Ten
“Tower.” Stunned, I sank onto Cam’s couch and closed my eyes. But that didn’t make it any less true. “Are you sure?”
Cam sat next to me. “If that money had come from anywhere else in the world, she’d tell us. But she can’t say anything that might incriminate the syndicate, so it has to be from one of Tower’s accounts.”
I frowned at him, confused. “Are you allowed to say that?”
Cam shrugged. “Now that you’ve already guessed, I’m not divulging incriminating evidence.”
“Is she going to get into trouble for this?” I felt sick, knowing I might have made things worse for Van, after everything she’d already been through.
“Not unless someone asks her a direct question. And that can’t happen unless someone finds out what she was doing here. So, obviously, don’t tell anyone.”
I nodded absently, but my brain had already moved on. “Why the hell would Jake Tower want to kill Anne’s husband? I can’t imagine him being tangled up with the syndicate without her knowing about it.” And if she’d known about it, surely she would have told us—not telling us would only make it harder for us to find Shen’s killer.
“It’s probably not actually Tower,” Cam pointed out. “It could be anyone with access to a syndicate bank account.”
But that wasn’t really true. “It’d have to be someone high up enough to have access to the account, and the clout to spend funds autonomously. Maybe even anonymously, right?” I had no personal knowledge about the Tower syndicate, but I knew how Cavazos ran his operation, and I was willing to bet my unmarked left arm that their day-to-day operations had a lot in common. “I’m guessing that’s no more than a handful of people, right?”
Cam nodded, looking distinctly uncomfortable, and I took that to mean we were getting close to a line he couldn’t cross.
“I’m also guessing you can’t tell me who those people are, can you?”
“No,” he said, and my sigh sounded almost as heavy as it felt. “But I swear, Liv, I had no idea the syndicate was involved until Van came out of the bedroom.”
I believed him. I don’t know why I believed him; he’d lie to protect the syndicate if the situation required it. But when I looked into his eyes, I believed him, and I felt a ghost of his touch on my back, tracing the words I wanted so desperately to be true. For both of us.
“Okay. I can get those names on my own.” Most of them, anyway. I wasn’t without resources. “But first we need to update Anne. And she needs to know about your binding, Cam.”
“I know.” He took my hand and pulled me closer, and I let him, against my better judgment. “Maybe you should let me talk to her. Alone.”
“Why?” I didn’t even bother screening suspicion from my voice. I hated knowing that even though he still loved me—I had no doubt about that—I couldn’t trust him. As long as he bore a live mark, no one would be able to fully trust him. Not even the syndicate. They may have had his service and obedience, but they didn’t have his heart—maybe they never had—and that meant he would use whatever loopholes he found.
But I still couldn’t trust him.
Cam looked up at me from the couch, and I let him pull me forward until I stood between his thighs, my knees brushing the front of the couch cushion. “Olivia, if you go up against the Tower syndicate, I can’t help you. And if Anne asks you to, you’ll have to do it. So it seems to me that the only way to avoid being asked to go up against the syndicate is to let me deal with Anne.”
I pushed aside the ache I got every time he touched me—the overwhelming urge to lean into his touch, rather than pull away from it—and made myself focus on his words. Because they made sense—up to a point. “Cam, I can’t avoid Anne. Even if she weren’t a friend, I’m working for her.” And unease was already crawling beneath my skin—the very beginnings of resistance pain—because I wasn’t actively pursuing her husband’s killer in that moment. “But she’s not going to ask me to go up against Jake Tower. She won’t do anything to put her daughter in danger, and going after Tower would do just that.”
“She’s in mourning, Liv. You can’t expect her to react rationally. And you’ll be bound to whatever suicidal, impulsive revenge she asks for.” He frowned, and I recognized the stubborn set of his jawline. “I can’t let you put yourself in that kind of danger.”
I stepped out of his reach, crossing both arms over my chest. “That’s not up to you.”
“I’m just trying to protect you, Liv.” He frowned up at me from the couch, elbows resting on his knees.
