Chapter 23

23

Cole

T onight's poker game at the sports bar will no doubt be just like all the others—a bunch of smug assholes speaking in Russian, trying to con me out of more money by cheating. I think Inessa is even in on it since she wanders through the room constantly to refill drinks and shit, most likely to peek at my cards. But what these fuckers don't know is that I hustled rich frat boys for the past three years to make a little side money. I'm not some sucker they can fuck over every single time.

Not that I would let them see how I really feel about them. No, I continue to lose, to let them think I'm a stupid kid. After all, I'm supposed to be working my way into their group, pretending I want to know all about my piece of shit grandfather.

All I need to know about Yuri Petrov is how awful he treated my mother. Dante told me that he starved her and beat her for an entire week last summer demanding that she tell him where I was. No telling what he did the first sixteen years of her life.

I'm certain that Yuri's men are no different from him. None of them treat women very well. Just while I've been at the poker games, I've seen them smack female employees around and shit. The "escorts" around here are so out of it they don't even know where they are anymore. Why anyone would want to screw someone so spaced out, I have no idea.

"Back again so soon?" Inessa says when she comes up beside me at the bar. I'm having a beer since it's only ten. I have two hours to blow but came here to distract myself rather than sit in the penthouse thinking about Cass on her date.

"I can't seem to stay away," I reply with a smile rather than the truth which is that I need to find out who wants Dante and his entire family dead.

"You're early for the game," she remarks. Resting her forearm on the bar she brushes it against mine. "I could keep you company down here or upstairs if you want."

My balls are still blue and aching from not getting any relief after going down on Cass, but I don't want to fuck Inessa. I should want her. Cass constantly rejects me lately, and she told me to quit coming to her room, which means I should take the hint that it's over and done, whatever we were doing. And sure, Inessa is beautiful, but she's also still the enemy.

But mostly, she's just not Cass.

Taking a long swig of beer, I try to figure out how to let her down gently. "Sorry, Inessa, but I…can't."

"Can't or won't?" she asks with a tilt of her head, her pretty blue eyes narrowed at me.

"Can't."

"Do you look so sad and lonely because you're having a spat with the redheaded girl? Salvato's spoiled daughter?"

"What? No. Why would you think that?" I ask in confusion .

She shrugs as if to say it's obvious that I want Cass. "Aren't you two together?"

"No. Cass is just my competition."

"Competition for what?"

Moment of truth time. Here goes nothing. Dante told me it was fine to tell them, but I haven't done so yet. Now is as good a time as any. "A competition to see who will be your next boss."

"Oh." Her brow furrows as she considers that. "Salvato is going to hand over the bar to you or her ?"

"Don't sound so excited," I reply with a chuckle at her obvious contempt. "And not just this bar, but everything he owns in the city, including all the Russian establishments."

"Well, I think you would be great. I just don't see the others here tolerating a woman in charge. If not for my marriage to Anton, they wouldn't allow me to help manage this place. Not that I'm allowed to do much."

"Cass can handle it," I assure her. "She could handle anything."

"I could help you win over the others and defeat her, you know. Unless you're loyal to Salvato?" Inessa says, but I barely hear her because I'm thinking about Cass.

And thinking about her only makes me want to see her, to crash her date. Is she home or still out with the munchkin? What if she doesn't come home but instead goes back to his place?

The odds are low. Still, thinking about another man touching her feels like I'm burning alive from the inside out, even if the chance is small.

"You know what? Tell the guys I can't make the game tonight, but maybe I'll catch the next one," I say to Inessa before walking away, heading for my guards who are playing a game of pool. They can still keep an eye on me from the billiards room while giving me some space, which I appreciate.

"What's up?" August asks, leaning on his pool stick.

"I need you to find out from Cass's guards where she went on her date tonight and then take me there."

Cass

After dinner, Alistair has the guards take us to his office, making good on his offer. I wait on the sofa in his lobby while he grabs the file. It takes longer than I expect. The guards agree to wait outside, able to clearly see into the office in the middle of the closed business center thanks to the floor-to-ceiling windows at the front entrance.

"Here you go," Alistair says when he returns and hands me an accordion file full of documents.

I pull out the stack of papers. The photo on the top of the stack of a pretty, young, redheaded woman makes me gasp.

"You look just like your mother," Alistair says when he stands next to the chair looking over my shoulder. "That file is all yours. I made copies but thought that you should have the originals. There are other photos."

I pick them up and shuffle through them slowly, seeing the life of the woman I never knew. The woman who brought me into this world and then disappeared.

The photo of her with a small, brown-haired girl makes my heart stop. "That's Madison. I don't think she ever remembered my mother, but maybe she did. She was probably only three years old when she…left or went missing."

"She was young, possibly too young to remember much about her," Alistair agrees. "You'll notice that most of the file is records of bank accounts, social media posts, that sort of thing. There wasn't as much surveillance video back in 2004. Well, there was, but it was mostly stored on servers in-house for businesses, predating the use of the cloud. So, if someone erased a day then it was lost for good. There were no backups."

Since Alistair doesn't seem in a hurry for me to leave, I keep shuffling through the paperwork with him narrating over my shoulder. It takes a little longer to decipher the handwritten notes. "Your mentor suspected my father?"

"Baker never would have said that to Dante Salvato's face, and I hope you'll keep that to yourself as well since he's happily retired now," he explains. "But in the end, Baker knew your father was innocent because he never gave up and he kept offering more money for information. He was desperate to find Charlotte, and failing that, to find conclusive evidence of what exactly happened to her. Guilty men don't want PIs digging around for dirt on a cold case."

"I can't believe Daddy worked so hard to find her," I whisper, mostly to myself.

In the pile of documents, I come to what looks like still photos from a video recording. The images are taken from far away, like in a retail store, but it's definitely my tall, thin, red-haired mother. She's carrying a bag that is so full of books you can see them peeking out the top.

"That was the day before her disappearance," Alistair remarks. "She walked to a bookstore close to the Royal Palace and purchased a stack of children's books. The receipt is in the file too."

I flip to a few more pages and see the list of titles—all my favorite books from my childhood. "We still have all of these in our library. My father refused to donate them even after we had all grown up."

"Your mother bought them for you and your sister. It's not fair that she never got a chance to read them to you," Alistair says. "She was your age when she disappeared."

I hadn't ever thought about her age at the time she left but…damn. She still had her entire life ahead of her, and someone snuffed it out. Seeing the file, my mother buying children's books, I feel more confident than ever before that she didn't abandon me. What mother buys out the entire children's section of a bookstore before up and leaving her child?

Her two daughters. The way she smiled so warmly while holding Madison makes me think she loved her as if she was her biological daughter.

The one thing that does surprise me about everything I've read, my mother didn't have a single bodyguard with her. It's surprising because my father is so strict about my sisters and I not going out alone, or even Vanessa or Cole being unprotected, despite how much we all bitch about it.

I think I'm finally starting to understand why he's so insistent about the extra security.