I moved through the boxes methodically, the house quiet all around me, the Hawks still asleep. My pussy pulsed at the thought of them sprawled out, naked, on Jagger’s bed.
But it wasn’t just my body that responded to the thought. There was something else, something in the vicinity of my heart that scared the crap out of me, that filled me to overflowing when I thought about the way Jagger held me when he slept, about Vigo’s muscular body finally at rest and Hawk’s long hair falling across his face, his dark lashes casting shadows on his cheeks.
I forced myself not to work through the boxes too quickly even though I felt like I already knew everything by heart. I’d been through it all so many times, but I didn’t want to miss anything important so I started making piles: things that might have something to do with the sex trafficking ring — because I was pretty sure that was connected to the wire transfers and I was prettythatwas connected to my parents’ murder and the person who’d run me off the road — and things that probably didn’t.
It was a lot of speculation, but I had to work with what I had and what I had was a lot of speculation.
Nothing jumped out at me as being connected to either Dimitri Kaprolov or the initials Jagger had found on the wire transfer to the Rooks.
I slumped in defeat.
Maybe it was unrealistic — the people behind the sex trafficking ring were powerful, and Lilah had said they were all over the world — but I refused to believe there was no way forward and I wasn’t ready to talk to Bram.
I already knew he’d tell me to stay out of it. And yeah, I could ignore him and keep digging with his knowledge, but it would freak him out, and after everything that had happened to our parents — not to mention my accident — I didn’t want to do that if I could avoid it.
I started packing up the boxes, keeping everything in the stacks I’d created: one big stack for everything that was almost certainly not related to the sex trafficking ring, a smaller stack of stuff that might be, and an even smaller stack was probably connected, like the wire transfers from Kensington Trust.
Maybe I could run down some of the other recipients of wire transfers from Kensington. If Kensington was being used to transfer money to Aventine and the Rooks, who else were they transferring money to?
I had all of the boxes repacked but one, and I was reaching in to place the final stack of papers — the ones that probably related to the sex trafficking ring and the story my parents had been working on when they’d been killed — when I spotted a scrap of paper in the bottom of the box.
But when I reached inside, I saw that it wasn’t a scrap of paper at all.
It was a napkin, the flap caught in the crease of the box so that the napkin blended in with the white cardboard.
I tugged at it carefully, not wanting it to rip, and pulled it loose.
It was printed with a logo — a stag’s head — and the words The Black Stag.
And under it, a name: Anna Reed.
There was also a series of numbers. A phone number, I thought, with the country code +44.
A quick internet search on my phone told me it was the country code for the UK.
I hesitated, then dialed the number since it was already morning there.
A woman’s voice answered, British but with the hint of something else.
Russian?
“Hello?” she said.
“Hello, is this Anna Reed speaking?”
Hesitation. And then, “Who’s calling?”
“My name is Cassie Montgomery. My parents were Braden and Catherine Montgomery. They?— ”
The line went dead, and I pulled my phone away from my ear and looked at it in disbelief.
Anna Reed had hung up on me.
I redialed but wasn’t surprised when she didn’t answer. She clearly didn’t want to talk to me.
My heart was racing, like I’d just discovered a tiny piece of gold hidden in the rocks at the bottom of the Blackwell River.
I got to my feet and headed back into Jagger’s bedroom.
