Blood Bound (2 page)

“Okay, look. Now that you’ve found him, you should just watch him until he makes a mistake, then go after him legally. Stick to what you’re good at, Adam. Anything else would just be dripping blood into the shark tank.”

“Wait for him to make a mistake?” Rawlinson demanded softly, and I nodded, already feeling guilty for the suggestion. “How long will that take, if it even happens? Coming in here once, with you, to take care of business—that’s one thing. But if we loiter, just waiting for this bastard to commit another crime… Well, that’s just not an option on the east side, is it?” His gaze pleaded with me, and I resisted the overwhelming urge to stare at the ground. “She was my
daughter,
Warren,” Rawlinson said, and the rare glimpse of his raw pain made me groan on the inside, even as I spoke the question I shouldn’t have asked.

“What do you want me to do? Go in and prick his finger?” My hand clenched around the stiff cloth in my pocket.

“I dn’t care how you ID him. Just get close enough to tell for sure, and we’ll handle the rest.”

“That’s going to cost you.” Sympathizing with his pain didn’t change my bottom line—freelancers don’t get benefits, and I was currently without health care, a dangerous position to be in, considering my line of work.

“Fine. Bill me.”

Against my better judgment, I led the way into the dark, quiet building with Rawlinson and Booker at my back. Most of the apartments were empty. Rumor had it the city planned to knock the eyesore down as soon as they managed to relocate the last six tenants—and convince Cavazos to sell the building. They probably had no idea there was a squatter on the third floor.

We crept silently up the stairs, the stiff bit of cloth clutched in my right hand, my fingers rubbing over and over the rough spot. I could feel him, so long as I was touching his blood. I could smell his sweat and taste his fear, both manifestations of the smear of psychic energy people leave behind with every drop of their blood.

For me, it’s a little harder working from only a name, but it can be done. And it’s easiest with both a name
and
fresh blood. But that rarely happens. UnSkilled criminals are much more careful than the unSkilled general population, and in hiding from police forensics labs, they’re inadvertently hiding from Trackers.

Even stupid criminals don’t want to be found.

The door between the stairwell and the third-floor hall was long gone, so we could see the light pouring from the crack beneath his door the moment we stepped onto the landing. The energy signature was stronger here, but no clearer. I was going to have to see the bastard to confirm his ID.

Damn it.

I snuck down the hall silently with Booker and Rawlinson on my heels until we stood in front of the lit apartment. I gestured for them to give me some space, and they stood to either side of the door, backs pressed against the grimy walls, out of sight from the occupant, unless he actually stepped into the hall.

Then I took a deep breath and knocked on the door.

When I’d worked for Rawlinson, I’d done both the tracking and the takedown, and back then, I would have looked the part—harmless, vapid young woman who needed jumper cables, or a telephone, or a big, strong arm to open a jar of pickles. Anything to get close enough to use a Taser on the target and collect a paycheck.

It’s amazing what a few years’ experience and the threat of mortal injury with no health insurance can do to change your perspective. Especially with the clock ticking in my ear and the certainty that I had no time to be incapacitated by injury.

Footsteps clomped toward me from inside the apartment and the door squealed open to reveal a tall, thick man with two days’ growth on his chin and suspicion shining in his eyes. He was armed—the handheld behind his right thigh was a dead giveaway—probably with the gun that had killed Alisha Rawlinson.

“Hey, sorry to bother you so late, but—” I let my right arm fly, and my fist smashed into his nose.

The target gave a wet gurgle of surprise and pain, and swung his arm up, too stunned tontolly aim his pistol as blood poured from his ruined face. I ducked below the gun and smashed his wrist into the door facing as hard as I could. Bone crunched. The target screamed again and his fist opened. The gun thumped to the floor and Booker kicked it down the hall.

I stepped back and let him take over, wiping the target’s blood from my face with the tissue Rawlinson offered. “It’s him.” I handed the tissue back as Booker pounded the target into unconsciousness in the doorway. The rest of this floor was empty, and even if one of the few tenants heard something, they wouldn’t come out to investigate. Not on this side of town. Not in the middle of the night.

Not if they had any wish to see daylight.

