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Then Nate sits upright so fast he almost headbutts me. “Zane, hey. Sorry. Yeah.”
“What is he saying?” West sits up, too, running a hand through the spikes of his hair. “Put him on speaker.”
“Zane?” I look from one to the other. “You found him? The guy who did the tattoos?”
Nate puts the call on speaker and we all bend over the phone as Zane’s voice rings inside the bedroom, tinny and rough.
“I found the fucker,” Zane says. “Sorry it took me so long, but I had a lot going on. So yeah, I inked this guy years ago, but that’s the thing: I don’t ink dragons on just anybody. There’s a code…” There are voices in the background, and Zane growls something back, and they fall quiet. “A code about who gets a dragon. It’s for people whose family fucked them over. Right? And this guy… well, he was still a boy back then. He’d been fucked over plenty. See, he’s the son of Mikhail Vasiliev, a former underground fighter.”
We stare at each other with round eyes.
“It’s him,” West mouths.
“Holy shit,” I mouth back.
Nate grins.
“A friend of mine used to fight in the underground ring here, and he brought him to me,” Zane is saying. “Friend of a friend. Said the boy’s family was all gone, dead, and his uncle was an abusive motherfucker. So I inked the boy. I had to, see?”
“Yeah,” Nate says, and his voice has gone dark and hard, his grin gone. “I see.”
“Good, okay.” The tone of Zane’s voice changes, gentles. “Okay. Was this helpful? I’m not sure what you need. I’m real fucking sorry to question your hope, but are you sure Kasimir wasn’t victim of an accident or killing somewhere? You said it, it’s been months.”
Kasimir. So strange to have people refer to Kash with that other name. He’s Kash. He’ll always be Kash to me.
“We can’t lose hope,” I say, and find Nate’s and West’s gazes on me, their eyes glittering in the gray light of dawn. “We can’t lose him.”
“I understand that. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. If you want me to ask that friend of a friend who brought Kasimir over for information, I can do it. Just tell me what to ask.”
“I wish we knew,” West says. “But what you told us is helpful. Thank you.”
“Any time, guys. Give me a call if you think of something.”
The call disconnects, and we sit there in silence.
“You were right, Nate,” West says finally. “Kash is a Vasiliev.”
“Wow.” I look down at the dark screen of the phone. “That’s crazy, that’s… finally we know who he is.”
“And what should we do? Contact Andrei Vasiliev and ask if his nephew came home from Brussels?” Nate grinds out. “You heard what Madden said. The uncle is an abusive motherfucker. And Kash was on the run, from the uncle or someone else we don’t know. We can’t just call Vasiliev up and ask, can we?”
As it turns out, there’s no need. Something happens without our input.
My job at the university campus offices is nice, and I’m also taking a few classes toward a degree, trying to get my life back on track—something I failed to do with West’s family dying and Kash disappearing.
Not sure how I thought I’d be more focused now. My thoughts keep spiraling. But it seems that life goes on even when you think it has stopped still.
My new colleagues are nice, and the office is quiet at this time in the morning. I’m on my phone during coffee break, and while engaged in my usual activity of the la
st few weeks—Googling the heck out of Kasimir Vasiliev and his whole family, is a masochistic hobby for sure, when it won’t help—I find an article where Andrei Vasiliev says he has welcomed his nephew back home.
What in the world? The article is dated three days ago. That’s really recent. I send the link to Nate and West, and I’m not surprised to get a call from Nate almost instantly.
“Hey, girl.”
His warm voice makes me shiver. I smile and turn away from the curious looks my new colleagues shoot me. “Hey, you. Did you see what I sent you?”
“I glanced through it. It seems legit. It’s a local news station, not some random blogger writing about it.”
