“Maybe we should take Anna’s advice, back off. You heard her, Dimitri is powerful and dangerous, and according to her, he’s not even the only one we have to worry about,” Jagger said.
I pulled my hand away. “We can’t back off. What about Rain and Jasmine and Nia? What about all the other girls who are still out there?”
“We can take everything we know to the police,” Jagger said. “Lilah told you there was still an active investigation right?”
“And how much good has that done the missing girls? How much good did it do me on the mountain?”
The men behind Imperium Fratrum weren’t just dangerous to the girls they kidnapped and sold. They were dangerous to anyone who got close to knowing what their were doing, who they were.
How many more people — people like my parents, people like me — would die because they tried to find the missing girls? And how many more girls would be ripped from their lives, from their families, only to disappear into thin air?
“Investigations take a long time,” Jagger said. “Especially when the feds get involved. You can ask Hawk about that.”
“We don’t have time,” I hissed, trying and just about failing to stay quiet. “The girls who have gone missing don’t have time. And what if another one is taken? Won’t you feel responsible if we don’t do something? Because I will. I’ll wonder if maybe she would still be free and with her family if only I hadn’t quit.”
Jagger sat back and stared at me.
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I didn’t know your parents but I can’t help but think you sound just like your mom must have sounded when she brought what she knew to Irina.”
“Is that supposed to scare me? Make me stop?”
He reached for my hand again, clearly trying to diffuse my rising anger. “I never want to scare you, Cass. But I have to admit I wouldn’t mind if you stopped all of this because I’m starting to feel like I can’t imagine my life without you and what these people can do — what they’ve already done — scares the shit out of me.”
My shoulders sagged as the fight left my body.
Because how could a girl be mad when one of the three men of her dreams said he couldn’t imagine life without her?
I swallowed the emotion that rose in my throat. I wanted to tell him I felt that way too, that I wanted to stay with them when my three months was up next week.
That I wanted to stay with them forever.
But I couldn’t do that. Not without talking to Bram.
“It scares me too,” I said. “But theytooksomething from me, from those girls. And for the first time in my life, I feel…awakeenough to do something about it. Don’t ask me to spend the rest of my life in the coffee shop, safe but asleep while bad things happen all around me. Please don’t ask that of me.”
He let go of my hand and pulled me against him. Thanks to the plush leather seats, it was easier to sink against his side than it would have been in a regular plane.
“You scare the shit out of me, Cass.” He kissed the top of my head. “For more reasons than one. And I don’t scare easily.”
“I’m sorry. I just… I need you to let me be myself. My real self.”
It was a relief to say out loud the thing the Hawks had made me realize: that before the Hunt, I didn’t have the first clue who Iwas. I’d assumed I was Coffee Shop Cassie because that was who I’d been told I was, because that was who Bram wanted me to be.
Locked up in the shop, safe and sound.
Except I’d never really been that person, and pretending to be that person had put me to sleep, like a princess in a fairy tale who’d pricked her finger on a spinning wheel.
I’d been waiting for something to wake me up. To remind me who I really was.
Braden and Catherine Montgomery’s daughter.
And Braden and Catherine Montgomery’s daughter wouldn’t make lattes and mochas while missing girls were dropping like flies right next door.
She would push, even if it was scary.
Even if it was deadly.
