Blood Bound (31 page)

But her expression gave away nothing. It was carefully guarded and practically blank, which told me she knew something. Something big.

“I don’t have any knowledge of Anne’s kid specifically,” she said. “But I know that Tower’s working on a big project and that it requires a lot of…resources. Which may be why he wants her.”

Resources? Project? What kind of project could be so important, so top secret that he’d need a five-year-old to… To what?

“What big project?” Cam demanded, his irritation bordering on anger.

Kori shrugged. “If you don’t know, it’s because he doesn’t want you to know.”

“
I
want me to know,” he insisted.

“Well, then, it’s too damn bad you don’t have your
own
mark tattooed on your arm, instead of his,” Kori snapped. “You know how this works, Cam. I don’t make the fuckin’ rules.”

“I also know you don’t mind breaking them whenever possible.” His frown deepened. “Or whenever it benefits
you.
”

“Look, I would tell you if I could.” Kori set her empty bottle down on the coffee table. “But I’m strictly prohibited from talking about the project. And there’s not a damn thing I can do about that.”

But if I caught her off guard with a good guess, her surprise—or lack thereof—might say as much as her silence.

“He’s selling Skills, isn’t he?” I asked, making a sudden, mental leap between two pieces of the puzzle we hadn’t yet connected. And her surprise—then quick poker face—was like a little gold star for my internal score card. “We thought Tower just paid for Hunter to have the procedure—whatever it is—but actually, he’s the one who
provided
it.”

“No.” Cam shook his head firmly. “It’s not possible. There’s no way Tower could be up to something that big without me hearing about it.”

Kori laughed out loud. “I’m not sure if you’re overestimating your own abilities or underestimating Jake’s, but you’re—” she hesitated, evidently running up against a verbal line she was forbidden to cross “12;inaccurate, at best,” she concluded, her amusement dampened by the restriction.

“And you’re saying he wants Hadley for this little project?” I said, while Cam sat in stunned anger.

“I’m not saying a damn thing,” Kori insisted, and I ignored her words, again focusing on her expression, which seemed to give a little this time. She looked…pleased.

“Does he want to use her blood for a transfusion?” Cam asked, when he caught on to my game. “She’s supposed to be one of his resources?”

Kori crossed her arms over her chest. “I can’t answer that.” Which was an answer in itself. “Nor can I confirm my own involvement in collecting these resources.”

Which was as good as admitting that Tower had made her kidnap people to be used in his new project.

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said, to Cam this time. “Hadley hasn’t come into her Skill yet. We don’t even know what Skill she’ll have. If she even has one.” I turned back to Kori. “Anne’s husband wasn’t Hadley’s biological father. Anne doesn’t even know who the father is.” And again I was struck by how odd that was—Anne just wasn’t the type to not know something like that. “It’s entirely possible that her father was unSkilled, and that Hadley’s not going to inherit any ability at all.” And honestly, if she inherited Anne’s Skill, she wouldn’t be much of a prize. Readers were a dime a dozen. “Why would he go through so much trouble to get her if he doesn’t even know whether or not she’ll be Skilled?”

Kori’s brows rose and she looked right into my eyes. “He wouldn’t.”

I glanced at Cam, but he looked as surprised as I was. “You’re saying he knows she’ll be Skilled? How can he possibly know that unless…?” My voice trailed off as synapses misfired in my brain.
Surely not…

“Unless what?” Kori prompted.

“Unless he knows who her father is.” I blinked and glanced at Cam, but he only shrugged, as if he was following my train of thought and reluctant to derail it. “But how could Tower know, if Anne doesn’t even know?”

“Maybe she does know.” Kori grabbed my water bottle and helped herself to several gulps. “Our binding doesn’t prevent us from lying to each other….” She left that reminder hanging in the air while she drank the rest of my water.

And suddenly everything I thought I’d known about Anne and her child was thrown into question. I felt as if I was standing on my elementary-school merry-go-round, watching the world spin around me, struggling to identify the now-blurry landmarks I’d known all my life.

I turned to Cam to find him frowning, his grip on his own water bottle tight enough to crack the plastic. If Anne had lied to me, she’d lied to him, too.

