Twenty-Five
I stumbled backward and grabbed the back of a chair to keep from falling. Pain exploded in my cheek. But I clenched my teeth and cursed beneath my breath to keep from alerting Cam. “Motherfucker!” I lifted one hand to my face to find it flaming against my cool palm.
Ruben stepped inside and pushed the door closed, then met my gaze with infuriating calm, as if hitting me sent him to his mental happy place.
Bastard.
My mental happy place involved him, ropes, nudity, honey and a massive nest of fire ants.
“Why didn’t you answer my calls?”
I stomped into the kitchen and he followed while I loaded ice into the center of a clean hand towel. “Regrettably, I am no longer in possession of my phone.” I twisted the bulk of the towel around the ice and pressed it to my cheek, but that only made the throbbing worse. “How many times did you call before you figured out I wasn’t going to answer?” Taunting him wouldn’t help anything, and it wasn’t as satisfying as hitting him back. But it was a close second. “Ten?” His scowl deepened, and my smile grew in direct proportion. “Fifteen? Twenty? Did you call me twenty times, Ruben? You know that makes you look desperate, right?”
He stepped closer. “Are you trying to piss me off?”
“Every girl needs a hobby.” I tried to step around him, but he grabbed my arm and pushed me into the countertop, standing so close our bodies touched from knee to chest, and I could feel the fury radiating off him like a fever.
“I’m assuming you came here to apologize. And to work toward forgiveness.”
“Then you’re making an ass out of us both.” I shoved him back with one hand and dodged his next grasp.
“If you’re not going to play nice, why are you here?” Ruben’s grin would have looked natural on a snake. “Did my mark scare Caballero off?” He came closer, and when I backed away, I bumped into the couch.
Anger got in the way of clear reasoning, and for a moment I saw red. “He doesn’t give a shit about your mark, and neither do I. And there’s nothing you or your joke of a binding can do about it.”
“Let’s see how you feel about that mark in six months when I own you, head to toe, and everything in between….” His hand slid over the curve of my backside, and I shoved him away again, but he only laughed.
“That’s not going to happen.”
He actually laughed. “You’re no closer to finding my son now than you’ve ever been, and once you’ve failed, there’ll be nothing stopping me from securing Caballero’s services, whatever that takes. Maybe as a signing bonus, I’ll let him watch us together, so he can see what a good little girl you’ve become.” Cavazos leaned in closer and my teeth ground together when his lips brushed my ear. “He might even learn something….”
I buried my right fist in his gut and treasured his explosive grunt of pain as I lurched away from him.
For one long moment, Ruben couldn’t speak. He couldn’t breathe. He could only clutch the top of the couch, hunched over in the spot I’d just vacated, riding out the pain. I wanted to throw another blow. I wanted to kick him while he was almost down. I wanted to kill him, and in that moment, I think I could have. He couldn’t shout for help with empty lungs, and if he died, my mark would die with him. I would be rid of him. I would be free.
But we needed him. Hadley needed him. And I didn’t want to have to tell a child who’d already lost her real mother and her adopted father that I’d just killed another of her parents.
So I sucked in a deep breath and backed around the sofa, keeping it between us, and when he straightened, fists clenched in the overstuffed cushions, I knew that playtime was over. It was time to get down to business—before his retaliation drew Cam out of hiding.
“Truce? I need to talk to you, Ruben.” I edged toward the end table as he rounded the couch.
“You need to do more than that.” He shoved the coffee table out of the way and came two steps closer.
“Look.” I opened the drawer and was reaching for Hadley’s picture when his next word froze me in place.
“Stop.”
I fought the direct order, mentally, but couldn’t make my body disobey. I stood, but left the drawer open. “Please just look….”
He lunged forward and grabbed my arm. The room spun around me, ceiling soaring before my eyes. My back hit the couch and he was on me in an instant, one hand tangled in my hair, pulling my head to the side. “Now. You are going to shut the fuck up and do exactly what I tell you, or I’m going to make you wish you never set foot in this city.”
I forced a bitter laugh, rolling my eyes to the side to keep him in sight. “You’re a little late for that one. I hate you.”
Ruben laughed. “That’s why this is so much fun. You and Meika have more in common than you would ever believe. Swear you’ll play nice, and I’ll let you up.”
“Fuck you.” I dug between the cushions for my knife, but only wound up pushing it deeper.
