part of the hall and continued through the sitting area with the window seat and into the other hallway.
I planned to go straight to the kitchen but stopped almost without thinking at the first closed door. Jagger had said their bedrooms were in the second hallway next to mine.
So what was behind these doors?
I’d explored the first floor on my second day at the house and had found a fully outfitted workout room, a library, a media room with theater-style seats, and a laundry room, but I’d been walking past the closed doors in the first hallway upstairs without a thought.
I opened the first door and peered into the darkness, then felt for the light switch on the wall.
