Blood Bound (20 page)

“You don’t
know?
” Liv glanced at me, frustration and disbelief lining her forehead and outlining the corners of her mouth, and I could only shrug. My only possible contribution to the conversation was the question I desperately didn’t want to ask, and I could see no real benefit of asking it. If I were the father, knowing that wouldn’t shed any light on the real question—why Hadley was being targeted. And if I wasn’t the father, I’d have just admitted to sleeping with Anne—a drunken, reactionary mistake I’d regretted the moment it was over. And Liv would probably never speak to me again.

Sleeping with random strangers years after we broke up was different from sleeping with her best friend the night Liv left. And at that moment, admitting what I’d done would only hurt everyone involved. Including Hadley.

“I already had her when I met Shen, and he loved her like she was his own,” Anne finally admitted. “But no, I don’t know who her biological father is.”

My grip around the wheel tightened until my knuckles stood out, white in the glow from the parking-lot light overhead. Was she telling the truth, or just trying to avoid outing me in front of Liv? Either way, her silence on the issue was both blessing and curse. If I was a father, I wanted to know it. I wanted to know
Hadley
.

Liv glanced at me again, and I avoided her gaze to keep her from reading the confliction surely obvious in my expression. She picked up the phone and held it between us. “Surely you have an idea. Like, a list, or something, that we could use to narrow it down?”

“Liv…” I began, humiliated for both myself and for Annika.

“No, I don’t have a list,” Anne snapped. “What I have is a very upset little girl who’s just lost the only father she’s ever known. She’s away from her home and all her things, and she doesn’t really understand why her dad won’t be coming home again. And now you’re telling me that whoever killed Shen will probably be coming back for Hadley, but instead of trying to help keep her safe, you’re interrogating me about my past sex life!”

“I
am
trying to help,” Liv insisted. “But Hadley’s not a random target. Someone planned this, and paid for it, and is probably pissed off that his hired gun misfired. And if I’m going to keep the next guy from succeeding where Hunter failed, I need to know why someone high up in the Tower syndicate wants your daughter dead.”

“I don’t know!” Anne cried. “She’s just a normal little girl. Happy, healthy, friendly. Loved by anyone who’s ever met her.”

“Is she Skilled?” I asked, without truly thinking the question through. A child of two Skilled parents would inherit the abilities of one or the other, or possibly the Skill of a grandparent. But a child of one Skilled parent had only a fifty-percent chance of inheriting that Skill. If Hadley was a Tracker, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that she was mine.

“I don’t know yet,” Anne said miserably. “She’s still so young….”

“Okay, you need to hide,” Liv said, and I could tell from the slump of her shoulders that she’d given up on the paternity angle, at least for now. “Take Hadley and your parents, and go somewhere random. Someplace you have no connection to. Pay in cash and don’t tell anyone where you’re going.” That was so she couldn’t be easily found through traditional means. But what neither of us wanted to say aloud was that if Tower sent another Tracker, they’d eventually be found, no matter what.

“Leave your cell phones behind,” I said, glad to finally have something helpful to contribute. “You can get prepaid ones on the road. And don’t use your real names.” That part was obvious, but couldn’t be stressed enough. “If you have access to a car you don’t own, use it.” Tower had contacts in the police department, and if he wanted Hadley badly enough, he’d use them. “And don’t tell us where you’re going.” Because then Tower could use me against Anne without even making me track her.

“But check in with one of us every hour,” Liv added, and in spite of the circumstances, that tight feeling in my chest eased a little. She wasn’t trying to get rid of me—yet, anyway.

“Okay…” Furniture springs groaned over the line again, and Anne’s footsteps echoed on a hard-surface floor. “I’ll call you back in an hour, from the road.”

“Good luck,” Liv said. Then she hung up and turned to me, gaze heavy with the weight of what we’d stumbled onto, and what had yet to be said. “I need to do something about this….” She held up her injured arm. “Then, I guess I owe you an explanation.”

I nodded and opened my car door, then sucked in a deep, cold breath. Yes, Liv owed me some information, but I wasn’t the only one in the dark about what had really happened that night, six years ago, and if she showed me hers, I’d have to show her mine. That was only fair.

But I couldn’t think of a single good way to tell the woman I wanted to be with more than anything in the world that I’d slept with her best friend.

