Blood Bound (35 page)

“When she wakes up, we can get Hadley’s middle name.” And hopefully a blood sample.

Then I froze as Cam sat straighter, and we both seemed to realize what I’d said at the same time.

“Her middle name…” I mumbled, and he nodded. “If she’s your daughter, her second middle name is yours to give. And you haven’t named her yet.”

“There’s no better time…” he said. “Just like Cavazos.” And he looked sick over the comparison.

I could have happily lived my entire life without ever finding a similarity between Cameron and Ruben, but if it helped us find Hadley… “So, what are you going to name her?” Though I really shouldn’t have asked. It was none of my business, and revealing her potential middle name could put the child in some serious potential danger someday.

But Cam only blinked at me. “I have no idea. I’ve never even thought about it. I always assumed that when I had a kid, I’d have at least a few months’ warning. Time to prepare.”

While he thought about it, I started opening the top cabinets we’d left closed in search of something stronger than soda. And finally, above the fridge, I found a small bottle of very expensive whiskey.

“Go easy on this,” I said, setting it in front of Cam along with a short, clear glass. “I suspect this is going to be a long night.”

“Thanks.” He opened the bottle—the seal hadn’t even been cracked—and poured a double shot, then waved off my offer of ice. “What do you think Cavazos would think of me drinking his whiskey?” Cam took a long sip.

“I’m pretty sure that’s
my
whiskey, considering how insistent he is that this is my apartment.”

“Well, then, you have excellent taste.” He took a second sip, then set the glass down. “Maybe you should consider staying here occasionally, just for the fringe benefits.”

I frowned at him, leaning over the bar. “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly why he wants me to stay here.”

I let him drink in silence for a few minutes, then I had to nudge. Every moment we wasted was a moment Anne spent without her daughter. A moment Tower could be moving Hadley even farther away from us. “Ideas?” I asked, and he shook his head. “You could always name her after your mother.”

Cam nearly choked on a fresh sip. “I think I should probably tell her she’s a grandmother—maybe—before I start naming unexpected children after her.”

“A valid point.” I hesitated, then pushed forward again. “I hate to rush something this important, but we need to move, Cam. What’cha got?”

“Nothing, yet. I don’t even know if she’s my kid….”

“I know.”

“But if she is, I owe her the courtesy of putting a little thought behind a name she’s going to be suck with.”

“So pick something pretty.”

He scowled at me, as if I’d just suggested he hang his theoretical daughter over the balcony by one foot. “Screw pretty. She needs something safe. Something with several potential nicknames. Something unrelated to me or to her, so it can’t be guessed. Something random, but not without some aesthetic value. After all, she
is
a girl.”

“That’s what I was getting at,” I said, both stunned and amused by the level of thought he was putting into it.

“Most people get nine months to think about this….” he complained.

I laughed. “Most girls start naming their future children in junior high.” He glanced at me with both brows raised, and I shook my head vehemently. “Not I. But I will admit to putting almost as much thought into picking out the .50 caliber as you’re putting into this.”

His frown deepened, and his disappointment was almost palpable. “You’d rather have guns than kids?”

“I wouldn’t suggest hanging pistols over a crib as a mobile, but other than that, I don’t consider the two mutually exclusive.” But Cam’s expression didn’t change. And finally I understood. I slid over onto the chair next to his and pulled his chin up so that our gazes met. “Hadley’s not a deal-breaker, Cam. If she’s yours, she’s mine, too. Not like she’s Anne’s, of course. But you’re not going to get rid of me by accepting paternity.”

“Sarafina,” he said, and I blinked.

“What?”

“Sarafina. For her middle name.”

“That’s
my
middle name.”

“I know. You said if she’s mine, she’s yours, too, and this would make that true. Let me name her after you, Liv. I’ve always thought it was a beautiful name.”

I smiled. I couldn’t help it; I was all gooey inside from a rare moment of mushiness. “Let’s see if it works.”

This time when he closed his eyes, it seemed to mean more. I felt intimately connected to the process, and my next breath seemed to hinge on the gravity of the result. And this time, when he opened his eyes and his disappointed gaze met mine, the breath I held felt too heavy to let go of.

“Nothing. She’s not mine.”

