Nine
“How many did you recruit?” Liv demanded in a furious whisper, and it took real effort for me not to lie. I’d been lying for so long now, to everyone but her, that telling the truth was hard. It hurt, like facing myself in the mirror—something else I didn’t do much anymore.
“I didn’t have any choice,” I said finally, so low even I could barely hear myself. “I was under orders to recruit Vanessa, then get her to help me track and recruit as many of the others as we could. All I got from her was a list of names, though.” I glanced at the bottle between my hands on the countertop, then made myself look at Liv. Just thinking about what I’d done made me sick to my stomach. “I didn’t want to involve her in the rest of it.”
“Well, she’s involved now, isn’t she?” Liv hissed. “She’s in it up to here.” She held one hand at shoulder level, where Van’s binding mark would be. “You could have found a way around those orders, Cameron. I’ve seen you wiggle out of things you’re supposed to do.”
“Yeah, maybe I could have. And maybe it wouldn’t have gotten both me and Vanessa hauled up in front of one very pissed-off Jake Tower.” Though I highly doubted that. “But if I hadn’t recruited them, someone else would have, and their methods might not have been quite as gentle as mine.”
“Gentle? Is that a euphemism for coercion and outright lies?” she demanded.
“It’s an alternative to gunshot wounds and children sold into the skin trade.”
“It’s all the same, Cam. You can’t serve yourself while you’re serving someone else.”
“Does that make you feel better?” I snapped, pissed off like only Liv could make me. “Standing there throwing stones from your pretty little glass house? Or is that an ivory tower? I can’t tell from my lowly vantage point, but I can tell you this—no one down here in the gutter has the luxury of principles like you’re flaunting. Some of us had to make compromises to survive.”
Her face flushed, her fists clenched in fury. “Don’t tell me about compromise—” She bit off whatever she’d been about to say and took a second to visibly regroup. “That poor girl was sold by her father, bound by one monster to another monster, then turned out on the street to bastards who beat and raped her for four years, and she didn’t even have the ability to voice protests no one would have listened to anyway. Then you swoop in and save her, and for what? So you can turn her over to yet another monster?”
Again, I opened my mouth, and again she spoke over me, leaving my protests powerless and unspent. “That girl trusts you.” Something dark and intense flashed behind the mask of anger Liv wore. Something I recognized… “She loves you, and you…”
“She what?” I said, forgetting to whisper. Liv blinked, and her confidence faltered. “Is that what you think?”
“I can see it, Cam. I can see it in the way she looks at you. And that’s fine. You and I can’t be…us…anymore. So you may as well be with her. But that’s not the point. The point is what you—”
“Olivia, will you shut up for a minute?” The toilet flushed down the hall, and I spoke over the anger rapidly flooding her cheeks. “She might love me like a brother. Because I took care of her. But she’s not in love with me.” I hesitated, trying to decide how much of Van’s business I was entitled to share with someone else. Then I forged ahead, hoping the truth really would set me free, at least to some degree. “She might like you, though.”
Water ran in the bathroom sink, and Olivia gaped at me. “She doesn’t like…men?”
I raised one brow, mildly amused. The bathroom door creaked open, and I leaned close to Liv to whisper in her ear. “You were jealous,” I taunted. She pushed me away, but before she could deny it, Van emerged from the hall, and Liv’s mouth snapped shut with an audible click of teeth.
“Okay, let’s get this done.” Van slid onto her bar stool and moved her finger over her laptop mouse to wake up the screen. “I have to be somewhere in an hour.” Then she glanced up, as if something didn’t feel right. “Did I miss something?”
“No,” Liv said, before I could even open my mouth. And when I saw her watching me out of the corner of her eye, I watched her back, while Vanessa clacked away, largely ignoring us both.
Armed with Eric Hunter’s address, the IP address I’d taken from his computer, the partial social security number from his hospital bill and his bank-account number from the statement Liv had found, it took Van less than ten minutes to find Hunter’s middle name.
“Ta-fuckin’-da!” She clapped her hands in triumph. “Richard! His middle name is Richard.”
“Great.” Liv leaned over Vanessa’s shoulder to peer at her screen. “Did you find anything on the other one?”
Van frowned. “The other what?”
“The other middle name. Skilled children are always given two middle names.”
“They are?” Van glanced at her, then looked to me for confirmation.
“Yeah. One from their mother and one from their father, but neither tells the other.”