Thirteen

I
followed Cam into his apartment and he closed the door behind us. The scrape of the dead bolt sliding home sounded louder and more final than it should have—a reminder that I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been, doing something I shouldn’t have been doing, even though I was no longer being compelled. Anne had never officially asked me to help protect Hadley. But I couldn’t just let a five-year-old—not to mention the family hiding her—get slaughtered. And I couldn’t protect Hadley from the Tower syndicate without whatever information Cam would be able to give me about his own employer.

And that was assuming I’d be any good to them at all. At the moment, with an open, bloody wound, I was a walking target for any blood Tracker. My arm stung, and ached, and throbbed, and every movement pulled the makeshift bandage, which tugged on the wound itself.

“Have a seat, and I’ll get my stuff.” Cam pulled out a bar stool on his way past the kitchen, and I sat, resting my arm on the counter. He opened the front closet and hauled out the huge duffel bag taking up most of the floor space, then hefted it onto the bar with a solid
thunk,
while I surreptitiously studied the way his arms and still-bare chest bulged with each movement.

Training agreed with him. A lot. So much, in fact, that I had to focus on the pain in my arm and the duffel bag on the counter to keep from staring. Again. He was going to
have
to put a shirt on.

“That’s your first-aid kit?” I glanced at him in amusement. “You could fit a body in there.”

“Most of one, anyway,” he said, and it took me a minute to realize he was joking. Cam unzipped the bag and started pulling out supplies. Alcohol, gauze, medical tape and several small bottles I didn’t recognize. “There’s some extra bandages and splints and stuff in the bathroom.”

“Do you really need all this?” Or had
somebody
turned into a hypochondriac?

Cam’s brows rose in amusement. “My job’s a little more adventurous than your average nine-to-five.”

So was mine, but my first-aid kit would have fit in a bread box. Of course, I was free to turn down the jobs most likely to get me killed, but Cam wasn’t free to do much of anything.

“Okay, let’s take a look….” He sat on the stool next to mine and gently peeled the duct tape from my arm. The paper towels had started to stick where the blood was dryingwinced when he carefully tugged them free. “It looks like the bleeding’s mostly stopped. Which is good. But we have to clean it, so it might start up again, a little.”

Blood had saturated both sides of the makeshift bandage, and he set the entire mess on a paper plate, which would be easy to dispose of along with the bandage.

He leaned over the counter to pull a clean dishrag from the top drawer, then laid it across the counter beneath my arm. “This is gonna sting, but it’ll help prevent infection.” Cam unscrewed the lid from a bottle of alcohol, then poured a thin, clear stream directly into the front of the wound.

Flames lapped at my arm and I hissed, then bit my lip against the pain. Tensing made it worse, so I tried to relax, but there was no way to relax with Cam this close. Even if he was only touching me to clean the wound inflicted by a syndicate hit man hired by his boss to kill a mutual friend’s young daughter.

Yeah, no stress there.

“First bullet wound?” He twisted my arm carefully, then held the towel beneath it to catch the alcohol as he dribbled it down the back side of my arm, over the exit wound.

“Yeah. Had a couple of knife wounds and two broken hands, though.”

Cam blotted the drips of alcohol, then laid the towel on the counter and started digging through the duffel again. “So you’ve had stitches before?”

“I am familiar with the concept, yes. But I’m not a fan.”

“Don’t worry.” He set a sealed hypodermic needle next to a small bottle of clear liquid capped in rubber. “I’m going to give you a local. You shouldn’t feel anything but some tugging.”

“Are you…um…qualified for this?” I asked, trying not to squirm as he stuck the needle through the rubber cap and drew liquid into the syringe.

“Six years’ experience in battlefield triage. Of sorts.” He tapped the syringe, just like nurses on TV. “Because some injuries you don’t want to have to explain, even to very discreet doctors.”

Even with the anesthetic, getting stitches sucked, mostly because seeing my torn flesh held together only by surgical thread was vaguely nauseating. But to his credit, Cam’s stitches were small and even—almost as good as the professional sutures my last knife wound had required. And, as usual, the worst part was having to sit still.

When I was stitched, rebandaged and still pleasantly numb, Cam set a glass of water and a pill on the counter in front of me.

