I feel bad telling them what Kash told me—in confidence, I thought. In exchange for me telling him about myself. And guess what? I never even got a chance to tell him what he wanted to know.

Now he’s gone.

“That night he came to talk to me as I was gathering some stuff to bring home with me. He said he got the tattoos in Wisconsin. And that his real name is Kasimir. That’s it, I swear. That’s all he said.”

“And just like that, after years of us asking and not getting a reply, he told you all that?” Sydney looks hurt.

“All that being his name and where he got inked.” I rub a hand over my mouth.

“That’s two things more than the zero things he told us,” Nate says.

What do they want me to say? “It was a weird-ass evening,” I mutter.

“You can say that again.” Nate scowls at the floor. “Kasimir… Russian. We knew he had a Russian connection. But how does that help?”

“Should we assume Graham is his real family name… or not?”

I exchange a questioning look with Nate.

“Not,” I say.

“Yes,” he says.

“He’s Russian.”

“Born and raised here. Who knows when his family immigrated. He could well have a non-Russian family name.”

“Fine. What else do we know?” Syd chews on a lock of her red hair.

“He’s a good fighter.” I consider what I said. “An amazing fighter. He could be doing this professionally.”

“Like a boxer?” Sydney blinks.

“More like mixed martial arts and street fighting.”

Nate shudders and rubs at his arms. That night he was so out of it, I doubt he had a chance to observe Kash’s fighting style.

But Kash is the reason we’re all here, that Nate is here, dammit. So I try to think, like Syd suggested. What else do we know about Kasimir Graham?

“We can try and find this Zane Madden, pump him for info,” I offer. “Kash said his name like he’s someone famous. Maybe up north he is.”

Nate and Sydney nod.

“We’ll do that. I’ll Google the crap out of that name.” She scratches at her chin. “What else?”

“Try and hack into his laptop, see if we get anything from there.”

“Dude.” Nate grunts. “We tried.”

“We can try some more. And we should look for any other evidence of who he really is. You never know what we might find.”

What I do know is that we’re grasping at straws. But if we stop, it would mean we give up. Grasping at straws is better than admitting defeat and that we lost Kash for good.

But the laptop won’t be hacked, and nothing else turns up in Kash’s room. Despite the dust it’s been gathering, it’s mostly empty. Not many places to hide, unlike Nate’s room that’s a jumble of papers and dirty clothes and boxes.

I itch to tidy it up. And I mean, you’d think

that a guy who ran out of his dad’s apartment in the middle of the night with a duffel full of clothes, his tablet and nothing else wouldn’t have so much stuff. But Nate’s a hoarder, apparently.

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