“Why wouldn’t the parents tell each other their own child’s name?”
“Two-person integrity,” Liv said. “So only the child himself knows his full name. I got one for my sixteenth birthday and the other for my eighteenth.”
“You got your own name for your birthday? Twice? How lame.” Van frowned. “Then again, I didn’t even get the day off for my birthday, so maybe that’s not such a bad deal after all.”
“It’s done for the child’s protection,” Liv explained, scribbling information from Vanessa’s laptop onto a notepad while she spoke, hair tucked behind her ears. She’d done the same thing in college, when we studied, and I never could understand how she could say one thing, but write something else entirely. “Names are power, and children aren’t mature enough to handle that power responsibly.”
“What do you mean names are power?” Van asked, and Olivia frowned at me in question.
“There are some things I can’t explain to her.” Not without breaching my contract with the Tower syndicate. Liv was right about that much—they don’t want us arming anyone with knowledge.
“Stupid binding restrictions…” Liv muttered under her breath. Then she stood, pen in hand, and gestured with it while she spoke. She would have made a scary teacher.
“If you know someone’s name—even just part of it—you have a certain measure of power over that person. The power to track, or compel, or bind that person to an oath or contract. Or, in your case, the power to hire someone to do any of that for you. How much power you have depends on how much of the name you know. And how much of that name is real.”
“What do you mean real?” Van looked fascinated, and more than a little frightened, now that she was starting to grasp the scope of her own ignorance. “Do Skilled children use fake names?”
“Not really. But kind of.” Liv chewed on the end of her pen, thinking. “Were you always called Van?” she finally asked.
“No, Cam was the first to call me that. I was always just Vanessa to everyone else.” Van hesitated, and I could see the light go on behind her eyes. “That’s why…” She turned to me, and that light brightened. “That’s why you told me never to give anyone my full name.”
I nodded, but was contractually prohibited from elaborating.
Liv rolled her eyes at my restrictions, but then she started filling in the things I couldn’t say. “Cam probably gave you your nickname for two reasons. One, out of habit. Skilled children are always given names that can be shortened into at least one nickname. To us, full names sound formal, and a little dangerous.”
“Like when your mom gets mad and she shouts your whole name?” Van asked.
Olivia laughed. “Kind of. Only Skilled parents would never do that. Anyway, the second reason Cam gave you a nickname was to help protect you. We’re taught to shorten our own names and to use friends’ nicknames in public, because using your full or even part of your real name in front of people you don’t know is like walking around handing out loaded guns to total strangers. Eventually, someone’s going to shoot. Just because you don’t know your name can be used against you doesn’t mean it never will be.”
Van’s brown eyes were huge. “That’s pretty damn scary.”
Olivia nodded. “It should be. Kids can’t grasp the importance of not shouting their names for the whole world to hear. Hell, most unSkilled adults can’t even grasp that. Which only fuels the black-market demand for names.” She paused long enough to take a sip from a fresh bottle of water I’d set out on the counter—two beers apiece was plenty for three o’clock in the afternoon, and more than enough to lift Liv onto her soap-box. “But my point is that if you tell a child his full name before he’s old enough to keep a secret, he’ll inevitably tell someone else. And every little bit of his identity that he lets slip gives a stranger power over him. It works the same way with blood.”
But Vanessa already knew that. The first thing I’d taught her was to destroy every single drop of blood she either shed or spilled. She was a fast learner.
“I’m at a serious disadvantage, having only one middle name, aren’t I?” she asked, and Liv nodded. “So…how can I get a second one?”
“Do you know which parent gave you the middle name you have now?”
“Yeah.” Van frowned, as if she was thinking. “My dad. It was his sister’s name. She died when he was a kid.”
I knew exactly what Liv was going to say next, and I’d been itching to tell Vanessa myself—to give her one more way to defend herself—but I couldn’t. I wasn’t allowed. But hearing Liv say it was almost as sweet. “Then your mother can still give you a middle name.”
“She’s dead,” Van said, and her frown deepened into worry. “Does that mean I’m screwed?”
“Quite the opposite.” Liv grinned for the first time since we’d been reunited. “That means you have the power to name yourself. Just…decide on a middle name, and keep it to yourself. Don’t write it down, and don’t tell anyone.”
“It’s that easy?”