“No painkillers.” I pushed the pill back across the counter toward him, careful not to move my left arm. “It doesn’t hurt that bad.” It would hurt like hell when the local wore off, but I couldn’t afford to be foggy-headed while we tried to figure out why someone high up in the Tower syndicate would want Hadley dead.

“It’s an antibiotic. To keep the wound from getting infected.” He set a large, opaque pill bottle in front of me and I squinted at the print. An off-brand of penicillin. “You’re not allergic, are you?”

“No.” I took the pill with a couple of ps of water. “Why do you have a bulk bottle of penicillin?”

“I actually have about a dozen of them.” He pulled a smaller bag from the huge duffel and unzipped it to show me more big white bottles. “Standard issue, from one of half a dozen pharmacists bound to the syndicate.”

“Because you’re no good to Tower if you die of infection?”

“Yeah.” Cam started loading supplies back into the duffel, but he left the pill bottle on the counter. “I don’t suppose you have a change of clothes in there?” He nodded toward the satchel I’d dropped on his couch.

“Nope. Had one in my trunk, though.” I
knew
I should have driven….

“I have something you can wear for now.” He piled everything my blood had touched onto the paper plate, then rolled the sides of the plate up like a big, bloody burrito and carried the whole thing down the hall. “Can you bring the syringe?” he called back over his shoulder.

I grabbed the disposable syringe, careful not to poke myself, and followed him toward the bathroom. But I missed whatever he was saying, because staring at the needle reminded me of the track marks on Hunter’s arm, and I couldn’t get that image out of my head. Something about it didn’t make sense.

In the bathroom, Cam pulled the shower curtain all the way back and set the paper plate in the middle of his tub. I sat on the closed toilet seat while he squatted in front of the cabinet beneath the sink, inches away, and I started a conversation about work to stop myself from asking why he ever bothered wearing clothes at all.

“So, what’s your theory on Hunter’s track marks?” I said, as he set a gallon-size bottle of rubbing alcohol on the floor.

“My theory?” He opened a drawer and set a pair of scissors and a box of matches on the counter. “I theorize that he’s a junkie who takes contracts most people wouldn’t touch—for instance, the murder of a five-year-old—to pay for his habit.”

“But that doesn’t add up,” I insisted. “Some of those needle marks were very fresh, but he didn’t act like any junkie I’ve ever met. He was coherent, and not too bad a shot, considering his view was partially obstructed, and his target was moving.” I lifted my arm as proof.

Shooting isn’t as easy as the movies make it out to be. Any decent-size gun packs a hell of a recoil, and aiming on the fly takes practice. An arm shot—a few inches from my chest—wouldn’t have been possible for anyone who maintained the level of high indicated by the number of tracks on Hunter’s arm.

Cam closed the cabinet and sat on the edge of the tub with the scissors in hand. “Okay, so he’s a very
high-functioning
junkie.”

“There’s no such thing.” I shivered as he slid the cold lower scissors blade beneath the bloody sleeve of the T-shirt he’d lent me. Since we’d have to destroy the clothes anyway, to keep viable blood samples from ever being used against me, it was easier to just cut the shirt off and avoid moving my injured arm any more than necessary. “And anyway, we tore his place apart looking for first-aid supplies. Did you see anything that even resembled drug paraphernalia?”

Cam frowned as he cut my sleeve up the outside, clear through to the collar, careful not to snag the fresh bandage. Or touch me, which was somehow both a relief and a severe disappointment.

“So he doesn’t shoot up there.” Cam shrugged. “Or maybe it’s not heroin. Maybe those are from his hospital visit. Allergy shots, or insulin. Maybe that’s why he goes to the public hospital.”

My ruined sleeve flopped forward, and I clutched the material to my chest, acutely aware how close Cam was, and how fully dressed he wasn’t. “You don’t go to the hospital for allergies unless you’re in anaphylactic shock, and if you’re
that
allergic to something, you keep one of those adrenaline needle pens on you all the time.” You’d think someone whose first-aid kit could supply a small country would know that. “But Hunter doesn’t have anything like that. Also, allergy shots go in your upper arm. Insulin can be given in your upper arm, stomach, hip or thigh, but
not
in the crook of your elbow.”