Chapter Thirty

When she left, I pretended not to hear her. She was crying, and it made my chest hurt. I rolled over, and willed the pain there to stop.

I pulled the memory of the tattoo—Monato’s mark—to the front of my mind. I pictured it on Cass’s shoulder, permanently etched into her otherwise perfect skin. It angered me. No. It infuriated me.

No wonder Monato had wanted her so badly. Before all of this, had she been his in more than one sense of the word? The thought burned my ego. I felt used, too. I might’ve been willing to protect her if she’d just told me.

Maybe.

But she said didn’t know Monato, argued a small voice in the back of my head. She seemed scared.

Or she’s a very good liar, I countered.

I rolled off the bed and yanked my jeans on angrily.

Either way, let him have her.

I opened my night stand drawer and pulled out a bottle of single malt and my favourite snifter. I looked at them both, put the snifter back, and took a swig from the bottle.

Part of me thought I was being unreasonable. An even bigger part of me thought I should be chasing after Cass, begging her to forgive me. So what if she had been a part of Monato’s group of girls at one point? She clearly didn’t want to be there now. She really was afraid of the man, I was sure of it. And maybe she hadn’t even been a willing participant. God knows I got the impression some of his girls hadn’t been.

But why didn’t she just tell me? I took another large gulp of whiskey.

I answered myself again. Because she was manipulating you.

That made perfect sense, too. I’d been trying to get to Colin’s killer for six months and if I’d been Monato, I’d have wanted me watched as I got closer to the truth. I hadn’t managed to plant anyone in Monato’s crew, but all he’d had to do was send a pretty face my way and that was it. How simple? Why hadn’t I thought of it?

Mostly because I would never want to expose a woman—any woman, not just Cass—to that life, I admitted to myself.

I’d seen Billy’s daughter lose herself in that world. My own brother had been murdered as a result of Monato and his views on women.

But Cass...

Why would she get the tattoo that marked her as one of his if she wasn’t?

I cracked my knuckles angrily as I focused on the evidence in front of me. There was an answer I wasn’t seeing. But the whiskey was making my mind feel slippery. I was missing something.

I drank again. And again.

I wanted out. I was done. I’d found Colin’s killer, and I had no reason to keep doing what I was doing. It was time to go back to my other life. I grabbed my phone and prepared myself to make the call, excusing myself from the business. I dialled and took another angry swig of whiskey. The bottle was getting empty, but I didn’t feel any better. In fact, I felt worse.

“Hello?” a deep voice on the end of the line said.

But something was nagging at me.

“Hello?” the deep voice said again.

“Never mind.” I replied, and I hung up.

I walked out of my room and down the hall to Colin’s room. I hadn’t been inside in who knows how long. Since before Colin had come into the business. Since before we had moved—three years earlier—out of the house and into separate apartments in the city. I took a big sip of my whiskey, opened the door, and stopped.

I frowned into the room, trying to figure out what it was that gave me pause.

It was too clean.

There should have been thick dust everywhere, like there was all over my room, like there was all over the rest of the house. But there was just the thinnest layer, as if someone had been using it much more recently than three years ago.

Had Colin been in here not long before he died? I wasn’t sure..

I walked over to the nightstand and slid it open. A leather holster and a gun were lying inside. I was sure they were Colin’s, and I was doubly sure he hadn’t owned them when we were living together.

“Why had he come here, of all places to conduct his business?” I muttered to myself.

I answered my own question. For the same reason you did—because no one else knew about the house.

So he’d been working in secret. On what?

I went over to his closet and shoved aside his suits, exposing a hidden panel on the wall. When he was a teenager, he’d stashed everything there—Playboy magazines, beer, his drawing-filled journal. If he really had been working on something, it would be in there.

I pulled the panel off, dragged out a medium-sized box, and took the lid off. My hands were shaking a little as I took the file folder out from inside. I tried unsuccessfully to steady them. As I opened it, the pictures inside fell onto the floor.

There were three small stacks, each with three photos a piece, and each with an index card of information written in illegible shorthand. It was Colin’s writing, and I felt a pang as I looked at it.

I spread the three stacks out and bent down over them. The images of three dead women’s shoulders—marked exactly the same way Cass’s was—made me angry and nauseous once again.

Monato’s mark.

But the pictures also made me curious.

I slammed the bottle down beside the paperwork and shoved thoughts of Monato and Cass aside.

I lifted the stacks, and moved the top photos away so I could examine the next ones. They were of the same women, only these ones were full body shots. I picked them up, one by one.

