Page 75 of Vicious Little Games

“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.

24

Cole

“How would we know where Cass went on her date?” Mike asks when we’re walking out of the sports bar.

“Because we’re going to ask her guards, you dipshit,” August tells him as his eyes scan the dark parking lot. His phone is already in his hand, as if he’s ready to text or call them just as soon as we get safely to the SUV. The guy takes his job seriously, that’s for sure.

“Uh,” Mike starts. “Why do you care where they went?”

“It’s complicated,” I mutter.

“Are we going to need backup?” August asks seriously while holding the rear passenger door open for me. I’ll never get used to being part of a rich mobster family even if I become the one in charge.

“I promise I won’t interrupt their date. I’ll just…observe,” I tell him.

“Yeah, right,” he huffs with a roll of his eyes before he slams my door shut. What I’m asking them to do is incredibly stupid. I know that. But then I thankfully hear August say to Mike through the door, “You drive. I’ll see what I can find out.”

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