Blood Bound (12 page)

I studied her for a moment, trying to decide whether or not she wanted the truth. “It’s not that bad, you know,” I said finally, and she looked at me as if I’d just put a knife through the Easter Bunny’s heart.

“It’s blood money, Cam,” she spat, slamming her bottle down on the counter, and my own temper sparked, part indignation, part denial. “How does it feel to know that your rent is paid with blood money?”

“You tell me,” I snapped, without thinking it through. But words can’t be unspoken—if I’d learned anything from swearing loyalty to Jake Tower, that was it. “You may not be bound to Cavazos, but you take commissions from him. What do you think he does with the people you find for him? You think he pats them on the head and sends them off to summer camp?”

“I don’t…” she stammered, and I’d had enough of her hypocrisy.

“Yes, you do!” I shouted, and some small part of me enjoyed her shock for that instant before it bled into anger. “You work for him, and you take his money, and you use it to pay absurdly high rent on an apartment in the fucking ghetto, just to stand on principle. But you’re paying for your principals with the same blood money that pays for this apartment. The only difference is that I can walk down the street without getting shot or mugged.”

She stood, practically shaking with fury, and I knew I’d made my point. “The difference,” she said through clenched teeth, her voice low and sharp enough to cut glass, “is that you signed on for this voluntarily, but I don’t have any choice.”

“What does that mean? Why don’t you have a choice?” I asked, and her face went as pale as my white Formica countertop.

“I…” Liv blinked, as if she’d confused herself. Or said more than she’d meant to. Then she grabbed her bottle and chugged the rest of it. “I just meant that I have to take whatever work I can get. I’m not exactly rolling in commissions since I left Rawlinson, and yes, I’ve done some jos for Cavazos, but that doesn’t make me his bitch, or his whore, or anything else.”

“I never said it did.” But she was already backing across my living room, headed straight for the coffee table on her way to a dramatic exit fueled by something I didn’t understand. “Liv, wait,” I called, already rounding the countertop into the living room when the back of her leg hit the corner of the coffee table. She went down on one hip, and her bottle smashed against the side of the table, spraying her jacket with the last droplets.

“Shit.” She started picking up the sticky pieces of glass and I knelt next to her to help.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

I shrugged. “It’s just a little glass.”

“I meant about…that whole thing. It’s none of my business what you do for a living.”

But I wanted it to be. “They offered me a step promotion,” I said, dumping the glass I’d gathered onto the coffee table.

“What?”

“When my five years were up. Tower called me in the week my mark would have gone dead, and I would have been free, and he told me I’d become very important to the operation. He said I had two choices—I could sign on for another five years, or I could leave the organization. As incentive to stay, he offered me a step promotion—two chain links for the price of one. Instant seniority.” I’d since learned that that offer was seldom extended, and even more seldom refused. “But if I opted out, I’d have to leave the city entirely.”

“Was that in your contract? Part of the noncompetition clause?” she asked, staring into my eyes from inches away, and I realized I hadn’t been that close to her in years. She hadn’t
let
me get that close….

“No. But he wouldn’t have had any trouble enforcing it.”

“You signed an extension so you could stay in the city?” she said, and I could only nod. “Because of me?”

“There were other factors….” Other people I didn’t want to leave behind. “But yeah.”

“Cam…” Her voice was more breath than sound, and it echoed in every cell of my body. And suddenly the memories were too much to fight. She was right there, after so many years, and she wasn’t pushing me away.

So I kissed her, and she kissed me back, and for several seconds, it was as if she’d never left at all.

Then pain slammed into my chest and I fell backward on my ass. By the time I realized she’d shoved me, she was on her feet, staring down at me. Glaring at me.

“Don’t. Touch me.” Her voice shook, and she couldn’t hide the tremor in her hands, even when she shoved them into her pockets. “This isn’t what it used to be. We can’t… We can’t ever go back to that.” She jogged toward the hall, pulling her jacket off as she went, and I only recovered enough to stand when I heard water running in the bathroom.

