I lifted my eyebrows. “A phone?”
“At the paper mill,” he said. “The dead guy had a phone on him.”
I sat up straighter. I knew one of the guys who’d ambushed us had died, but this was the first I’d heard about evidence that might identify him.
“How do you know?”
He leveled a gaze at me that said,You know better than to ask.
“Right. Do you have it? The phone?”
“Not anymore,” he said. “I gave it to Aloha.”
“But isn’t it… I don’t know, evidence or something?”
“Let me worry about that,” Bram said.
I sat back in my chair and stared at my unopened yogurt, my mind spinning.
“How long do you think it’ll take Aloha to get into it?”
“Couple days,” Bram said. “Maybe a few.”
I drew in a breath, my pulse racing. If we could identify even one of the men who’d ambushed us at the paper mill, we might be able to figure out if Dimitri was the one who’d hired them.
“Thanks,” I said. “I know you don’t want to be involved, so just… thank you.”
“I’m involved,” Bram said. “So tell me.”
I met his gaze. “Tell you what?”
“Everything.”
“Everything?”
He nodded. “Everything you know about what happened to Mom and Dad. Everything you’ve learned about what they were digging into when they were killed. Everything you know about who ran you off the mountain, who might have tried to kill you and the Hawks at the paper mill.”
I bit my lower lip. “That’s a lot of everything.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s my fault. And I’m sorry, Cass. It shouldn’t have gone this far, and it might not have if only I’d listened to you. I hope you can forgive me one day, but in the meantime, I’m going to need you to tell me everything if you want my help.”
It was too much to hope for — that Bram was finally willing to listen, that he was willing to talk about what had happened to our parents, let alone do anything about it — and I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
I started slowly at first, with all the things that had made me suspect our parents’ deaths hadn’t been an accident, including the witnesses who’d seen Travis Dorsey slam into the car without even trying to slow down.
And then: the Russian man who’d hired Travis Dorsey to run our parents’ car off the road, the wire transfers from Kensington Trust to Aventine that I’d found in our parents’ old papers.
That got his attention. He sat up straighter, told me to go on, and I could tell he was locked into what I was saying.
So I told him about Irina Sokolov, how she’d worked at Kensington for the bratva, how she’d changed her name to Anna Reed and gone into hiding when she’d realized the bratva was funneling money used to traffic women.
How she’d warned me about Dimitri Kaprolov.
I wasn’t surprised when Bram leaned forward, his black eyes burning like pieces of smoldering coal.
“Dimitri Kaprolov?”
“You know about him, don’t you? Because of Maeve.”