She would fight.
46
VIGO
I staredat the computer screen, my eyes practically crossed. I’d been on my computer all morning, Cassie and Jagger set up next to me on the patio table outside, cups of coffee gone cold, their laptops open.
“Did you know Owen Shaw was seen on Dimitri Kaprolov’s yacht in Greece?” I asked them.
Owen Shaw was a tech bro — a nerd from MIT who’d become a billionaire when he’d sold his software company to a tech giant.
“I saw that,” Cassie said, her eyes glued to her own computer.
We’d spent the first day home sleeping and regrouping, trying to conquer our jet lag. I was still a little groggy, but Hawk had left the house early that morning and Cassie had hopped out of bed and grabbed her laptop like a woman on a mission.
I’d felt like a dick letting her sift through the terabytes of information on Dimitri Kaprolov alone, so I’d grabbed my computer and we’d set up shop on the patio, combing the internet for everything we could find about Kaprolov and his known associates.
Jagger had joined us less than twenty minutes later.
“Did you know Kaprolov had dinner with Roman Vale at Cannes last year?” he said.
Cassie looked up. “Really?”
“Not surprised,” I said. “He always seemed like a smarmy asshole.”
Roman Vale was an A-List celebrity with the kind of dignified good looks I could only hope to achieve in my fifties. Maybe I should have been surprised that he was palling around with Kaprolov, but after just a couple of hours researching the Russian oligarch, nothing surprised me anymore.
The guy wasn’t just hanging with old pot-bellied Russians.
He was connected.
Reallyconnected.
In just a couple of hours we’d logged not just tech bros and celebrities but titans of business, Saudi princes, and politicians from every continent in the world.
“It’s a long way from scary asshole to sex trafficker,” Jagger said.
“We don’t know they’re all sex traffickers,” Cassie said. “We’re just trying to establish high-profile connections to Dimitri so we can dig deeper. Some of these people may have no idea what he’s involved in.”
I leaned back in my chair. “You know what they say, two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.”
Cassie trained her eyes — blue today — on me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I rested my foot on the table and tipped my chair back until I was teetering on the two back legs. “Just that Anna made it seem like a lot of people were involved in Imperium Fratrum. You really think no one’s talked?”
“I agree,” Jagger said, without looking up from his laptop. “People overlook bad shit all the time when it means confronting that the people they like are assholes or criminals.”
“You think some of these people know and just… accept it?” Cassie asked.
She didn’t get it because it was something she’d never do, which only made me love her more because she was one of the truly good people I knew and I’d realized a long time ago that truly good people weren’t a dime a dozen.
And yeah, I loved Cassie. It had crept up on me, but I couldn’t deny it when just the thought of losing her made me want to tear the world apart.
I just hadn’t told her yet because somehowI love youdidn’t seem very romantic when you were trying to bring down a notorious sex trafficking ring.
Some separation between the two would be nice.
“I know they do,” I said. “Most people aren’t strong enough to have their internal biases confronted. It’s easier to just pretend things are the way you think they are or the way you want them to be.”