He looked so disappointed that I decided not to mention the other possibility—that Kori had lied about Tower’s intentions. That Hadley could be dead. That was too much to think about at the moment.

“This is so stupid.” Cam leaned with both elbows on the bar. “I didn’t have a daughter yesterday, and I don’t have one today. Nothing’s changed. So why do I feel so…”

“Empty?” I suggested, and he looked up. He didn’t nod, or acknowledge what I’d said, but I could see in his eyes that I was right. And I felt it, too. I’d thought—just for a minute—that he had a daughter, and that she could be like a daughter tome, too. Or maybe more like a niece. Either way, she would be someone small and fragile that I could help keep safe from the world and its iron fists.

But then that moment was over, the fantasy shattered, and I remembered that in real life, I was in love with a man I couldn’t survive and bound to a man I couldn’t escape. I remembered that I collected guns and counted scars, and that maybe I wouldn’t be the best influence on someone as impressionable as Anne’s young daughter was sure to be.

“Well, I guess that’s that.” Cam crushed his empty soda can and screwed the lid back on the bottle of whiskey. “Name-tracking is a no-go, unless Anne has some more accurate information for us.”

“How long do you expect her to sleep?” I asked, and he glanced at his watch.

“It’s already been almost two hours and I gave her a small dose. She could wake up anytime.”

I stood and headed for the bedroom, and he called after me. “Careful. Mama bears wake up cranky.” Especially those who wake up missing their cubs. I peeked into the bedroom and found Anne stirring slowly, sluggishly, on the bed. She was waking up.

I sat on the edge of the mattress, and when I put a hand on Anne’s arm, she opened her eyes. She blinked several times, then sat up slowly and stared at me, her hair mussed as if she’d slept for days. Her nap obviously hadn’t been very restful.

“What happened?” she croaked, eyes still red from crying.

“Cam sedated you.”

“Bastard…” she mumbled, pushing tangled hair back from her face. She cleared her throat, then met my gaze again. “Hadley?”

I glanced at my lap, then made myself meet her gaze. “We’re still working on it.”

“I don’t understand. I left Kori a message directly asking her to bring Hadley back. She can’t ignore that.”

“I know. We don’t think she’s listening to her messages. Cam thinks she’s been ordered not to.” I sighed, then plunged into the rest of it. “Cam tried to track her, but…something’s off about her name, Anne. Whatever’s going on, you need to tell us. We can’t find her if we don’t have all the information.”

“I can’t…” She scrubbed both hands over her face, then left them there, shoulders shaking with silent sobs.

I pulled her hands away from her face and made her look at me. “You don’t have any choice, Annika. We’ve tried everything we could think of. Cam tried to track her using Shen’s last name, then yours. He even tried his own, but that didn’t work, and neither did giving her a middle name. We know she’s not his, so whatever you’re hiding…well, it can’t be worse than that, right?”

Anne frowned, momentarily distracted from her tears by obvious confusion. “What? Why would she be Cam’s?”

I watched her expectantly, waiting for comprehension to sink in, and when it didn’t, I had to actually say what I’d been avoiding discussing. “Anne, I know about the two of you. At the party. Six years ago.” Her eyes widened, and I barreled on. “Kori told me. So, on the off chance that Hadley was his, Cam tried giving her a paternal middle name, then tracking that name. But it didn’t work. So we need to know—who is her father? Or at the very least, what’s her real name? The whole thing, Anne.”

For a moment, she looked as if she was actually going to answer, as hard as that might be. Then she burst into tears instead.

Cam’s footsteps echoed in the hall while I tried to calm her down, and when he appeared in the doorway, she saw him and cried even harder. “Anne,” he said, as I pulled her gently to her feet and guided her toward the door, “I know you’re upset, but we don’t have time for this. Actually, we don’t know how much time we have. We don’t know much of anything, and we’re not going to until we find her. So we need you to calm down and tell us everything you know. Everything.”

She nodded unsteadily and wiped her face with the tissue I handed her, then glanced back and forth between us, still sniffling. “Okay. But I’m gonna need a drink.”

Cam forced a smile. “That, we can do.”

