by CR Robertson
He was my kryptonite. No matter how much I wanted to hate him, when he touched me, I couldn’t resist. I needed to run and keep running, it was the only solution. He surrounded me, consuming my every thought until there was nothing left but him and the feel of his body moving in mine.
He groaned, his hand skimming down my stomach until it found that tiny mass of nerves between my legs. Xavier knew my body and everything that got a reaction from me. He was a musician who knew exactly where to touch to create the right notes.
I was pissed, angry beyond belief, but none of that translated to my body writhing under his. I screamed, my legs desperately widening to accommodate him pulsing as he exploded.
Xavier slumped on top of me. This was the bit where I normally stroked his back, but I lay here numb. I swore I’d never sleep with him again after what I saw last night.
“Cas?” He pushed himself up enough to look into my eyes.
Right then, I made a decision. I slowly stroked his back even as I planned my escape. I didn’t need much with me for a few days while I sorted my head out.
Everything was on automatic pilot as I put clothes into my bag instead of what I normally took to work. I wore trousers and a top as opposed to my skirt suit. The small safe in my room contained my passport and cash for emergencies.
“Gotta go, I’m late for a meeting. We’ll chat about this later.” I pressed a quick kiss on his lips, lifted a slice of toast off his plate, and darted to the door before he could object.
My fingers skimmed my phone as I texted my boss Al and my best friend Megan.
Dying with the cold. I’ll be off for a few days. Going back to bed. Cas.
They both replied within a few moments, telling me they hoped I felt better soon. I turned my phone off and removed the SIM. Then I did what I did best.
I ran.
There were places that rented rooms by the day for cash. Risking using my credit cards once, I went into a department store and bought myself a backpack and comfortable clothes. Then I lifted more money from my bank account and became the woman I used to be before I became Cassandra Kincade.
Over the years, I’d kept the bank accounts opened by my parents for me. I still held a passport in that name as well. Megan was the only person in this world that knew who I really was. She knew because she harboured the same secrets as me.
My hair was shoved under a baseball cap to hide part of my face, and I changed into the baggy clothes I bought. No one who knew me would recognise me right now.
Every hour that passed took me further into my past and miles away from Xavier. He had the power to make me accept his life. I should never have agreed to be with him, but the lure of finally finding someone to protect me had been too great.
I changed trains often, crisscrossing across London until I was sure that anyone tracking me would be confused. Then I got on a train out of London and headed to the one place I swore I would never return to.
I went home.
***
Chapter Five
Xavier
“Where the fuck is she?”
Three fucking days Jordan had scanned facial recognition through CCTV. He found her a few times on trains going opposite directions before she disappeared off the grid completely. Her phone was dead, and her credit cards hadn’t been used since the morning she wandered out of my life.
I knew there was something wrong with her reactions, but I wanted to believe we could just ignore what had happened.
“I’m an expert on disappearing, Xavier. To be honest, watching her, I’m impressed.” Jordan continued to type while scanning video footage. “Do you think she went to the police?”
“No, I think she was fucking terrified and ran from the two psychopaths she saw killing those men.”
“You’ll need to talk to her friends,” Ash said from where he was lounging on a sofa in the background. “Maybe they’ll know something.”
Jordan spun his chair around to stare at Ash. “I’ve been so far into her life that I’m the equivalent of her gynaecologist right now. What could her friends possibly tell me that all her records don’t?”
Ash pushed himself up. “You’re the one who pointed out she disappeared like a pro. What if that’s because she is?”
I remembered our conversation about her parents dying in the car crash and her holding her dead sister’s hand.
“Bring up her records from childhood. She was orphaned at an early age and her sister killed. She was put into care.”
Jordan’s fingers flew over the keys. “Nope. Says here her parents passed away a few years apart from natural causes. No sister listed.”
“Fuck!”
“Do we have a problem?” Ash asked, finally giving us his full attention.
I gave them the outline of what happened in The Midnight Rooms, but leaving out the personal stuff we shared. “She had no reason to lie to a stranger,” I concluded.
“I can’t fucking believe you started a relationship with someone down there,” Jordan bitched.
There was no point in answering him because he would keep poking until I snapped.
She had no social media accounts, so he delved into her business life. Two members of staff were listed but their photographs were taken from a strange angle, the way any of us would pose to ensure facial recognition wouldn’t detect us.
“That’s her friend Megan she always talks about. They were in the care system together.”
Jordan’s shoulder stiffened. “Isn’t this just the day for surprises,” he muttered. “Meg was my sub for a few years.”
“This just keeps getting better,” Ash commented, a shit-eating smile on his face.
“Wait until Uncle Lucas works out that you’re sniffing around his daughter,” I taunted, and his smile disappeared.
In the past few days, I’d gone to her office pretending I needed contracts for one of our buildings reviewed. Her secretary Sasha had told me she was really ill with the cold and at home at the moment. Considering I had the keys to her apartment and was pacing the floors there every night, I knew that wasn’t the case.