Anger warredwith something else inside me. Something deeper and older. Something that bruised me from the inside out every single time I heard her name, either out loud or in my own head. I followed her down the hall and stopped outside my own bathroom, where she stood with her jacket spread across the counter, trying to scrub drops of beer out of the leather.

“This is bullshit, Olivia.”

But she just scrubbed harder, so I snatched the cloth from her and she turned on me, eyes blazing with some dizzying combination of anger and…regret. “Don’t do this, Cam. This isn’t the time to open old wounds.”

“There’s never going to be a time, is there?” I pulled the cloth back when she reached for it. “Every time I see you, you tell me to go away, but you look like you want to cry when you say it. You don’t mean it, and we both know that.”

“I mean it….” she insisted.

“No, you
don’t!
” I shouted, and this time she didn’t argue. “What happened, Liv? Why are you lying to me? Why are you lying to
yourself?
”

She blinked up at me, eyes damp, in spite of the stoic set of her jaw, and I was nearly knocked off balance by the storm of conflicting urges raging inside me. How could I be so furious with her, yet so in love with her at the same time? How could she be so maddeningly closed-off, yet so obviously vulnerable beneath her shield of denial?

With one breath, I wanted to shake some badly needed sense into her, but by the next, I needed to protect her. To hide her away from whatever had put that bruised look in her eyes. And suddenly I couldn’t resist.

I stepped so close I could smell her shampoo and feel her warmth through my clothes. She sucked in a shaky breath and her fingers curled around a handful of my shirt, clutching at it, as if she wasn’t sure whether to pull me closer or push me away. Her forehead fell against my collarbone and in that moment, her defenses failed. She stood there with me, leaning against me, exposed, her heart so raw and wounded I wondered how it could possibly keep beating.

I slid one hand past her jaw to cradle the back of her head, and she held her breath when I leaned down to whisper into her ear. “Why can’t you just admit that you still want me? We both know it’s true.”

She took one more uneven breath, and her grip on my shirt tightened. “Because what I want doesn’t matter. Maybe it never did.”

Her defenses dropped back into place with a thud that jarred my entire existence. She pulled the rag from my hand and bent over her jacket again, and that’s when I noticed the words tattooed in an arc just below her neck and above her collar, bared by the hair she’d swept over one shoulder.

Cedo nulli.
Latin for “I yield to no one.” It was the motto of the independents—not a binding mark, but a promise made to one’s self, and a fitting summary of Olivia’s entire life. Or maybe it was her battle cry.

Was that the problem? She couldn’t be with me because I was bound to Tower? But she’d pushed me away long before I accepted my first mark. No matter what else happened, before the day was over, I was going to know the truth.

Eight

I
kept scrubbing my jacket long after I’d gotten the spots out, because my hands needed something to do.

Cam kissed me.
And I let him.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. I’d spent years pushing him away to make sure that could
never
happen. I’d only let myself think about him when the only other option was to truly experience the present—forced fealty to Ruben Cavazos. The memory of me and Cam together had become my mental refuge. I’d built him up in my mind, inflated my memories of him so that just the thought of him could block everything else out, and I’d never expected the actual man to live up to what I’d re-created in my head.

It shouldn’t have been possible.

He shouldn’t have had a chance to live up to anything.

But then I tripped, and he was there on the floor with me, and my body remembered what my head was trying so hard to forget—that I wanted him. All of him. That I missed him like I’d never missed anyone in my life.

Sometimes I dreamed about Cam, then woke up heartbroken and tried to go back to sleep immediately, to recapture the fantasy. The what-ifs. What if I didn’t know what I knew? What if I’d never left? What if Noelle was wrong, and I’d spent the past six years running away from the best man I’d ever met—the only one I’d ever loved—and I’d ruined both our lives for nothing?

But Elle wasn’t wrong. She’d never been wrong. Cam and I were dangerous to each other, and every second we spent together was a second ticking away on some countdown I didn’t truly understand. All I really knew was that when we got to zero, someone would die.

Knowing he was alive but I couldn’t have him was infinitely better than knowing I’d gotten him killed because I had the willpower of a nymphet in heat.