“Yup,” I said, pleased to be able to add something to the conversation. “But think about it carefully—when you decide on a name, it becomes part of your identity, and you can’t change your identity, even if you change your name legally. But once you have a second middle name, you’ll be that much harder to track or bind.” And as long as Tower didn’t know she had a second middle name, he couldn’t order her to divulge it.
“Awesome.” But she looked distinctly less than thrilled. In fact, she looked kind of scared. “So, if you Skilled people have this much power over names, and blood, and oaths, and contracts, why aren’t you ruling the world? I mean, why haven’t you guys just kind of…taken over?”
Liv glanced at me, and when I shrugged, she returned Van’s somber gaze with one of her own. “What makes you think we haven’t?”
Vanessa’s eyes went so wide she would have looked funny if she hadn’t looked so stunned and terrified.
“Not us personally,” I clarified. “Liv and I have no more power over the rest of the world than you do. But the people in political power have a lot more at their disposal than just a lot of money. Why do you think that not one single country’s government has been able to officially recognize—and thus claim the ability to regulate—Skills?”
Van blinked. “Because somebody in Washington doesn’t want that to happen?”
“More than one somebody,” Liv said. “And more than one somebody in Ottawa, and London, and Paris, and Berlin, and Mexico City, and Beijing, and…”
“I think she gets the picture, Liv,” I said, before she could recite the seat of government in every country in the world. And before Van’s eyes could bug out of her head.
“So it’s a conspiracy?” Van whispered, and that time I wasn’t even sure if she was talking to us.
“It’s a way of life,” Liv corrected. “It’s a game of misdirection. It’s the wolf dressed in lamb’s wool, holding a filibuster on the senate floor. You’ll hear what he’s saying, and you may even see his sharp teeth peeking out of the disguise, but you’ll never know what he’s trying to distract you from with all the noise and the political controversy.”
I scowled. “Well, now that you’ve scared the shit out of her, how ’bout we return to the job at hand, and let D.C. run itself into the ground without our help?”
Vanessa glanced at her watch, then turned back to her laptop screen, obviously relieved to have something else to think about. “Well, if Mr. Eric Richard Hunter had a second middle name, it’s not on anything I’ve been able to find online.”
I rounded the corner of the peninsula to join Liv in looking over Van’s shoulder. “What worries me is that his first middle name was so accessible.”
“Why does that worry you?” Van asked, cracking the top on her water bottle.
“Because we don’t actually use our middle names,” Liv said, before I could answer. “That would defeat the entire point of having them. They don’t go on our birth certificates, or any other official paperwork. That’s like handing out the key to your house every time you fill out a routine form.”
“So, wait a minute,” I said, going over the facts in my head. “Hunter left large amounts of his own blood in his bathroom, and the power from it is fading faster than the blood itself is drying? He went to a public hospital, and his middle name is on records accessible to the public?”
“Well, maybe not accessible to most of the public,” Van amended.
“Okay, but my point is that this doesn’t sound like the behavior of any Skilled person I ever met.”
“Nor does the Skill fading from his blood make one single bit of sense,” Liv added. “I don’t know what to think.”
“Does that mean you can’t track him?”
Liv grabbed her jacket from the back of an armchair and dug into her pocket, presumably for the most recent blood sample. “It still has some pull. Which means we can and will track him. Especially now that you’ve found his middle name for us.” Because for all we knew, the pull from his blood might just lead us to another pile of bloody bandages instead of to the man himself. Which was why we’d stopped to look for his name—our tracking plan B.
“What about the bank account?” I asked, and Van turned back to her computer as I slid Hunter’s bank statement across the counter toward her.
“I’ll see what I can do, but I’m going to need some privacy. My methods are kind of…supersecret, proprietary knowledge.” Van picked up her laptop and gave me a sly smile. “Should I take the bedroom, or would you two like it?”
I laughed, and deferred the matter to Liv, who looked as if she wanted to boil me alive. “You go ahead,” she said finally. “We’re not going to need it.”
Vanessa shrugged and hauled her stuff down the hall to my bedroom, the only other room in the apartment, except for the bathroom. I took my water bottle to the couch and sat, amused when Olivia just stood in the middle of the room, glancing between the couch and the bar stools. “I promise I won’t bite,” I said, gesturing at the two unoccupied couch cushions.
She considered for a second, then dropped onto the opposite end of the couch. “If memory serves, you’re all bark anyway.”
“I think we both know better than that. And if my memory serves, I have a couple of bite marks that prove you’re not, either.”
