Twenty
The 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, if I’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.”
For one long moment, I could only stare at her, drowning in a very private horror, and an even more private rage. I got homicidally pissed off thinking about the limited groping rights Cavazos had now. The thought of what he’d be able to do to her—or make her do—in six months sent bolts of protective rage surging through me, obliterating all rational impulses. My teeth ground together. My fists clenched so tightly my hands cramped. But I couldn’t find words to express any of that. They were all tangled up in the bitter lump in my throat, refusing to budge.
What came out instead was, “Why the hell would you let him seal a mark like that?” People all over the world were having their free will stolen or sold out from under them, like what had happened to Van. But Olivia had intentionally signed hers away!
Liv grabbed an unopened bottle of water from the coffee table and threw it at me, grunting with fury. I tried to duck, but the bottle hit my shoulder then fell to the ground, leaving a deep throb in the joint. “Why would I sign on for that? Why would I sell him my service, and my body, and my fucking free will? I did it to save your ass!”
I blinked in surprise. “To save…? What the hell does this have to do with me?” Other than my renewed determination to burn her contract to ashes, even if that meant dousing Cavazos with gasoline and lighting a match.
“You said you had a run-in with Ruben once,” she said, her eyes blazing with some toxic combination of anger, fear and some small measure of resentment. “Would that have been about eighteen months ago?”
“Yeah.” Confused, I sank onto the nearest bar stool. “Tower sent me to the south fork to pick up some loser who’d flaked on a loan extension. But when I got there, the target was… Well, I don’t know where he was. I’d tracked him there, and I could feel him there somewhere. But Cavazos’s men were everywhere. Evidently I got in the way of something they had going down, and his goons hauled me in.” One of them had smashed me over the head with a bat, and I’d woken up somewhere on Cavazos’s private property, tied up and bleeding, being questioned by the man himself.
Liv shook her head. “You didn’t get in the way—you were set up. Your target knew you were coming for him, so he sold you out to Ruben, in exchange for enough cash to pay off his debt.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. They messed with me for a while and asked me a bunch of questions I couldn’t answer, but then they let me go a day later. If he wanted me badly enough to pay for me, why would he just let me…?” My words faded into silence when she stared at the floor to avoid my gaze. “Liv, what the hell did you do?” I stood and tried to touch her, but she backed out of reach again.
“I traded my services for yours. You know how I’m tracking for Cavazos using only a name?” she asked, and I nodded again, stunned when the pieces began to fall into place. “That’s why he wanted you. I’d only dealt with him a couple of times, but I’d seen enough to know I didn’t want you to have to sign with him.” She barked a bitter laugh. “Of course, the joke’s on me—I didn’t know you’d already signed with Tower. I thought you were freelancing. Like me.”
And suddenly the devastating weight of my own unwitting involvement was too much to bear. I sank onto the couch, stunned. “You signed with Cavazos to…?”
“To keep you from having to,” she finished for me. “It was my fault you were in the city, and I thought you were freelancing in the south fork to stay close to me. I was…trying to protect you.”
She was trying to protect me.
My head spun a little, then the room spun a lot more. “You gave yourself to Ruben Cavazos—with no restrictions—to protect me.” Son of a bitch! My fist slammed into the coffee table and an empty water bottle fell over, then rolled onto the floor. “Why would you do that? Why the hell would you ever think I wanted you to do that? I’m supposed to protect you.”
Liv’s gaze hardened again. “Right after you drag me back to the cave by my hair, right? Damn, you can be a real asshole sometimes.”
“Then why would you sign over the rest of your life for me?” I demanded, standing, even though the room still felt a little unstable.
“Because I love you!” she shouted, anger flashing in her eyes, as if loving me was some kind of bitter curse. And maybe it felt that way, after everything she’d been through. “Because that’s the only way he would let you go. He knows you’re better with names, so trading my services for yours didn’t benefit him. He wouldn’t make the deal without knowing he stood to gain something if I failed. But I still have six more months to find his…missing person, before he can collect on the penalty.”
“Can you do it? With this relative’s blood sample?” Because I couldn’t have. Liv’s talent with blood went way beyond anything I could have done.
“I don’t know. If I’m close enough to feel the pull…probably. Maybe.”
“How close do you have to be?” She advertised her services with a range of eighty miles, but she’d been better than that when we were together in college—back when she was still an amateur, not even regularly using her Skill.
Liv hesitated, but only for a moment. “Three hundred miles, give or take.”
Holy shit… I sank onto the couch again, stunned. That was nearly double the range of the next best blood Tracker I knew. If Cavazos knew how good she really was, he’d never let her go. He’d find some way to keep her, even if she fulfilled her contract.
She shrugged. “I know it sounds like a lot, but considering that the target could be anywhere in the world, my range could be a thousand miles, and I’d still be useless without something else to go on. I have to narrow down the possibilities before tracking even becomes an option, and I’ve been trying to do that for the past year and a half with no luck.”