What the hell is wrong with me?
I was deep in Jake Tower’s territory, sporting an intimately located binding mark from his nemesis, which could easily get me killed—or worse—if exposed. Yet all I could think about was the hurt look on Cam’s face when I let him kiss me, then pushed him away again. The confusion in his eyes when I refused to explain why I’d left.

It wasn’t fair of me to keep that secret from him. I
knew
it wasn’t fair. But what if telling him only sped up the inevitable? What if telling him
caused
whatever Elle had seen?

What if
not
telling him caused it?

The doorbell rang, and my head popped up. I saw my reflection—never a good idea after a day of submission, coercion and sneaking around unfriendly territory—and I looked tired. But that was better than looking scared.

After a long, slow exhale, I ran my fingers through my hair and tossed my damp jacket over one arm instead of putting it back on. Surely meeting Van would be easier if we got this whole mark search out of the way first.

I was halfway down the short hall before I realized something was weird. Cam was laughing, and he wasn’t alone. And the other voice sounded distinctly…feminine.

I stood in the living-room doorway for almost a minute before they realized I was there, watching them, surprised and a little disappointed to realize that Van was a girl. I was kind of ashamed of myself for assuming she’d be male, and even more ashamed of myself for wishing I’d been right.

Then Cam noticed me, and when he stood, she swiveled on her chair to face me. And some fragile part of me withered and died. Van was gorgeous. Not just pretty, like I could be, with a day’s notice and an hour in the bathroom. Gorgeous like Elle had been—effortless, largely oblivious and completely natural. If she wore makeup beyond mascara, I couldn’t tell.

There had to be a reason Cam hadn’t mentioned the fact that Van was a woman.

“Van, this is Liv Warren,” he said as she stood and offered me her hand. I shook it, and held it for maybe a second too long, trying to decide how threatened I should be.

“You’re Van?”

“Vanessa.” She pulled her hand firmly from my grip, but offered me a friendly, if cautious smile. “And that’s all you need to know.”

Smart, for someone unSkilled.
But considering that I was evidently the talk of the west side at the moment, it did no good for Cam to withhold my name anymore; I’d just have to be content with the knowledge that—hopefully—my middle names were still my own little secret. Well, mine and Cam’s.

“Cam says you need some technical assistance?” She wore a long, filmy black skirt and a green-and-black-patterned tank top beneath a bulky sweater that couldn’t quite hide how very well built she was. However, it did cover her markings, which left me no way to judge her rank within the Tower organization, or to guess what her job within it was.

And suddenly I truly understood why Nick had insisted I remove my jacket earlier—so he’d know exactly who he was dealing with. And that point of commonality between us pissed me off.

“Yeah.” I reached for the lunch I’d barely touched, then realized I no longer wanted it. “We’re looking for a full name and the owner of a certain bank account. But those’ll be two different people.”

“Which do you want first?” Van bent to pick up a backpack I hadn’t noticed and set it on the extra bar stool.

“The name,” Cam and I said in unison. If we could find Eric Hunter’s full, rightful name, Cam could track him from that, while I made what use I could out of the strange blood samples. We’d come at him from two different angles, and hopefully arrive at the point where they met.

Van set up her laptop and several other pieces of equipment on the kitchen peninsula while Cam told her what we already knew and I…watched them. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t be with him—not like I wanted to be—but that didn’t make it any easier for me to see him with someone else. And the fact that he still wanted me clearly hadn’t stopped him from exploring his options.

They were obviously close—they laughed easily and seemed to share several private jokes no one bothered to explain to me. He knew what she liked to drink, and she knew where he kept the glasses, paper towels and extra notepads.

Conclusion: she’d been over before. A lot.

“Okay, let’s see what we can find on Mr. Hunter.” Van took her sweater off and draped it over the back of her stool, and that’s when I got my first look at her mark. A single greenish chain link. She’d served less than five years, based on the fact that she hadn’t earned a second mark yet, and the color green said she worked in some kind of unSkilled staff capacity. That could be anything from bookkeeping to housekeeper, but based on the equipment she’d unloaded, I was guessing Van served in a more technically apt position.