He let go of my hair and his hand wrapped around my throat. But I managed three short words before he started to squeeze.
“I found him.”
Cavazos’s hand loosened, but didn’t leave my throat. “What?”
“I found him. Your son.”
“You’re lying.”
I shook my head, and his ring dug into my chin. “Let me up, and I’ll tell you.”
“You’ll tell me anyway.”
That was true, and we both knew it. I had to tell him what I knew, but my mark wouldn’t die until he was in physical possession of his child. “Fine. Let me up and I won’t make you work for the information.” It was within my ability to make him fish the information from me question by individual question, which would take forever and piss him off.
Of course, I didn’t have that kind of time to waste at the moment, but he didn’t know that.
Ruben let go of my throat, and trailed his hand from my neck down the center of my torso as he climbed off of me. I didn’t let go of the breath I’d held until he settled into a chair perpendicular to the couch, still within striking distance, but removed from my personal space. “Talk fast.”
I pushed myself upright, in spite of the pain in my arm, and took a moment to tug my shirt back into place, determined to reclaim a little dignity before we began the professional portion of the night’s festivities. “I found your kid, but he’s not exactly…a he.”
“Not exactly a he? I’m losing patience, Olivia. If I’m going to have to beat the information out of you, we should really get started.”
“Okay. Here.” I stood, and he was in front of me in an instant, ready to stop me, should I bolt for the door. “Relax. I’m not going anywhere.” I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. I edged past him and bent to pick up a photo from the floor, where it had fallen when he’d shoved the coffee table.
Ruben didn’t sit again until I sat and handed him his own photograph. “This is your picture of Lucio.” The middle name he’d given the illegitimate child he’d thought was a boy. “The one you gave me a year and a half ago.”
He took the picture and frowned at it while I pulled Anne’s photo from the drawer of the end table between us. “Now look at this one. Do they look like the same child to you? Same room? Same outfit? Is that your baby?” And more importantly… “Is that ‘Tamara’?”
Ruben gaped at the picture, his eyes growing steadily wider. “Where did you get this?”
“Is that her?”
“Without a doubt.” His gaze was glued to Noelle’s face, smiling out at us from a moment frozen in time. “Where is she?”
“Dead,” I said, and his jaw tightened, the only outward sign of his displeasure, and I was surprised to realize that he still cared about her, even years later. “Your wife had her shot six years ago, about four months after this picture was taken.”
Ruben’s eyes closed, but he didn’t let go of the picture.
“Also, her name wasn’t Tamara Parker. It was Noelle Maddox.”
“How do you know all this?” he asked, staring at the picture again.
“Michaela told me she had ‘Tamara’ killed, as a conversational lead-in to her intent to do the same to me. As for the rest of it…I’m getting to that. But first, I really need to know something.”
“You’re answering questions, not asking them.” But for the first time since I’d met him, he sounded neither confrontational, manipulative nor controlling. He wasn’t trying to overpower me, make an example of me or get me out of my pants. And oddly enough, melancholy-Ruben was pretty damn creepy.
I could find nothing to blame for the change in him, other than seeing Elle again for the first time in years, and I really needed to understand why one of my best friends in the world would have voluntarily spent so much time with someone as vile and abusive as Ruben Cavazos. So…
“Did you love her? Not like you love Michaela.” If their twisted marriage could even be described in such terms. “Did you actually, really love Noelle, more than you love yourself?”
Ruben scowled, as if I was wasting his time. “That’s a pointless question.”
“It is not a pointless question. You cheated on your wife for the first time with Noelle. Surely that means something—your first infidelity. Did you love her?” Please. I need to know…
Ruben sat back in his chair, watching me like a shrink with a sadistic streak. “Are you jealous, Olivia?” But this time I recognized his misdirection for what it was—a defense mechanism. He was hiding from the truth.
“Hell no.” I bent to pick up the towel I’d dropped and scooped several fuzzy ice cubes back into it. “I’m searching for a shred of humanity in that shriveled tangle of arteries you call a heart.”
“Well, stop.” His scowl deepened. “It’s not there.”
But it was. It had to be. Elle wouldn’t have stuck around long enough to produce another human being with him if he didn’t treat her better than he treated…anyone else I’d ever seen him with, other than his daughter. But he wasn’t going to say it.