She’d run away.
Pain that I didn’t know existed pulsed in my chest in a steady rhythm, threatening to suffocate me. The man who’d survived the other night felt the brunt of my emotional anguish and ending up breaking and telling us exactly who sent him. Jordan happily dispatched and put him in the special burn unit we had a few miles away. You couldn’t identify a body if they were nothing more than ash that was scattered on the wind.
The people behind the attack would receive a visit from us as soon as I located Cassandra and knew she was safe.
“Meg has a lot of darkness in her. I didn’t know what happened in her past, but suspected there was something she was hiding.” Jordan interrupted my thoughts. He leaned back in his chair and stared vacantly at the screens. “It certainly makes me rethink a lot of our time together.”
“Talk to her, see if she tells you anything. Run a check on the details of the accident I gave you and see if it comes up with anything.” I dragged my fingers through my hair, kicking myself for the millionth time.
“You need to sleep,” Ash said, squeezing my shoulder.
“I knew she was acting weird and I said nothing since she’d dropped wanting to yell about witnessing three murders.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I need to know she’s okay.”
“We’ll find her,” Jordan replied, bypassing the security systems to infiltrate databases he shouldn’t have access to. “If we’d known she had a past, I could have dug deeper days ago.”
“We all have pasts,” I muttered, the weight of mine resting firmly on my shoulders.
“Whatever she saw obviously triggered something in her. Maybe she witnessed another murder or a serious assault?” Jordan rambled on as he opened database after database. “All the searches are running. The results will ping to my phone. I’ll go and pay Meg a visit and see what she can tell me about your wayward girlfriend.”
My eyes narrowed on all the screens that were taunting me. If Cassandra knew how to disappear, then she had more to her past than I ever guessed. Normally, when someone came into my life, they were security vetted until we practically knew what they ate for breakfast. I decided not to pry into her past.
Ash joined me at the desk, bringing up the systems he tended to work best at since he was the financial mastermind of our group. “Give me her details over and I’ll go through her accounts with a fine-tooth comb.”
I hated doing this, but if she ran then she needed someone right now. Even if I could send her friend to her, I had to do something to make this better. Right now, I’d screwed up on so many levels that it was ridiculous. If it was either of the other two guys, I’d be tearing them a new ass right now. The only reason they weren’t doing it to me was because they knew I was a good judge of character and we all trusted my vibes.
If only I’d trusted them that last morning.
I knew she was nervous, her reactions muted. But I convinced myself that I could make everything okay when we talked later. That opportunity never happened since she ran and never looked back.
Ash typed away, hunting through her accounts. “She lifts a thousand pound out in cash every single month.”
“That’s not unusual,” I pointed out, leaning over to check the screen he was working on.
“Not in itself, but it’s on the same day every month, like a direct debit but in cash.”
My brow furrowed. “Like she doesn’t want to leave a digital trace to another account.”
“Exactly,” Ash confirmed. “She only has one source of income which goes into her general working account. She needs to pay all her bills and syphon money from that account for everything she needs.”
None of these were normal reactions for the average person. We understood them because we each had several personas that we could morph into at any time. Which led us back to the question as to why Cassandra needed them.
“No way to trace it?” I knew the answer before I asked the question but needed to hear it confirmed.
“Nope. She’s clever, lifting the money from different locations every month.”
“The same as she knew to confuse the CCTV in the tube and move back and forth across town until we lost her.” My fingers tapped a tribal beat on the desk while I considered all the options. “Identities are easier to interchange if you only change one detail. That way you don’t have to remember as much.”
“Mmmm.” Ash continued to scan and type. “This is interesting. Two years ago, she applied for her passport.”
“Why’s that interesting?”
“She applied for it twice in the same year. Once in March and again in October.” Ash pointed to the screen. “They’re done online these days, so if she doesn’t have any credit cards in her alias, it would make sense that she needed to use her bank card for both.”
“Can you track it?”
“Maybe… Jay is the one with all the back doors into places none of us want to know about.”
A green light flashed on the screen. “Her phone just came online,” I muttered.
We watched as Jordan’s programme tried to locate the cell towers closest to her location. The green light went out again before it could be fully traced.
“Two minutes twenty seconds,” Ash said. “Just enough time to check her messages and turn it off before it can be checked.”
“Shit!” I slumped back into my chair and covered my eyes with the palms of my hands. Cassandra was doing everything to avoid being detected by the textbook we wrote. She must really hate me if she was going to this amount of effort to avoid me.
“You doing okay?”
“Nope.” I felt like punching the wall. “She’s going to a lot of effort to make sure I know she doesn’t want to be with me.”
“Nah, she’s scared and running. If that’s all you know when that emotion appears, then you revert back into a learned pattern. I didn’t ask before, how were they killed?”
I lifted my head and stared at him. “Jay shot two of them at close range. He broke the neck of the third. I left the fourth unconscious for interrogation.”