“Thank you, Liv,” Rawlinson said, as Booker dragged the unconscious man into his apartment.

“Don’t thank me. Pay me.” I peeled off my bloodstained jacket and handed it to him. “And if this doesn’t come clean, you owe me one just like it.” Then I took off toward the stairwell without looking back, trying to ignore the repetitive thud of fist hitting flesh echoing in the hall behind me.

On the street again, I exhaled, then glanced back at the building behind me. Silence, except for my own footsteps and the highway traffic two blocks away. True to his word, Rawlinson was keeping things quiet.

I crossed the road in a hurry, digging in my pocket for my keys, but froze when I spotted my car—and the man leaning against the hood. He was built of shadows, untouched by the streetlight on the corner, but I’d know that silhouette anywhere.

“Hey, Liv.” Cameron Caballero stood, and the past six years without him suddenly seemed surreal, as if I’d dreamed the whole thing, and now I’d finally woken up to the truth. To how my life should have gone.

But then a car engine started, stalled then restarted in the distance, and my life—the gritty reality—snapped back into place like emotional whiplash, leaving me gasping for breath.

Him showing up like this again wasn’t fair. But
fair
had never been less relevant.

“Not tonight, Cam.” Mentally steeling myself, I clomped toward him and my car, assuming he’d move when I tried to unlock my door. But instead of sliding out of the way, he stood, inches away now, intentionally invading my personal space. I could step back, but that would be acknowledging that being so close to him still affected me. Or I could stand my ground and make
him
back down.

“You know, someday you’re going to have to tell me what happened,” he said when neither of us moved, his voice an intimate, familiar whisper. “Why you left.”

“Today isn’t that day. Move.” I wanted to shove him out of my way, but touching him would have been a very bad idea. Maybe the best bad idea I’d ever had. “Don’t make me hurt you. I’ve already broken one face tonight.”

“I heard you were breaking faces professionally,” he said, still watching me as if nothing in the world existed, beyond whatever he saw in my eyes. “Then I heard you quit.”

I didn’t know what tsay to that, but as always, when I ran out of words, he still had plenty. “Would you really hit me?”

“Would you really make me?” I eyed him boldly and he sighed, and I could see that spark of possibility—of a rekindling—die in his eyes.

“No one makes you do anything, Olivia,” he said, and my chest tightened with the desperate wish that he were right. “A friend wants to see you.”

I reached around him and unlocked my car door, but he still leaned against it. “I don’t want to see your friend.”

He stared down at me from inches away, and I knew his eyes would be dark, dark blue, if they weren’t swimming in shadows. “Not my friend, Liv. Yours. She came to me looking for you. I think you should hear her out.”

But I couldn’t do anything that meant spending time with Cam, for both of our sakes. It was the same every time I ran into him: a jolt of memory, a spark of resurrected heat and a huge dose of regret I was sure he could see. That regret was what kept bringing him back.

It was what still drew me to him, even as I pushed him away.

“I don’t give a shit what you think,” I said, too late to be believable. I didn’t bother asking how
he’d
known where to find me. Cam was a Tracker—the best I’d ever met, other than…well, me. But whereas I was good with blood, he was good with names. Given a full, real name, he could find anyone, anywhere, and his range rivaled mine. And I’d made the mistake of telling him my full name—which no one else in the entire world knew—years ago. When I’d thought we’d be together forever.

That was one of the most foolish mistakes I’d ever made, but one he hadn’t given me reason to regret. Until now.

“Last chance, Cam. Move, or I’ll move you.”

He shoved his hands into the pockets of a snug pair of jeans and gave me this sad little smile, as if he missed me and wanted me gone, both at once, and I knew exactly how that felt. Then he stepped aside and watched while I slid into the driver’s seat and slammed the door.

As I pulled away from the curb, I glanced in the rearview mirror to find him still watching me, unmoving, until I turned at the corner and drove out of sight.

I unlocked my office door and shoved it open, then trudged across the small space toward the tiny bathroom. I had no waiting room and no fancy chairs. Just my desk, two cheap, upright cabinets full of my stuff and one old leather couch, stained and ripped, and more comfortable now than the day I took it from an ex’s house along with my own things—restitution for the car he’d stolen and nearly a year of my life wasted.