“Fine. Did you hit her?” I asked, approaching the issue from another angle. Surely he wouldn’t beat on someone he truly loved. And I wanted that to be Elle for more reasons than I could even list. I wanted Elle to have been in love at least once before she died. I wanted to know that Ruben hadn’t abused one of my best friends during the last years of her life. I wanted to know that she wouldn’t have put up with it, if he’d tried.
She wasn’t bound to him. If she had been, she could never have run from him.
“Did I hit her?”
“Don’t act like that’s not a reasonable question.” I put the icy towel on my bruised, swollen cheek for emphasis.
Ruben sighed. “Did I hit her…?” And this time he actually seemed to be contemplating the question. “Only once. When she told me she was leaving. I left to cool off and when I came back, she was gone.”
“Holy shit. She hurt you, so you struck out at her.” He had loved her. And he missed her.
Maybe he’d been different with Elle. Maybe she hadn’t even known what he was really like, if she never saw him in his own world. After all, they were together eight years ago. A lot could have changed since then.
That’s what I told myself anyway.
“Enough.” He glanced at the picture again. “Tell me about my son.”
I nodded. In addition to satisfying my curiosity, talking about Elle had put him in a much more malleable mood. “Okay, here’s the short version. Your son is actually a daughter. Her name is Hadley, she’s seven years old, and she’s both smart and beautiful.”
Ruben blinked at me. Then he leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t like games, Olivia.”
“Yes, you do. But this isn’t a game.”
Another blink. Then Ruben held up Anne’s photo and pointed to the baby. “That is a little boy.”
“No, that is a little girl in a blue baseball cap. Evidently gender-specific physical traits aren’t so clear at that age. At least, not with the diaper on.”
Ruben brought the picture closer to his face and stared at the baby. Then he compared it to the child in his own picture by staring at that one. And finally he met my gaze again. “So…you’re serious? I have another daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Where is she?”
I hesitated a little longer than I should have, unsure how best to break the rest of the news to him. “That’s where this gets complicated. A couple of hours ago, she was in Cam’s apartment, but—”
“You brought him in on this? You took my daughter to Caballero’s apartment, before you even told me you’d found her?”
“No, on both counts. Cam and I were working on something else entirely. We were trying to protect a mutual friend’s daughter. But then it turned out that her daughter and your son were the same person. Only she was a little better informed about the child’s gender. And location. And name.” But not by much.
His forehead furrowed and his voice dropped into the dangerously angry range. “You and Caballero knew Tam—Noelle?”
“I grew up with her. Cam only met her once, through me. But we never knew she had a baby. Elle and I were out of touch the whole time she was with you, and afterward…she didn’t tell anyone.”
“If Noelle is dead, how did she hire you to protect her daughter from me?”
“We weren’t protecting her from you, Ruben. I’ve found no indication that she ever thought you’d hurt your own child.”
He looked so relieved by that fact—so uncharacteristically human—that I had to press the ice into my battered cheek again to remind myself that he really was a world-class asshole in everyday life.
“And she wasn’t the one who hired us. Before Elle was murdered, she sent Hadley to another friend to raise, in the event of her death. Which she obviously knew was coming. You knew about her Skill, right?”
Cavazos nodded and waved that bit of trivia off as unimportant. “Get on with it.”
“Anyway, she gave the baby to Anne and forbade her from telling anyone the child wasn’t hers. Which is one of the reasons you’ve had trouble finding her. Well, that, and you thought she was a boy. Clever on Elle’s part, huh?”
“I should have expected no less.”
“Yeah, well, she’s given all of us a bit of a postmortem surprise. But the weirdest part is that I randomly wound up working for you six years after she died, looking for the daughter you never knew you had. It’s almost too coincidental to believe.”
Ruben brows rose in mild amusement. “It’s neither weird nor coincidental, Olivia. It’s my Tamara. Your Noelle.”
“You think she knew I’d wind up working for you? And that Anne would hire me to protect Hadley in the middle of all that?” I shook my head slowly, trying to wrap my brain around the impossibility.
“I’m saying she pushed you into working for me, just like she pushed your friend Anne into raising her child and protecting her from Michaela.”
Did he really think we were all trying to protect his illegitimate child from his own psychotic wife? A valid assumption, I guess, but way off base…
“Ruben, I know she was a Seer, which is part of the problem with Hadley, but she couldn’t have seen everything. No one can see everything.”
