And deep down, I didn’t think Bram was built that way either.
He’d proven that when he’d put everything on the line for Maeve.
I thought about the phone Aloha had hacked from the dead guy at the paper mill. How did it connect to what I was seeing on the board?Didit connect?
But it had to. Somehow everything that had happened — Aventine and the Cantwells and the school Lilah told me about and Dimitri Kaprolov and the missing girls like Rain, Jasmine and Nia — was connected.
I just couldn’t see the red string between them yet.
And what about princessA? Who was she and what part did she play in the dark tragedy playing out around us?
I had more information than ever.
So why did I feel like I was getting further away from the truth?
26
JAGGER
Cassie puta brave face on the day, but I knew the time we’d spent at the storage unit had been hard in more ways than one. First there was the knowledge that her parents had left something behind, that they’d made plans to preserve it in the event of their death.
And that was almost certainly why they’d paid for the storage unit in advance, why they’d appointed an ally like Daniel Feldman to watch over it: they’d known someone was onto them, had known they’d kicked a hornet’s nest that put them in danger.
So Catherine and Braden Montgomery had packed away their most prized possessions: pictures of their children, mementos from their lives together. They’d done it knowing Bram and Cassie might someday find everything after they were gone, that their children would have to revisit childhood memories without them.
That must have been hard for Cassie to process.
And then there was the new information about Catherine’s and Braden’s investigation into the sex-trafficking ring, aplethora of leads to pursue when we’d already spent the last four months trying to unravel Imperium Fratrum.
It would have been a lot for anybody.
We’d been wiped after unloading the contents of the storage unit, and Cassie had looked more than a little shellshocked. So we’d ordered Chinese and piled onto Hawk’s California King to eat and watch a movie, trying to give Cassie a cozy distraction, if only for a while.
Now we were stretched out on the bed watching a romcom — Hawk’s choice, allegedly for Cassie, although the expression on his face said he was pretty into it — and Cassie was still on her phone next to me, researching the photos on the board from the storage unit, looking up names from the FOIA documents.
I’d stopped being surprised by the way my chest tightened when I looked at her.
I knew what it meant now. Knew how much I loved her.
My feelings had been validated at the storage unit, because looking at the pictures over her shoulder — pictures of her parents, of Bram as a little boy and Cassie as a gap-toothed little kid — I’d seen a happy family.
And for the first time in my life, I’d felt the pull of longing.
No one was more surprised than me to realize I actually wanted to watch my baby grow inside Cassie’s belly, wanted to hold a tiny little human with her shy smile and her copper hair.
None of that could happen until we put this Imperium Fratrum shit to bed — I couldn’t live with the possibility that Cassie would be a target forever — but as I watched the light from her screen flicker across her face, I spotted the feverish shine in her eyes and knew she needed a break.
I hesitated, then plucked the phone out of her hands.
“Hey!” She blinked, her eyes clouded.
“Time to put this away.” I set it on the nightstand next to Hawk’s bed.
“I was working on something,” she said.
“We know,” Vigo said. “You’re not even watching this stupid movie.”
“It’s not that stupid,” Hawk said from Cassie’s other side.