“Be right back,” Cam mumbled, then set his bottle down on his way to the bathroom.

When the door closed behind him, I turned to Kori, unable to purge my own curiosity. “So, you and Cam work together? How dd that happen?”

She shrugged. “We don’t so much work
together
as work near each other. I see him all the time, but we’ve only been paired up for a couple of jobs.”

“Was he already bound to Tower when you…signed on?”

“No, but he came on board soon after,” she said. I started to ask how the hell she’d wound up working for Tower, but she spoke before I could. “Speaking of familiar faces, you ever hear from Elle?”

I frowned, and she saw it on my face before I could figure out how best to say it.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Yeah. I’ve tried to track her over and over, and I’m not getting even a blip of an energy signature from her name.” And I didn’t have a blood sample, of course.

Kori nodded. “I had a feeling. Her brother’s been looking for her for a while, without any luck.” Her petite features betrayed no hint of emotion, but I saw through her mask of disinterest. She and Elle were close once, like Anne and I had been.

Then Kori blinked, as if someone had pressed her reset button, and I knew she was going to change the subject—a tried-and-true defense mechanism. She twisted to face me, one arm resting on the back of the couch, and I should have recognized the look on her face. As if she was bored and ready to start trouble. I should have remembered….

“So, I’m kinda surprised to see you and Cam together again, after what happened at that party. Especially with Anne coming over.”

Anne?
I shrugged. “That was six years ago. I made a mistake, but that’s all over now.”

Kori blinked, surprised. “
You
made a mistake?”

“I dumped him in the middle of the party, Kor. He deserved an explanation, at least. Then maybe I wouldn’t have lost six years with him. Maybe I wouldn’t have lost touch with the rest of you, either.”

Kori just frowned at me. “You really don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?” Why was my heartbeat suddenly painful? Why did it hurt to inhale?

“Shit.” Kori glanced at the ceiling for a second, then met my eyes again. “I didn’t wanna be the one to tell you. I figured you knew and just decided to sweep it under the rug. Or whatever.”

“Knew
what,
Kori?”

“Cam slept with Annika. That night at the party. I thought you knew. Hell, I thought that’s why you walked out.” She watched me, waiting for my reaction, but I didn’t have one. Her words bounced around in my head and the hollow echo reverberated the entire length of my body. “Six years ago. Do the math, Liv.”

So I did the math. And suddenly wished I’d never learned how to add.

Twenty

T
he apartment was quiet when I stepped out of the bathroom. That should have been my first clue that something was wrong.

“Liv?” I called. There was no answer, and my skin prickled. “Kori?” I ducked back into the bathroom to grab the spare 9mm I kept between the two bottom towels stacked beneath the sink.

“She left to give us some privacy,” Liv called. I exhaled in relief and headed down the hall. I should have known better.

“We need privacy?” I leaned against the living-room doorway to find Liv waiting for me on the couch, arms crossed over her chest, gaze hard. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re Hadley’s dad?” Her voice could have cut glass. “When were you going to tell me?”

Every single hope of a permanent reconciliation I’d harbored in the past twenty-four hours died a bloody, violent death and a deep, numbing cold grew in my chest. “No, Liv, it’s not like that.”
Damn you, Kori!
I crossed the room toward her, but Liv stood and backed away from me, keeping the coffee table between us.

“Really? What is it like, Cam? Is it like you sleeping with my best friend at a party while Elle was telling me you’re probably going to kill me someday? Because that’s what it sounds like. Is that why Tower wants Hadley? Because he knows she’s yours, so she has a fifty-fifty chance of becoming one of the best name-Trackers in the country?”

“No.” I tried to round the coffee table, but she backed out of reach again. “Liv, I don’t know why he wants her. I don’t know anything about his project.”

“But she is yours?”

“I don’t know. I honestly have no idea.” I struggled to hold together the pieces of the life I was determined to reclaim, but they just kept slipping through my fingers to shatter on the floor between us. “I want to believe that if I had a kid, Anne would have told me. Six years ago. But I don’t know
what
to believe anymore.” And I’d never spoken a truer sentence.