“Is that what you think?” He laughed, as if he hadn’t even heard the part about his daughter. “You think she was just a Seer? Tamara—Noelle—was so much more than that. She didn’t just see the possibilities for the future, she saw the strings connecting all those possibilities. She could mentally pluck one string and watch how it rippled along all the other lines, changing things. Rearranging them. She pulled my strings, Olivia. It sounds like she pulled yours, too—yours and your friends. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she pulled the string that put you in the city—in my line of sight—in the first place.”
“No.” I shook my head, trying not to see all the pieces of the puzzle that was Elle, suddenly falling into place now that he’d revealed the pattern they formed. “I came to the city to get away from Cam.” Because Elle had said one of us would kill the other.
Shit!
Ruben laughed at my expression. “It was her, wasn’t it? She’s the reason you’re here?”
“Not just me…” I mumbled, before I realized I wasn’t obligated to tell him this part of it, and that if I did, he’d no doubt use it against me someday.
But the unspoken words still echoed in my head. The truth was that Elle hadn’t just pulled my strings. Cam had followed me to the city and wound up working for the other side—the side that had kidnapped her daughter—and that no longer felt like an unfortunate-but-random occurrence. If Ruben was right about Elle’s Skill, she could have put Cam where he was. She’d placed a mole—an insider’s set of eyes and ears—into the organization she knew we would someday have to infiltrate.
But she hadn’t placed Kori in the Tower syndicate. I was virtually certain of that. She never would have put a friend in the position Kori was in. Kori was a wild card—the one element Noelle, for whatever reason, hadn’t been able to account for.
“Oh, wow.” I had no other words for it. No wonder Tower wanted her child. He might not even know Hadley was also the daughter of his mortal enemy—knowing she might inherit the kind of serious Skill her mother had was temptation enough to snatch the child while she was still small and helpless, even if there was no proof yet that she’d actually be a Seer.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Cavazos said, and I saw a hint of a nostalgic smile on his face, so out of place it was startling. “She was also impossible to surprise on her birthday. Though I still have no idea what she saw.” He spread both arms to take in the whole tangled catastrophe. “Why she did any of this.”
“She did it to protect her daughter—your daughter—from Jake Tower.”
“What?” Cavazos demanded, and in an instant, the calm, almost nostalgic syndicate leader I’d come to tolerate over the past few minutes was gone. In his place sat the Ruben Cavazos of old, but the anger now blazing behind his eyes was fueled by fear and desperation, lending a much more personal—and dangerous—flavor to his rage.
“Olivia, where is my daughter?”
“We’re not sure. Exactly. Cam was able to get a read on her name, and he thinks she’s still in the city. But Tower has her.”
I barely even saw him move. One second he was sitting in the chair to my right. In the next instant, a Ruben-shape blur streaked toward me and an instant after that, I fought to get my feet beneath me as I was dragged across the room by my neck. My back slammed into the front door. Then Ruben was in my face, and I really wished I’d had the forethought to grab the knife I’d hidden in the couch.
“How the hell did Jake Tower get my daughter?”
“Spy,” I gasped, and he loosened his hold so I could speak. But not by much. “Before we knew Hadley was yours, we called a friend for help—a Traveler—but it turns out she’s bound to Tower. She didn’t want to take Hadley. She didn’t have any choice.”
“How long ago?”
I rolled my eyes to the left until I could see the clock mounted on the wall above the kitchen sink. “About two and a half hours ago.”
“Jake Tower has had my daughter for two and a half hours, and you’re just now telling me?”
“We didn’t know she was yours until a few minutes ago—when I told your men to call you.”
“So…I hire you to find my child, and instead, you get her kidnapped by a man who’s been trying to kill me for the better part of a decade. Give me one reason I shouldn’t kill you right now.”
His hand tightened around my throat, and I gasped reflexively, trying to drag in air that wouldn’t come. I clawed at his hands, but when he whispered for me to let go, my hands fell to my sides of their own accord. Contractually speaking, he couldn’t kill me. But he could damn well choke me until I passed out, and then he’d find Cam and Anne in the back room, and without me to mediate, he might very well decide to kill them both before he even realized who Anne was.
I kicked out as hard as I could, and my boot slammed into his shin. Ruben cursed and squeezed tighter.
Desperate and out of ideas, I kicked backward, and my boot heel echoed against the hollow door. I kicked it one more time, before he could order me to stop.
A second later, Cam stepped into my line of sight over Cavazos’s shoulder, gun aimed at Ruben’s back. “Let go of her now, or I will shoot you.”