I walked through the villa, trailing Alina Volkova. I’d spotted her almost as soon as I’d split from Hawk, fresh from our climb (if you could call it that, we’d slid down as much as we’d climbed) down the hillside over Villa Lysis.
And yeah, Alina Volkova was pretty, I guessed.
But that kind of pretty left me cold.
She knew what she was: a pretty rich girl with cookie-cutter features, expert makeup, and designer clothes, a girl whose only purpose in life was jet-setting from one party to the next.
Maybe it turned me off because it shone a light on some part of myself that understood her, the part of myself that hadn’t been that different before we’d met Cassie.
Hadn’t I been a version of Alina Volkova? Someone who parkoured from one thrill to the next with no thought for anyone but myself?
Except I wasn’t that person anymore. That person wouldn’t be hunting the crowd for signs of Cassie. That person wouldn’t be itching to put a bullet in Dimitri Kaprolov’s head to avenge Cassie and her parents. That person wouldn’t be thinking ahead to the future, a future where fun sounded like fucking Cassie for the rest of my life, putting a baby inside her, waking up to her every fucking morning and going to sleep with her every fucking night.
And don’t get me wrong. I was still going to rob banks, was still going to have fun.
Life was too short for anything else.
But my fun was going to be with Cassie from now on.
I spotted Hawk across the room but didn’t acknowledge him. He had eyes on Alina too, and I knew he was clocking her security, three men in identical black suits who rotated casually around her, like planets rotating around the sun.
I scanned the crowd around her, looking for Dimitri even though my hopes for finding him here had already started to fade.
It wasn’t that we hadn’t spotted him yet: it was the vibe.
Dimitri was a ghost, a man who drifted through the background of other people’s lives, a man who let other people do his dirty work.
It made sense that he wouldn’t be here when I thought about the pictures of Alina that included him, pictures that usually showed the two of them at a restaurant or on a boat.
This was Alina’s scene, not Dimitri’s.
Which didn’t mean the trip was wasted. Because Alina would eventually meet up with her father, and now we had Alina in our sites.
Plus, we’d come prepared.
Now one of us just had to get close enough to her to execute the backup plan.
47
CASSIE
Jaggerand I stood in the biggest room on the first floor, a room that might once have been a ballroom, several arches soaring overhead, multiple chandeliers casting glittering light over the crowd clustered around a glass case highlighting the fifteen-million-dollar diamond-and-emerald necklace on black velvet.
We’d already seen it up close and I’d been surprised to feel nothing as I’d stared at the expensive piece of jewelry. It was just a bunch of gold and polished rocks.
Pretty, I guessed, but ultimately meaningless.
I glanced at the ring on my finger, a ring that had been made for me by the Hawks, and felt something else: my connection to the three men who’d changed my life.
Who’d changed me.
“Do you think Bram’s okay?” I asked Jagger.
“He’s fine. If there had been a problem with security we would have heard about it by now.”
We hadn’t brought our phones (the Hawks said it would be stupid, just in case we got caught), and I hated being out of touch with my brother, knowing he was outside with a bunch of armed men.
It was stupid — Bram could take care of himself — but everything that had happened over the past few months had only driven home the realization that we were the last members of our family, and I really wanted to live in a future where Bram and I could do something other than try to overcome our shared trauma.
