“Wait…” We waited while Cassie put the pieces together. “Bram knows about Dimitri Kaprolov?”
“He knows of him,” Hawk said. “Undetermined whether he knows that Kaprolov might be connected to the sex trafficking ring.”
“I can’t believe this,” Cassie said. “The whole time? Bram knew the whole time?”
“In all fairness to Bram,” I said, “he probably doesn’t knowyouknow about Kaprolov.”
I knew why Hawk glared at me: why the fuck was I defending Bram?
“Have you told him?” Jagger asked her. “About Kaprolov?”
She sighed. “No, I… I don’t know. It was just a name. And all Bram told me about what happened with Maeve was that she’d been kidnapped by that manosphere guy.”
I took my Oreo cup to the sink. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it kind of sounds like you and Bram need to talk more.”
Cassie rubbed at something on the island. “It’s not that simple.”
Jagger tucked a piece of hair that had fallen out of her ponytail behind her ear. “Sometimes hard conversations are worth having.”
“Easy for you to say,” Cassie grumbled. “You don’t have Bram as a big brother.”
In any other universe, I would be glad Cassie and Bram were at odds if only to fuck with Bram. But now all I could think aboutwas Cassie and what was best for her, which was obviously fixing things with him even though Bram was an epic asshole.
All of which meant I was more than in trouble with Cassie Montgomery.
I was royally fucked.
37
CASSIE
I was still reelingfrom everything the Hawks had told me when I returned to my room after another hours-long orgy, this time in Jagger’s bed..
They were good at distracting me, and who could blame me for being distracted? The way they occupied my body left no room for anything else, their hands and mouths probing every inch of me, their toys taking me to new heights of pleasure even when I was sure it wasn’t possible for sex to feel any better than it already did.
This time it had been a thick rubber glove, each finger covered in a different textured surface: thick corkscrew ridges, smooth nubs, even rubber spikes. The black glove had looked intimidating on Jagger’s big hand, but I gave myself over to the Hawks, and like always, they brought me to new sexual heights, pushing their rubber-clad fingers inside me while burying their faces between my thighs, teasing my clit with the textured surface until I came so hard my eyes watered.
I should have been exhausted and ready to sleep wrapped in their arms, especially since the clock was ticking on my time withthem. Instead I’d stared at the ceiling as their breathing turned rhythmic, dropping into sleep one by one.
Now I sat on the floor of my room and removed a lid from one of the boxes from my apartment. Hawk and Jagger had carried them in from my car, but I hadn’t had time to look through them since the Hawks’ revelation about the note on the wire transfer to the Rooks.
I still couldn’t believe it. All this time we’d been running down the same person, a person tied to Maeve’s kidnapping last year.
I remembered the question Daisy had asked me when I’d told her I didn’t think Maeve’s kidnapping had anything to do with the sex trafficking ring in Blackwell Falls:are you sure about that?
The truth was, I hadn’t been sure. I’d known Bram kept things from me, that he tried to shelter me like I was still the little kid he’d had to raise after our parents died.
But Bram’s determination to keep me from anything bad — anything real — had succeeded in making me follow suit. Now I didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t trust him enough to tell him stuff I knew would make him upset or mad.
It hadn’t done either of us any favors to dance around the hard stuff, but that didn’t mean I knew how to fix it.
How did you get someone to talk when they didn’t want to talk? How did you get them to share their feelings when they were just beginning to acknowledge that they had them?
I sighed and closed the first file box. I didn’t even know what I was looking for, maybe something that would connect the dots between my parents and Dimitri Kaprolov or the initials in the wire transfer to the Rooks.
It seemed impossible that my parents would leave all this information behind — interview notes about stories they were working on and copies of letters written to lawmakers and pagesand pages of financial records — and not leave anything that might help someone connect the dots.
Then again, it’s not like they’d expected to be driven off the mountain. Not like they’d expected to orphan their two kids.