In the bathroom, I pulled off my top and grabbed a clean T-shirt from the cabinet over the toilet. The sun would be up in a couple of hours. I’d crash on the couch until dawn, then get an early start, because if I went home and crawled into bed, I’d lose most of the day to sleep, which would lead to me losing the job I’d just bid on to Travis Spencer, the runner-up, and his two meat-head associates.

With a quick glance at my pale, blood-splattered reflectionran warm water on a clean rag and scrubbed my face until I could no longer smell the energy signature of the blood I’d been tracking. But as I turned away from the mirror, the squeal of hinges bisected the silence, and my heart beat a little faster.

Someone was in my office. At four-thirty in the morning. Without an appointment.

I dropped the rag into the sink and squatted to pull a 9mm from the holster nailed to the inside of the cabinet beneath the sink. Aiming at the floor, I disengaged the safety and stood, ready to elbow the door open. I wasn’t expecting trouble, but honestly, I wasn’t surprised by it, either. Spencer had been gunning for me ever since he dropped the ball on the governor’s missing mistress, and I picked it up and ran for the goal.

“Once upon a time, four little girls, best friends, took an oath of loyalty,” a woman’s voice said through the door, and I flicked the safety back on.
It can’t be…

Annika. Cam had sent her alone. Smart man.

We hadn’t spoken in six years, but hearing her voice was like peeling back layers of time until my childhood came into focus, gritty and rough around the edges—was I ever
really
innocent?—yet somehow still naive compared to what time and experience had since made of me.

“They promised to always help one another, whenever they were asked,” she continued, as I fell through the rabbit hole, flailing for something solid to grab on to. “They signed their names, and—”

“And they stamped their thumbprints in blood.” I pushed open the bathroom door to find Annika Lawson watching me, green eyes holding my gaze with the weight of shared youth and the long-since frayed knots of friendship. “That’s where those stupid little girls went wrong,” I said. “They disrespected the power of names and blood.”

And look where it got us—my entire life ruled by one careless promise the year I was twelve.

“We didn’t disrespect the power, Liv.” Her gaze was steady, holding me accountable for every truth I’d ever tried to hide—that much hadn’t changed, even after six years apart. “We just didn’t understand it.”

Because no one had told us. We didn’t know we were Skilled, because our parents thought they were protecting us with ignorance. Insulating us from the dangers of our own genetic inheritance.

In the first years after the revelation, people sometimes disappeared. Government experiments or eager private industry research, no one knew for sure, but the disappearances terrified already worried parents into a perilous silence. They could never have known that Kori’s little sister was a Binder, or that at ten years old, she’d be strong enough to tie us to one another for the rest of our lives.

“Well, the power understood
us.
” And our ignorance didn’t make that binding any less real. Or any easier to undo. We’d bound ourselves together so tightly that as we grew up, the bonds chafed, wearing away at our friendship until nothing was left but resentment and anger.

I pulled the bathroom door closed and sank into my desk chair, fending off a battery of memories I’d thought buried. It felt weird to see Anne in my office, out of place in my adult life when she’d been a central figure of my youth. Part of me wanted to hug her and get caught up over drinks, but the stronger part of me remembered what went down that night six years ago, the last time we’d all four been together.

A reunion wasn’t gonna happen. Ever. And not just because Elle was dead and Kori was MIA. Anne had disappeared when I’d needed a friend. I could have tracked her, but why, when a dozen unanswered calls and messages said she didn’t want to talk to me? So I’d struck out on my own, and never once looked back at the past. Until now.

“What are you doing here? Is a third ghost from my past going to show up and take me to my own grave?” But that possibility struck a little too close to home, and I had to shrug it off.

She sank onto the couch and her composure cracked, then fell away, revealing raw pain and bitter anger, and suddenly I wanted to hurt whoever’d hurt her. In spite of what she’d done to me—what we’d all done to one another—I wanted to protect her, like Kori and I had looked out for her as kids, and that impulse ran deeper than the oath connecting us. Older. All the way back to the day Anne and I had first met, before Kori and Elle even moved to town.