“Gunshots are loud and the aftermath messy. If it’s triggered something she’s suppressed, then we both know she’s running scared and will end up tripping over a trap someone left for her. It’ll activate the moment she does or goes somewhere she shouldn’t.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I replied, suddenly weary of my life and all the shit I had to deal with.
“Is she worth it?” Ash asked softly, his voice low.
“Yeah, she is. Uncle Lucas was right all those months ago. When men like us find the woman meant for us, we just know. I will kill anyone who goes anywhere near her.”
“That’s all I need to know. By the way, you know you’ll have to do the same for me one day.”
I quirked an eyebrow. “Uncle Lucas will roast your balls if you go anywhere near Lucrezia.”
“It would be fucking worth it,” he muttered.
Ash seemed to have developed an obsession with my cousin. Every time we visited my uncle, he spent his time staring at her when she wasn’t looking. The funny thing was that she did the same. Both of them were head-over-heels about each other but neither would make the first move. If I got Cassandra back, we’d all take a road trip to meet my extended family and I’d nudge my cousin and oldest friend together.
The first thing I was going to do was handcuff Cassandra to my bed. There’d be no more staying in her apartment. Her bed wasn’t more comfortable than mine as she claimed. Which brought me to wondering why she preferred to stay there.
“Be back in a bit, Ash. I’m going to give the apartment another search to see if I can find something with another name on it.”
“I’ll call you if I find anything.” He lifted his arm in an absent wave since he was already glued to the screen again.
Her apartment was always sparse, so I started where people tended to keep all their most prized possessions. We all had a little dragon DNA in us and liked to sleep where we kept our treasure. Every drawer and cupboard were searched with no result. It was only when I was sitting on the end of the bed staring at the floor that I realised the bottom of the wardrobe was too deep.
Dragging all the bags she kept there onto the floor, I felt around the edges until my fingers located a slight indent at the back. Pushing down on it, the base of the wardrobe lifted to reveal a hidden area which housed a small safe, jewellery boxes, and some piles of paperwork.
I didn’t need to open the safe, because a letter was caught in the bottom of the door. In her haste to leave, she didn’t see it.
Cassandra Jenkins.
Addressed to a post office box.
The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t remember where I’d heard it before. I put everything back into position and tucked the letter into the inside pocket of my leather jacket.
“Where the fuck are you, Cas?” I asked the empty room.
A lump in my throat rose and I struggled to keep my emotions under control. I didn’t even risk a phone call or sending the information over a message. We all knew the rules about keeping information safe.
My Harley welcomed me, and I lost myself to my thoughts on my way back to our base of operations. Why did her name sound familiar?
Jordan was already there when I returned. “I thought Meg was going to shit herself when I arrived at her office and started asking about Cas’ past. When she left to get me the glass of water I requested, I bugged her phone and her bag.”
Why the fuck had I not done that with Cassandra? “I’ll need an implant for Cas if we ever find her,” I muttered in a dark tone.
There was no way she’d go missing on me again. We all wore trackers that only the three of us had access to. No one else knew that we’d had them injected in our ankles.
“I installed one in Meg when she was my sub. She still doesn’t know it’s there,” Jordan added conversa
tionally.
“You do realise that you have control issues?” I demanded.
“Says the man who’s going to microchip his girlfriend after we track her and drag her unwilling ass back,” Jordan countered. “Meg is special. I like to know she’s safe.”
“Freak,” Ash taunted.
“Takes one to know one,” Jordan retaliated.
Ignoring their rivalry, I pulled the letter out and handed it to Jordan. He looked at the name and address and paled. “No fucking way.”
“What?” I demanded, eyebrows raised at his tone.
“There is no way that she is who that letter says she is. Fuck!” He went trailing through files and pulled up an image of a family—mother, father, and two daughters. “Frank Jenkins disappeared without a trace about twenty years ago. He was a member of the Council. Everyone thought he wanted out and just ran.”
“No fucking way,” Ash said, his eyes darting to me.
“They died in a car crash,” I said in a hollow voice.
“If they did, I’d suggest it wasn’t an accident,” Jordan replied. “Everyone else dead?”
I nodded once in confirmation.
“Then she’s the missing heir to their fortune. If someone wanted access to her father’s accounts, the best way to do it would be through her.”
He enlarged the picture of the eldest daughter. Lines and dots appeared as her face was analysed. Jordan used a photo from my phone.
“It’s her,” I said in a low voice.
“This is Council business now,” Jordan said.
“Like fuck! That is my future wife you’re talking about!”
Silence erupted around me. I’d never said it out loud before, but from the moment I heard her voice in that conference room and realised it was her, she was mine. Forever.
“What do we do?” Ash asked, trying to broker peace between us.
Jordan’s gaze locked on mine. “You heard the man. We’re searching for his wayward fiancée and need to get her home.”
“Your tracking system earlier said she was somewhere in the South of England.” I nodded to the screen as if it was still there.
