“I was hoping you knew,” Jagger said.
“I don’t.” Cassie frowned. “I just thought it was a bill.”
Jagger picked up his phone. “I was curious so I did a search.”
He pushed his phone toward Cassie.
She studied the phone. “S&S Storage?”
“It’s a storage facility in Carlton,” Jagger said. “The kind you rent when you have too much shit.”
“Or when you need a safe place to store your shit,” I said.
“Wait…” Cassie looked up. “Do you think this has something to do with the key?”
The possibility hung in the air
I put my Oreo spoon on the counter and looked around at the people who’d become my family.
My real family.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
24
CASSIE
S&SSecurity wasn’t in Carlton exactly. It was on a stretch of rural road — next to a Tractor Supply on one side and a vacant lot with chain link fence around it on the other — half a mile from the suburban town.
It was the kind of place I’d probably driven by without noticing: just a series of rectangular one-story structures with silver roll-up doors and a small sign on the first building that readSafe and Sound Storage.
The information you need to pick up where we left off will require you to uncover long-stored treasures.
Vigo parked the G-Wagon in the empty lot, and we got out of the car and looked around.
“Wow,” Hawk said, taking in the peeling paint and rusted metal, “this place has seen better days.”
He’d suffered for our sex at the barn that morning, and he’d been moving more carefully, taking it easy on his burn and the incision that was still healing from his surgery.
His dark eyes were hidden by sunglasses, his broad shoulders testing the seams on the clean white T-shirt he’d changed into before we left Blackwell Falls for S&S Storage.
I knew exactly how his long black hair felt in my fingers, exactly how his powerful body felt moving over mine, and desire still thrummed between my thighs like a wakened beast.
“This look like a place where your parents would store stuff?” Vigo’s blond hair was spikier than usual, making him look a little like a mad scientist as he scanned the empty parking lot.
The fact that he was holding his bat didn’t help. I had that sense I always had with the Hawks: that anything could happen, that it could be good, bad, or even catastrophic.
But it didn’t scare me anymore. They’d pulled me into their madness, and I had no desire to leave, no desire to return to my former, ordered world.
“Not really,” I said. “But there were a lot of things I didn’t know about my parents so that might not mean much.”
Jagger tugged on one of his eyebrow piercings. “Are we sure this place was even here ten years ago?”
I didn’t blame him for asking. S&S was the kind of place that could have been here fifty years or five, the kind of place that had been forgotten since the day it opened.
“I’m not sure of anything.”
I touched the silver key in my pocket.