“I don’t need your protection. But I could use your help. And for the record, you’re not giving Anne enough credit—I think she’s holding things together pretty well. Besides, I owe her an update, and she deserves to hear the facts in person.”
Cam gave in with a heavy exhale and a single nod. “Six years has only made you more stubborn.”
But he was wrong about that. The past six years had also made me faster, meaner and less willing to believe in the inherent goodness of any species that could include Jake Tower and Ruben Cavazos among its numbers.
“I take it this little emergency meeting means you haven’t found him yet.” Anne’s hand shook as she spooned sugar into her coffee, and I wondered if she’d had any sleep at all in the twenty hours since her husband was murdered.
Cam and I had not.
“Not yet. But we know where he lives, we have most of his name, and we found a fresher sample of his blood.” And we had tested the pull of Hunter’s energy signature using both his blood and his name on the way to meet Anne. Both were very strong signals, leading deeper into the west side. Hunter was still alive, and he almost certainly knew someone was after him. Yet he hadn’t left the city.
The fact that he’d stayed made me nervous, and it was one of the biggest factors in our decision to update—and question—Anne before going after Hunter again.
Anne sipped from her mug and watched us from across the table, oblivious to the Friday-night dinner crowd just starting to filter in at the end of the nine-to-five shift. “So what’s the problem?”
I glanced at Cam to see if he wanted to take the lead—he was the one bound to Tower, after all—but he gestured for me to go ahead.
“Anne, was Shen involved with the Tower syndicate?” I whispered, leaning across the table to make sure we wouldn’t be overheard. “In any way at all?”
She choked on her coffee. “No,” Anne croaked, blotting her mouth with a paper napkin. “Absolutely not.”
“Are you sure?” Cam asked. “If he was, he might not have been allowed to tell you. Did you ever see him with anyone who had a chain link tattooed on his arm. Or her arm?”
Anne leaned closer, brows drawn low over eyes shining even greener than usual with exhaustion. “Living in the suburbs doesn’t make me an idiot. I know Tower’s insignia, and I would know if my husband were working for him. Or meeting with someone who worked for him.”
Cam gave her an awkward little grin, obviously trying to soften the coming blow. “You might not.” He slid his right hand beneath his left sleeve, as if he had an itch to scratch. “I’m a third-tier initiate.” He lifted the hem of his sleeve quickly and subtly, just long enough for her to get a peek at his marks, then let the material fall.
Anne set her coffee down carefully, deliberately, but she couldn’t hide the tension in her grip. “You work for Tower.” It wasn’t a question. It was a stunned statement of new facts, spoken to try to convince herself of the reality.
I knew exactly how she felt.
“He’s being modest,” I said, unable to keep the bitter edge out of my voice. “He’s actually Jake Tower’s top Tracker. Even got a step promotion last year. Isn’t that swell?”
Cam’s jaw tightened, but just because he didn’t like the truth didn’t make it not true.
Anne focused on him with an iron glare, and I realized she was about to make me proud. “I’m going to forgo the whole ‘what the hell were you thinking?’ speech in favor of something even more obvious,” she snapped in a harsh whisper. “You should have told me that up front. I never would have involved you in this if I’d known!”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” he said, with a meaningful glance at me. “I wanted to help.”
Anne took a deep breath and another sip from her mug. “So, what does this mean? Why are you asking about Shen in relation to Tower? You think someone killed him because they thought he was…one of you?” she asked, with a censuring glance at Cam.
“Not exactly…” he mumbled, and I exhaled slowly.
“Anne, someone in the Tower syndicate paid to have your husband killed.”
In the silence that followed, the ambient restaurant noise seemed to close in on us, amplifying Anne’s shock and denial, Cam’s obvious confliction, and my own kaleidoscope of anger, fear and dread.
“Why?” she said, when she’d recovered the ability to speak. “Why would they want Shen dead?”
“I don’t know.” And I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “Are you sure he never had any business with the organization? Could he have been working with or for someone you didn’t know about?”
Red hair tumbled over her shoulder as Anne shook her head slowly, clearly giving it serious thought. “We both worked from home. We shared an office. There’s no way he could have kept something like that from me. No way he would have.”
