Cassie exhaled her relief.
“This is it,” Hawk said, craning his neck to look through the windshield at the thick row of hedges on either side of the grave drive.
“Still can’t see a fucking thing,” Vigo said. “What if there’s a gate or something?”
“We’ll have to take it as it comes,” Hawk said.
“Are you sure we shouldn’t try calling again?” Cassie asked. “Ask if she’ll see us?”
“Calling is for losers,” Vigo said. “We just show up. She’ll see us. One way or another.”
I caught Cassie’s frown in the shadows of the back seat. “Now you’re scaring me.”
“Nothing to be scared of,” Jagger said. “Hawk and Vigo are right. Anna Reed hung up on you. She’s not going to see us if we call. We’ll improvise.”
“I get nervous when you improvise,” Cassie said.
“I’m hurt,” Vigo said from the passenger seat. “Improvising is our specialty.”
“I don’t want to freak her out,” Cassie said.
“We’re not going to freak her out,” I said, hoping we didn’t actually freak her out. “We just want to talk.”
Cassie cut a glance at Vigo as Hawk put the car in gear. “Famous last words.”
“Why are you looking at me?” Vigo asked. “I didn’t even bring my bat.”
41
CASSIE
There was no gate.Just the long gravel drive leading through a row of hedges to a cottage nestled in the trees.
I turned to Vigo, sitting in the back seat with Jagger while Hawk drove. “No bat required.”
“We’re not in yet,” Vigo said.
He was right but I was still glad he didn’t have his bat or one of the guns the Hawks kept in their work room in the Blackwell Falls house. I knew they stole for a living — or they had before they’d won me in the Hunt, they hadn’t mentioned it since my accident — and I didn’t want them treating Anna Reed’s house like a smash-and-grab at a jewelry store.
She’d changed her name and gone into hiding for a reason. I didn’t know what that reason was yet, but I had no desire to freak her out.
“We’re just going to talk right?” I asked them, trying not to sound as nervous as I felt, both about what Anna Reed might tell me about my parents and what the Hawks might do to get the information out of her.
“Sure thing, mouse.” Vigo sounded positively chipper about the whole thing, which only made me more nervous.
There were few things that excited him more than sex and violence, and since we were here to talk to Anna Reed, I could only assume he was thinking about the latter.
Hawk pulled the car next to an older sedan and turned off the engine.
I looked through the passenger side window at the stone cottage in the trees. It was cute, the gardens extravagant for such a small place, still overflowing with color and trailing vines despite the fact that we were halfway through September.
I thought I saw the curtains in one of the front windows flutter, but it happened so fast I couldn’t be sure.
Smoke trailed from a chimney on the peaked roof, unsurprising since it was actually kind of cold, the sky gray and forbidding.
It had poured during the night, and we’d piled into the bed on the second floor of the rented house while rain pelted the windows. They took turns fucking me, making me come with their dicks and their mouths, not a toy in sight since we’d packed in a hurry.
The toys were fun but I hadn’t missed them: the Hawks had more than enough tricks up their sleeves, no batteries required.
