Cassie wasn’t a baby. It would be wrong to infantilize her.
“Can you guys help me?— ”
She stopped in her tracks when she spotted us in the kitchen. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, mouse. Want some Oreos?” I moved to the cupboard to pull down another cup — not as good as my Oreo cup but it would do — then reached for an Oreo. “You look like you need Oreos. I mean, you look beautiful too but you definitely look like you need Oreos.”
Cassie always liked beautiful, whether she was wearing a fancy dress like the one she’d worn to my dad’s award ceremony or jeans and a T-shirt like she wore now, her copper-colored hair in a ponytail, eyes flashing blue above her lavender T-shirt.
She narrowed her gaze and I suddenly felt like a kid who’d literally gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Sit,” Hawk ordered.
She did because she was a good mouse and she did what we told her to do.
Mostly in bed but other times too. Sometimes.
“Is it about last night with the Kings?” she asked.
“We found the transfer,” Jagger said. “The Kings were right. It went to the Rooks’, and I found a note in the metadata.”
It was the reason he’d gone with Hawk to Aventine: Hawk was the most likely to get into the financial records but Jagger was the one best equipped to read them.
“What kind of note?” Cassie asked.
“Initials,” Jagger said. “IS at KT.”
“IS at KT…” Cassie furrowed her brow. “KT has to be Kensington Trust.”
“Agreed,” Hawk said.
Cassie chewed her bottom lip and it was all I could do not to say fuck this shit and carry her to bed, forget about wire transfers and sex trafficking and murder and make Cassie come until she forgot about it all too.
“So who — or what — does IS mean?” she asked.
“No idea,” Hawk said. “The Kings didn’t know either. This all happened before they were at Aventine. Most of the people associated with it back then are long gone.”
“Maybe there’s someone in the bratva with those initials?” Cassie said. “Someone who graduated from Aventine back then?”
“They couldn’t think of anyone,” Jagger said. “But they said they’d do some digging.”
Cassie nodded. “Okay well… that’s still good right? I mean at least we know for sure the money that was transferred to Aventine was earmarked for the Rooks. And that means it probably made its way to the Russian mob, which makes sense if Travis Dorsey was telling the truth about the man who hired him to kill my parents.”
I nodded, scraping the bottom of my Oreo cup with my long spoon. “Definitely.”
I wanted to kick Hawk and Jagger, who were sitting at the island like doctors about to deliver bad news.
“What aren’t you telling me?” she asked, looking from me to Jagger to Hawk.
“Bram already talked to the Kings,” Hawk said. “Last year.”
Cassie shook her head. “About this?”
“Not exactly, Jagger said.
“Turns out that guy who kidnapped Maeve went to Aventine on scholarship,” Hawk said. “And the guy who broughthimin, who mentored him, was the same guy my contact the bureau said is under investigation.”