In the breakfast nook, I pulled a chair out from the table for Anne while Cam poured two fingers of whiskey over ice. He set the glass on the table in front of her, and Anne traded the box of tissues for her drink. She downed half of it, winced, then held the glass in both hands and stared into it.

“I haven’t told you guys the truth about all of this. About any of it, really.”

“Yeah, we gathered,” I said softly, trying to set her at ease.

“The truth is that I don’t know who Hadley’s father is. I don’t know what her full name is. I couldn’t even swear that Hadley is her real first name. All I know for sure is that she isn’t five—she’s seven. Fortunately, she’s kind of small for her age, so no one’s really questioned that. They just think she’s very bright, which is true. Hell,
she
even thinks she’s five.”

Damn.
I blinked at Cam, relieved that he looked just as speechless and confused as I felt. But before I could formulate some kind of response, Anne went on.

“Hadley turned seven last month. And she’s not mine.”

Twenty-Three

“W
hoa…” Cam stood and stomped toward the kitchen, then turned to face us again, stiff with anger. “You let me think she might be mine, when she isn’t even
yours?
”

“I’m sorry.” Anne set the glass down and turned in her chair to face him. “It never occurred to me that you’d think that. I honestly haven’t thought about…that night—the party—in years, and I hadn’t done the math in my head, because… Well, because the math isn’t real. She’s not really five.”

“So…who’s her mother?” I asked, while Cam ran cold water into a glass at the sink.

Anne studied my expression, as if she was testing it for sincerity. “You really haven’t figured it out?”

“No!” Even as I answered, I was silently grasping at straws, looking for clues I might have missed, fully aware that there were probably some things she couldn’t tell me. But I came up empty. “How could we have?”

Anne sighed and picked up her glass again, but just held it, as if she was testing her own willpower. And this time when she looked at me, her damp eyes were bottomless wells of pain mixed with relief. “Olivia, she’s Elle’s daughter. How can you look at her and not see Noelle?”

Stunned, I sat back in my chair, and on the edge of my vision, I saw Cam slowly lower his glass of water. I hadn’t seen it—
we
hadn’t seen it—because we weren’t looking for it. We hadn’t been looking for Noelle.

Cam refilled his glass, then sat down on Anne’s other side, across the small table from me. “Why do you have Noelle’s daughter? And how did she get a daughter? And where the hell
is
she?”

All valid, important questions, but the rapid-fire succession only added to the chaos. “I think we can deduce how she got a daughter,” I said, then returned my attention to Anne. “But as for the rest of it, we’re truly in the dark.”

“Okay.” Anne drained her glass, then slowly swirled the ice standing in the bottom. “A few days after that party—
the
party—a woman showed up on my porch with a baby.”

“Seriously?” Cam asked, and Anne nodded.

“Just like she’d stepped out of a movie. She had a baby in a car-seat carrier and a letter from Noelle, asking me—
begging
me—to take care of her. That was it. No time limit. No ‘I’ll be back for her soon.’ Just ‘Will you please take care of my baby,’ and ‘Will you please not tell anyone that she’s mine unless it’s necessary for her safety.’ That, and a list of her vital statistics. And, of course, I had to do it. Not that I would have just left Hadley on the porch, but you know, because of the binding, I didn’t have that choice.”

I frowned, trying to puzzle through an inconsistency in her story. “But how did she…” And then I understood what probably should have been clear earlier. “You didn’t burn the second oath.
Noelle
did.”

Anne nodded. “That’s the only thing I can figure, anyway. Otherwise, she would never have been able to ask me, even through a letter.”

“Why didn’t you come to me for help? I could have tracked her!” And maybe I could have prevented all of this…!

“Because I couldn’t!” Anne sat straighter, her animated gestures fueled by frustration. “You’d have asked about the baby, and I couldn’t tell you she was Elle’s! I did try to find her, though. I’ve hired Tracker after Tracker over the years, and no one’s even gotten a single blip on her signature. No sign that she’s even alive. And she’s not. She can’t be. She would have come back for her daugh20;Jf she were still alive.”

“Okay, wait,” I said, trying to sort through information swirling around my head. “Noelle
gave
you her baby?” It was part question, part repetition of the facts in an attempt to understand them. “She just…what? Sent the babysitter over with her only child? Why?”