She said a cool goodbye to the Hawks and we started toward the back of the house where Hawk had moved the car.
We were just about to the corner of the house when she called my name.
I turned to look at her, a forgotten woman with haunted gray eyes and the regal bearing of a displaced princess.
“I held you once,” she said. “When you were first born. I came to see your mother after she got home from the hospital, and there you were, the tiniest little thing with your mother’s red hair and changeable eyes.”
“I’m glad.”
She returned my smile. “Me too.”
She was gone before we rounded the corner.
45
CASSIE
I staredout the window of the plane even though there wasn’t anything to see. The night was moonless and dark, broken only by the flashing light on the jet’s wing.
I was still processing everything Anna had said earlier that day, everything she’d told me about my parents. They’d always been frozen in my mind at the ages they were when they’d died, but hearing Anna talk about them had given me a glimpse into their earlier lives. Now I imagined my mom as a girl even younger than me, attending Bellepoint and going to a party at Aventine, looking for fun or maybe a cute boy.
I could see her standing in the woods at the quarry (I’d never been but I’d heard about it), introducing herself to Irina Sokolov. And I could see the rest of her life unfolding too, meeting my dad — a cute engineer who’d graduated from a bigger school — and getting married and having Bram and me.
There were still missing pieces: how my mom and dad — and English major and an engineer — had become activists and independent investigative journalists, what had drawn them to the missing girls and the financial transactions at Kensington,how they’d met up with the people I remembered filling our living room when I’d been a kid.
But I could see them as people now, real people with past, with lives that didn’t begin when they’d had kids.
It made me even sadder that their lives had been cut short — even more angry — and I pulled out the picture Irina had given me and stared at the couple smiling into he camera, the little boy frowning next to our dad, like he knew what was coming.
“You kook like her,” Jagger said, coming over to sit next to me. He leaned in to get a closer look. “It’s in the eyes, the mouth.”
“You think?”
He nodded, his eyes still on the picture. “The hair is obvious, but I can see you in the way she smiles. She was a smokeshow, like you.”
I laughed softly, trying not to wake up Hawk and Vigo, who were sprawled out, fast asleep, in other seats. “Thanks.”
He took my hand, like he always did when he knew I was struggling. It was one of the many things I loved about him. He had a way of letting me know he was there when I needed it most, a way of being with me that was quiet but made e feel safe.
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “I think so. It’s just… a lot.”
“Understandable. Did it help? Talking to Anna?”
“It did,” I said. “It gave me a fuller picture of them, of what they were like. And know we know about Imperium Fratrum, and we know that Dimitri Kaprolov is one of them.”
Jagger’s brow furrowed with worry.
“What?” I asked.
“We found out something else,” he said. “Or we confirmed it. The sex trafficking ring didn’t die with the Cantwells. It’s bigger than that, bigger than them. And Dimitri is part of it.”
“That’s a good thing though right?” I asked. “Because now we know and we can really dig into Dimitri.”
He nodded but I could tell there wa something he wasn’t saying.
“What? Just say it.”