“Okay…” I nodded, my brain racing so fast my head was starting to hurt. “But that means we still have six months to destroy your contract.”
Liv barked a bitter laugh. “You think I haven’t thought of that? I have no idea where he keeps his signed contracts. For all I know, they’re not even in the country, and they’re most definitely stored in a fireproof vault, under armed guard, and probably shielded by the best Jammers in the world. Those contracts are Ruben’s lifeblood. He’d put everything he has into protecting them. We’re never going to find them, and even if we did, we’d never get to them.”
“The hell we won’t. I’m not just going to let him have you, Olivia. And neither are you.”
She exhaled slowly. “The only way out of this is to fulfill my contract.”
“And you can’t tell me who he’s looking for?”
She shook her head.
I shrugged. “That’ll make it harder for me to help, but not impossible.”
“There’s nothing you can do, Cam. I can’t even give you the name I’m tracking.”
Another shrug. “So I’ll get it from someone else. You sold your soul for me, and I’m going to help you get it back.”
She shook her head, slowly, sadly, and sank onto the couch next to me. “I love you for trying, but it won’t work. No one else knows the name I’m tracking.”
I felt my brows rise as what she was saying sank in. “No one?” She shook her head, and I frowned. “No one in the whole world? Just you and Cavazos?”
This time she nodded, eyes narrowed as if she’d just stumbled upon my train of thought. “No one knows this name, other than me, except for Ruben Cavazos. He’s the only one,” she said, eyeing me meaningfully.
And the only possible way that Ruben Cavazos could be the only one in the world to know someone’s name was if… “It’s his kid,” I said, and Liv’s sudden smile brightened her entire face. “That’s why you only have one name. You’re tracking the middle name he gave his own kid.”
“I cannot confirm that,” she said, grinning like a fool. “I can’t even discuss it.”
“Yet I can’t help noticing you’re not denying it.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Then let me follow that path a little farther….” I closed my eyes, thinking. “He doesn’t know the rest of the kid’s name, so that means he’s probably never met him. You said it’s a him, right?” I said, and she smiled again. The kid was a son. “And I’m guessing you would have tried tracking the boy’s middle name with the last name Cavazos.” Again, no confirmation. She couldn’t discuss it. “And based on the fact that you’re still tracking a single name, I’m assuming the mother—whoever she is—gave her son a different last name. Probably her own.”
Liv shrugged and sat on the coffee table in front of me. “That, I honestly don’t know. I have no clue what the mother’s real name was—the one she gave Ruben was fake. But I know, as of this evening, that Meika had her killed years ago.”
“That’s what you were talking about earlier….” When she’d said Cavazos’s wife had his first mistress killed. “Which means this son must have been conceived years ago. So why is he just now looking…?”
“He didn’t even know—” Liv flinched and one hand flew to her forehead, obviously the source of the pain. “Okay, evidently that’s prohibited information.”
Yet I could finish most of that sentence myself. Cavazos hadn’t even known he had a kid with this other woman until…something. Something Liv obviously couldn’t explain to me.
“Just like me…” I whispered, without thinking that through. Then I realized I hated having something in common with Ruben Cavazos. But not as much as I hated the thought of having to share Liv with him.
“You really think Hadley’s yours?” she asked softly, from inches away now.
“I honestly don’t know. But if there’s even a chance of that, I have to admit I understand why Cavazos would be so hell-bent on finding his kid.” I hated not knowing whether or not I was a father. And feeling guilty that I might have accidentally abandoned my own child for the first five years of her life. And I was pissed at the thought of how many things I’d already missed, that I could never get back. “I guess that’s at least one thing a woman can never understand—if you have a kid out there somewhere, at least you know it.”
“Yeah, I guess.” She looked as if she wanted to add to that—or maybe argue—but then her phone rang and she dug it out of her pocket to read the text. “Anne’s downstairs with Hadley. Will you get Kori while I bring them up?”
I nodded and when she disappeared into the hall, I grabbed my own phone and texted Kori. Get back here, bitch.
A second later, she walked out of my unlit hallway and leaned against the peninsula separating the kitchen from the living room, watching me with undisguised mischievous curiosity. “What’d I miss?”
“Only the chaos of your own creation,” I said, and she laughed out loud. “I was going to tell her, you know. I just wanted to do it my way. In my own time.”
Kori shrugged. “Your own time should have come a little sooner.”
“Mind your own business, Korinne. Or I might decide to tell a couple of your secrets.”
Her laughter died a sudden, quiet death. “Don’t threaten me, Romeo. Our checks may be signed by the same man, but Liv had my back way before she met you, so if I have to choose between the two of you, she’ll win every time.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “Don’t try to sound all noble—we both know you were just making trouble out of habit.”
She shrugged and managed a grin. “I’m not sayin’ it wasn’t fun. But if you’d told her like you should have, when you should have, I couldn’t have had any fun at your expense, now could I?”
Before I could argue, my front door opened behind me, and I turned to find Liv leading a child into my apartment.
And maybe into my life…