“Then I don’t know,” I repeated. “Cam, any insight? Why might your brothers in crime have a suburban software engineer capped?”
He scowled at me, but didn’t even try to deny the illegal nature of most of his employer’s business. “It could have been anything. To stop him from working on whatever he was working on. Or, if they wanted him to do something and he refused, this could have been a reprisal. It could even have been intended to scare someone else he worked with into falling into line. Or it could be completely unrelated to his job. Maybe he saw something he shouldn’t have. Maybe he borrowed money he couldn’t pay back. But based on the amount of money someone put out for this, and the fact that they hired someone outside of the organization, I’m guessing this was both personal and important to someone pretty high up. And that’s all I can say. But for the record, it’s also all I know.” This time.
He didn’t say that last part, but we all heard it.
“This doesn’t make any sense.” Anne still looked so stunned I was surprised she could form complete sentences. “He didn’t owe any money. We’re not wealthy, but our savings are intact. And he didn’t see anything unusual—he would have told me if he had.” I started to argue that he might not have, to keep her safe, but she amended her own thought before I could. “Or maybe he wouldn’t have told me, but I would have known if he was upset about something. But everything was fine.” Anne closed her eyes and visibly paled. Her hands shook as she pushed straight red hair back from her face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, though the answers seemed too numerous and obvious to be stated.
“I just realized that Hadley could have been home when it happened. Any other Thursday night, she would have been. She would have seen him die. Or worse.”
“What was unusual about yesterday?” Cam asked, and I leaned closer to listen. Any variation in their normal routine could hint at why Shen was killed.
Anne picked at the fingernails of her left hand. “It was Hadley’s best friend’s birthday. I dropped her off at the party on my way to the gym. Any other night of the week, we all three would have been home. Any other Thursday, Shen and Hadley would have been home together.”
I laid my hand over hers on the table. “Okay, I think you should focus on the fact that she wasn’t home. Neither of you were. Focus on that and be grateful. And leave the rest of it to us.”
“You’re still going to…finish this?” Anne’s eyes shined with feverish hope. Dark desperation.
“We can—and will—still go after Hunter,” Cam said. “He’s not a member of the syndicate, so I have no official conflict of interest. But that’s as far as I can go. I can’t take any action against the organization, and I can’t know for sure that either of you are going to, or I’d be obligated to stop you. So please take this seriously—do not move against Tower.” He turned to me then, as somber as I’d ever seen him. “And if you choose to ignore that warning, as I’m fully aware that you will, do not discuss it in front of me. Wait until I’m gone.”
“We’re not moving against Tower,” Anne insisted. “That would be suicide. Just get Hunter—that’s all I have any right to ask.”
“Wait…” I turned to Cam, choosing not to point out that Anne didn’t actually have the right to ask for Hunter’s life, either—she was neither judge nor jury. “How do you know Hunter isn’t syndicate?” Surely Cam didn’t personally know everyone bearing Tower’s mark.
“An initiate wouldn’t have been paid like that—he would just have been ordered to make the kill. He might have gotten a bonus after the fact, if he really rocked the execution, but it wouldn’t have been even half what Hunter got paid. Someone hired an independent to keep this from being traced back to the syndicate.”
“But we traced it back to you guys pretty easily,” I pointed out.
“No, Van traced it back to Tower. Because she works on the business side of things and is already familiar with the accounts. An outsider would have had a bitch of a time finding the source of that money, I’d bet you anything.”
“Okay, I think the best thing for you to do is to go back home and be with your daughter. And forget about the Tower syndicate,” I said to Anne, pushing my own mug toward the middle of the table while Cam dropped a twenty-dollar bill next to his. “We’ll call you when it’s done.”
Anne nodded, still gripping her mug.
I glanced back at her from the front of the restaurant as Cam pulled open the door. She still sat there, staring at the table. Shaking. Gone was the steel-spined widow who’d walked into my office demanding justice. Things had changed. She was in over her head.
And so were we.