The building was stately, with two stories, columns out front, and darkened windows that said the cleaning crew was either already gone or had yet to arrive.
“You’re late,” Neo said as we approached.
In spite of the heat — Blackwell falls wouldn’t start cooling off until the end of the month — he wore trousers and a button-down shirt open to reveal a tattoo on his chest I couldn’t quite make out.
He looked like what he was: the rich heir to a mafia throne.
“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t realize this building was such a hike from the parking lot.”
Rock — in jeans and T-shirt I clocked as expensive — ran his hands through his platinum-blond hair. “Let’s get this over with.”
“I thought we were breaking into the Rooks’ house?” I asked as Hawk and I followed them to the glass doors of the building.
“We are,” Rock said.
I’d hoped for a simple answer when I’d called Neo for an update on the wire transfer that had been sent from Kensington Trust to Aventine, one of the transfers Cassie’s parents had flagged before their murder.
But it hadn’t been that easy.
The Kings had located the transfer in Aventine’s archives, but the name of the intended recipient had been scrubbed from the records. All they’d been able to see was that it had been disbursed to a fund used by the Rooks, the frat run by kids of the bratva.
In other words, the Russian mafia.
To figure out what had happened to the money from there, we had to access the Rooks’ records.
And that meant getting into their headquarters and frat house.
“Walking up to the Rooks and asking to see their records room is a bad idea.” Neo removed a key from his jeans and unlocked one of the glass doors to the administration building. “Unless you want to be tortured by a bunch of Russian thug babies?”
“We’ll pass,” Hawk said.
He looked forbidding in the shadows, his long dark hair partially obscuring his face, his posture like an animal preparing to pounce at the first sign of danger.
“That’s what I thought,” Neo said
We stepped into a cavernous foyer with soaring ceilings and a grand staircase curving to the second floor. The floor was travertine, and above us, the crystals on the chandelier winked even in the shadows.
It was typical for a private university for the elite, although in this casethe elitereferred not to old-money trust fund babies or the kids of new-money tech billionaires but to the most powerful criminal families in the world.
Neo tossed Rock the keys. “Lock it up.”
Rock locked the door while we followed Neo down a long hall.
We passed a large event space, its doors open to reveal a banner that readWelcome, Freshman.
And if the chandelier and staircase hadn’t made it obvious that this was no state university, the hallway beyond the event space would have: the closed doors on either side were solid wood, carved into intricate designs, the artwork framed in gold.
Neo stopped at a door near the end of the hall. A gold plaque on the wall readChess Room.
Because of course Aventine would have a fucking chess room.
“You guys a bunch of undercover chess nerds?” Hawk asked.
“Used to be part of the curriculum,” Rock said. “Before phones and computers rotted our brains.”
It made sense. All the frats at the school were named after chess pieces: the Kings, the Knights, the Saints, the Rooks.
Even the Queens had a house where the women from all the crime families lived and studied. Apparently organized crime apparently hadn’t caught up to the twenty-first century.