“But there’s a possibility that she’s yours? And you didn’t tell me?” She shook her head, as if she wanted to deny it, but she couldn’t shake the thought loose. “
Neither
of you told me?”

“I can’t speak for her—I’m sure she has her reasons for not telling either of us, and I’m hoping one of them is that I’m not the father.”

Not that I was set against ever having children, but this wasn’t the way I wanted that to happen—missing out on the first five years of my own daughter’s life. Not even finding out about her until my boss tries to abduct her. I wanted to be a part of my kids’ lives. And I wanted them to be
Liv’s
children. Not Anne’s. The product of our life together, not a drunken mistake.

“But Liv, Anne and I didn’t…get together…until
after
you left. Not that that makes it okay, but for the record, I didn’t cheat on you. I would never have even
thought
about anyone else, ant8217;d still had you. And I wouldn’t have been drunk enough to make a mistake like that if I hadn’t just been hurt and humiliated by the woman I loved more than anything else in the world, without even a word of explanation.”

“Are you seriously saying it’s
my
fault you had sex with my best friend?” she demanded, and I felt her slipping away from me again….

“No. I’m saying I was out of my mind with grief when you left, Liv. I had a plan for that night. I…I had a ring.”

Liv blinked, then sank onto the couch, as if her legs wouldn’t hold her anymore. “You had a what?”

“A ring. I was going to ask you to marry me. I had this whole cheesy moment planned. There was champagne, and a ring, and I was going to ask you at the stroke of midnight. But then you dumped me in the middle of the party instead, and when you left, you took my whole life with you, Olivia. Everything I ever had, and everything I ever wanted. All of it, gone. I couldn’t think straight. Then Anne was there, and she was hurting, too, and she wanted to go to a bar, but she was too drunk to drive. So I drove her and I tried to drink until I forgot all about you. And it worked—for one night.”

Liv stared at me in shock. As if she couldn’t form a proper sentence, or maybe even a single word. She swallowed thickly and stared at her hands. Then she met my gaze again, and this time when her mouth opened, words actually came out.

“Kori said you two hooked up while I was still there. She thought that’s why I left.”

I almost laughed at the absurdity of her statement. “Yeah. Because Kori was a pillar of sobriety that night, so her version
must
be accurate.”

“She
was
pretty drunk….” Liv conceded, and I grasped at the straw of belief she dangled in front of me.

“Olivia, I’m sorrier than you can possibly imagine for not telling you. I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know
when
to say it. There haven’t exactly been many good moments to blurt out, ‘Hey, remember when you left me with no warning and no explanation and ruined my entire life? Well, I got drunk and slept with your best friend, and there’s a very slight possibility that I might be her daughter’s biological father.’”

“Yet Kori found an opportunity,” Liv snapped.

“Kori waited until I left the room to throw a wrench into our reunion, and she did it to get back at us for dragging her into this. She doesn’t like being forced to do something.
Anything.
”

“That makes two of us.”

“That makes
all
of us,” I corrected. “I wish you’d stop acting like you’re the only one saddled with a mark. At least yours comes with some measure of freedom and a nifty expiration date. I’m stuck tracking for Tower—not to mention whatever else he wants done—for the next four years, minimum.”

Liv’s face flushed with anger, and I recognized the building storm that was about to wreck us both. “You want to talk about that expiration date? Let’s talk about that.” She stood, fists clenched at her sides. “In six months, if I haven’t found Cavazos’s…missing person, I will officially be in default of my contract. Do you know what happens then? Have I mentioned that?”

I shrugged. “A really big headache?”

The look she gave me was so cold my teeth wanted to chatter. “If I default on my contract, I become his. Completely. Exclusively. Without restriction. In six months, unless I suddenly, miraculously develop the ability to track someone through a single middle name or get close enough to use a relative’s blood sample, I become the private property of Ruben Cavazos, compelled to obey his every word. Whatever he tells me to do. He can make me kill for him. Maim for him. Kidnap or steal. Or anything more personal and humiliating that strikes his fancy. This boundary tattooed on my thigh? Six months from now it becomes a fucking red carpet. For the rest of my life. So tell me again how I have it so good, Cam. ’Cause right now, that kinda feels like a fairy tale.”