The first one was Billy’s daughter. I recognized her immediately. In life she’d been a petite blonde with an easy smile—not much more than a kid. In the picture, she was thin to the point of illness, with protruding shoulder blades and a gaunt face. She’d had a drug problem, and it was evident in the images as well.

I glanced at my brother’s notes and I read the index card. Front, M. Overdose.

I couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been for him to keep this information about the woman he loved.

There was a date recorded on the card, too, and I winced as I realized she had died only two weeks before Colin.

Why had he kept these in here?

I moved on to the next stack of pictures. They were of another blonde with a bruised face.

Cross, B. Overdose.

Colin had phoned me after this girl died. He’d been the one to find her. I closed my eyes and remembered the conversation.

“Why are you calling me?” I had asked. “I thought your new work meant severing all ties.”

“C’mon, John,” he whined. “I’ve got a job to do.”

I sighed. “Fine.”

It had been two months since I’d spoken to him, but I caved anyway. I always did with Colin. With everyone else, I could lay down the law. But never with him. He was only twenty-one—eight years younger than I was—and could bend me to his will at any given moment.

“I had to do something I didn’t like today, bro,” he said.

“I have to do something I don’t like every day,” I had laughed.

“I found a body,” he whispered.

I stopped laughing. “Did you call the cops?”

I wasn’t sure which answer I wanted. A yes would mean he’d endangered himself. A no would mean he was that much closer to stepping over the edge. He didn’t respond to my question directly anyway.

“Here’s the thing, one of the older guys found a girl, too. Just like this one. In the same apartment, but years ago” Colin told me. “So I’m doing some digging.”

I felt instantly worried.

“You shouldn’t be talking about it,” I said.

“It’s hard to not talk to the guy who’s helping you clean up a body.”

“Stay out of it,” I commanded. “You get paid to carry a gun and clean up messes, not to worry about how the messes got there.”

“I don’t think I can do that, bro.”

“These girls…they get in over their heads and they wind up dead,” I stated with false casualness.

“Not all of them want to be where they are,” my brother replied coldly.

Why hadn’t I picked up on that? He had probably been talking about Mary-Anne, and I had just dismissed it.

“Colin, you said yourself you’ve got a job to do,” I had reminded him.

“This is bigger.”

He sounded excited and that worried me more.

“I’m on my way home,” I told him. “I’ll cover your ass when I get there.”

“No!” he protested. “The whole point of this was to separate ourselves. It was even your idea.”

“Sort of,” I muttered.

But I hadn’t wanted to tell him that our then-mutual boss had pushed for the move and I had fought against it. Colin had been told that the whole thing was my idea, and that had made him so damned proud.

I put down the picture of Cross, B., and moved on to the third photo. It was an older, more blurry picture, and I was sure she was the other girl Colin had mentioned, the one who had been found in the same apartment. How did he manage to acquire it?

Canter, J.M. Overdose. (Suspected suicide.)

I stared down at Canter’s face, and my world halted. It was a jarring stop, and for a second, my whole world was still.

It was Cass’s face there, eyes closed peacefully. The same high cheekbones. The same full mouth and delicate nose. Yes, this girl’s hair was dark. But when I looked closely, I could clearly see lighter roots as her scalp.

“Jesus,” I swore.

I cursed my own stupidity.

It had been Cass getting a tattoo at Yun’s, not her friend, I realized. That ink on her back had been fresh. She had been commemorating this woman—her half-sister. Jeanette. She had as much as told me so at the cabin. But I’d had no reason to make the connection.

Except you should have, said that small, irritating voice in my head. And you probably would have, too, if you weren’t so intent on getting her to pretend to be your wife.

I had sent her away with no questions, with no explanation.

“I’m an idiot,” I muttered.

I fumbled around for my phone. I wondered if Billy had already dropped her off at home. I hoped not. I dialled him quickly and he answered on the first ring.

“Things not going as planned, Casanova?” He sounded tired.

“Not exactly,” I admitted. “I’m a fool. A jerky fool.”

Billy laughed. “No shit.”

“You on the road?” I asked.

“Nah. Been back awhile. Didn’t want to disturb you.”

Dammit.

“Do you think she’ll forgive me?” I wanted to know.

“Who?”

“Cass. Who else?”

Billy paused. “Forgive you for what? Isn’t she up there with you?”

“I told her to leave,” I replied.

“For God’s sake. Why?”

“I made a big mistake,” I said. “I thought she was one of Monato’s girls.”

“What?!” I’d never heard the man sound so surprised.

“I said it was a big one.”

Billy was silent.

“And I told her you’d give her a ride wherever she wanted to go,” I said. “She didn’t ask you?”

“I didn’t see her,” Billy told me quietly. “I’ve been asleep in the guest room for hours.”