Liv laughed, and my mission in life became making that happen again. When she laughed, she looked like the Olivia I’d known, and if I closed my eyes and listened closely, I could almost pretend the past six years had never happened. I could pretend she might not hate me for signing my life over to a man and an organization she detested. An organization we both detested, if I were being completely honest—which I couldn’t do aloud.
“Can I see your tattoo?” I asked, and her smile died a sudden, brutal death. “On your back. You don’t have to take anything off,” I clarified. What had she thought I meant? “You don’t have a mark from Anne and the girls, right? I thought that was a paper binding.”
“It is. Blood bound and name bound, but on paper. Thank goodness.” She relaxed a little, but I couldn’t forget the severity of her original reaction. What did it mean? Why was she so touchy on the subject of marks?
And then the guarded look in her eyes gave me sudden insight: she had another mark somewhere—one she clearly didn’t want anyone else to know about. It was probably a dead mark—the statement tattooed on her back clearly stated her position on the subject of ownership—but I couldn’t help wondering who she’d been bound to. What she’d been bound to do—or not to do?
Instead of answering the questions I hadn’t asked, she twisted away from me and folded one leg beneath herself on the couch. Then she slowly swept her long hair over one shoulder, baring the small black script echoing the neckline of her shirt, between her shoulder blades.
And there it was. Cedo nulli. The script taunted me. It said that, even if she’d been bound before, she’d gotten out of it with her principles intact. She answered to no one.
Well, no one but the women she’d sworn to help, and none of them would ever make her do what I’d had to do for Tower and the syndicate.
I reached out without thinking, drawn by the pull of the words and the purity of soul they represented, and traced the first letter with my finger. Liv’s whole body tensed. She pulled away from my touch, and the ever-present ache in my chest widened into a chasm I couldn’t climb out of. My sigh was an exhale of pain.
But then she relaxed a little—an obvious effort for her—and leaned back until her skin touched my finger again, at the base of the calligraphic C. I held my breath as I traced the rest of the letters, treasuring the warmth of her skin. I don’t know why she let me touch her this time, when she’d been pushing me away for years, but I wasn’t going to question it.
I’d just finished the last letter—acutely aware that once I’d started breathing again, her breathing synced with mine—when my bedroom door opened and Vanessa clomped down the hall toward us with her backpack over her shoulder, equipment already stowed.
“Any luck?” I asked, as Liv swept her hair back over her shoulder to cover the words, as if she had never let me touch them.
“I’m sorry, Cam, but I can’t help you.” Vanessa walked past the kitchen on her way to the door, and Liv was up in an instant. She grabbed Van’s arm and pulled her to a stop before I could get between them.
“What do you mean? Why not?”
Van tugged free from Liv’s grip, and I pulled Olivia back, in case she was tempted to reach out again. Vanessa didn’t like uninvited touches.
“Let her go,” I said, recognizing the frustration and fear cycling in a never-ending loop beneath Van’s sudden mask of disinterest. “If she says she can’t help, she can’t help.”
Liv whirled on me, confused and angry. “She found the account! You know she did. She knows who hired Hunter to kill Anne’s husband, but she’s not telling. That is in no way okay with me.”
“I’m sorry.” Vanessa backed toward the door, the strap of her bag clenched in a white-knuckle grip. “I just can’t.” She was upset—I could see that much. She liked Liv, probably because of what she’d told Van that I couldn’t. They could have been friends, if not for that damned Tower binding.
Liv was right. No one bound to a syndicate could ever really have friends.
She reached for Van again, and again I pulled her back, and Van slipped out of the apartment and into the hall. When I wouldn’t let Liv go, she spun into a right hook that caught me square on the jaw.
“Damn it, Olivia!” I rubbed my face with one hand and held her arm in the other, forced to tighten my grip until it probably bruised. “Just let her go.”
“She knows who paid him!”
“That’s exactly why she can’t tell you!” I shouted, hoping—wishing—that she would just calm down long enough to draw the obvious conclusion, a fact I wasn’t allowed to outright divulge. “I can’t tell you this, Liv. You’re going to have to think it through for yourself.”
And finally she stopped struggling, and her arm went limp in my hand. “It was there all along, and we didn’t see it.” She swallowed thickly, and suddenly looked sick to her stomach. “It was Tower. Jake Tower hired Hunter to kill Anne’s husband.”