Blood Bound

“That’s not what I was going to say,” I insisted.

“But we both know it’s true.”

I couldn’t argue. “Anyway, it was only supposed to be for one term. Five years. They’d lost their best Tracker and I needed a job—”

“Convenient …” she noted, peeling the foil back from the first gyro.

“At the time, yeah,” I admitted. “It seemed pretty damned convenient.” Fortuitous, even.

Liv swallowed her first bite and stared at me with her brows drawn low over those big blue eyes. “You know they set you up, right? They didn’t save you. They found you, assessed your potential, then shot you.”

“Liv …” I began, but she spoke over me—it almost felt like old times.

“By that point, they had you right where they wanted you. You were incapacitated and in their debt, and they had a fucking huge sample of your blood, which is probably on file in a room full of sensitive information somewhere. You didn’t really think they destroyed all of it, did you? Please tell me you’re not that gullible.”

“Of course not.” But wasn’t I? Liv was sitting in my kitchen, inches away, telling me what a fool I was, and all I could think of was how badly I wanted to kiss her—and not just to shut her up, though that benefit would not go unappreciated.

“It was a win-win for Tower from the beginning,” she insisted, dropping her gyro onto her plate so she could tick off points on her fingers. “He has you shot. If you die, at least you can’t sign on with the competition. If you live, he has a chance to recruit you, albeit through pretty damn vicious means. If you sign on voluntarily, he has one hell of a new Tracker. If you don’t, he has enough of your blood to bind you without your consent, at least for a while. Either way, you’re his, for the cost of a bullet, some gauze and a round of antibiotics.” She leaned on the counter with both elbows, eyeing me with the first sign of amusement I’d seen from her in hours. “You always were a cheap date.”

I laughed. “You’re one to talk.” On our first date, sophomore year in college, we’d split a carnival hot dog and a cherry slushy—which she’d then vomited all over us both on the Tilt-A-Whirl.

“Yeah, I guess I am.” Her nostalgic smile lasted as long as it took for me to pull two Coronas from the fridge. “Greek food, Mexican beer. Interesting combination.” She reached across the counter to pull the bottle opener/magnet from the side of my fridge, then popped the top off her bottle.

I watched her take a long draft, and when she set the bottle down, she eyed me pensively. Almost reluctantly. “Please tell me you already knew all that. About Tower’s unconventional recruiting methods. Because I thought that was just an urban legend until about ten minutes ago….”

“At the time, I didn’t know,” I admitted, popping the top off my own bottle. Suddenly I wished I’d poured something stronger. “But it didn’t take long to figure out. And it’s no urban legend.” Since my first binding mark, I’d seen two other Skilled members netted the same way, and rumor had it that syndicates in other major cities had caught on to the same recruiting techniques. Certain Skills—and the most talented in any Skill set—were in demand, and there was nothing those in power wouldn’t do to secure the services they wanted.

Liv took another drink, then stared at me through the half-empty bottle, as if the beer-bottle filter might reveal something she hadn’t seen in me before. “So, if you figured it out, why’d you re-up? How’d you get those second and third chain links so fast?”

I studied her for a moment, trying to decide whether or not she wanted the truth. “It’s not that bad, you know,” I said finally, and she looked at me as if I’d just put a knife through the Easter Bunny’s heart.

“It’s blood money, Cam,” she spat, slamming her bottle down on the counter, and my own temper sparked, part indignation, part denial. “How does it feel to know that your rent is paid with blood money?”

“You tell me,” I snapped, without thinking it through. But words can’t be unspoken—if I’d learned anything from swearing loyalty to Jake Tower, that was it. “You may not be bound to Cavazos, but you take commissions from him. What do you think he does with the people you find for him? You think he pats them on the head and sends them off to summer camp?”

“I don’t …” she stammered, and I’d had enough of her hypocrisy.

“Yes, you do!” I shouted, and some small part of me enjoyed her shock for that instant before it bled into anger. “You work for him, and you take his money, and you use it to pay absurdly high rent on an apartment in the fucking ghetto, just to stand on principle. But you’re paying for your principals with the same blood money that pays for this apartment. The only difference is that I can walk down the street without getting shot or mugged.”

She stood, practically shaking with fury, and I knew I’d made my point. “The difference,” she said through clenched teeth, her voice low and sharp enough to cut glass, “is that you signed on for this voluntarily, but I don’t have any choice.”

“What does that mean? Why don’t you have a choice?” I asked, and her face went as pale as my white Formica countertop.

“I …” Liv blinked, as if she’d confused herself. Or said more than she’d meant to. Then she grabbed her bottle and chugged the rest of it. “I just meant that I have to take whatever work I can get. I’m not exactly rolling in commissions since I left Rawlinson, and yes, I’ve done some jobs for Cavazos, but that doesn’t make me his bitch, or his whore, or anything else.”

“I never said it did.” But she was already backing across my living room, headed straight for the coffee table on her way to a dramatic exit fueled by something I didn’t understand. “Liv, wait,” I called, already rounding the countertop into the living room when the back of her leg hit the corner of the coffee table. She went down on one hip, and her bottle smashed against the side of the table, spraying her jacket with the last droplets.

“Shit.” She started picking up the sticky pieces of glass and I knelt next to her to help.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

I shrugged. “It’s just a little glass.”

“I meant about … that whole thing. It’s none of my business what you do for a living.”

But I wanted it to be. “They offered me a step promotion,” I said, dumping the glass I’d gathered onto the coffee table.

“What?”

“When my five years were up. Tower called me in the week my mark would have gone dead, and I would have been free, and he told me I’d become very important to the operation. He said I had two choices—I could sign on for another five years, or I could leave the organization. As incentive to stay, he offered me a step promotion—two chain links for the price of one. Instant seniority.” I’d since learned that that offer was seldom extended, and even more seldom refused. “But if I opted out, I’d have to leave the city entirely.”

“Was that in your contract? Part of the noncompetition clause?” she asked, staring into my eyes from inches away, and I realized I hadn’t been that close to her in years. She hadn’t let me get that close….

“No. But he wouldn’t have had any trouble enforcing it.”

“You signed an extension so you could stay in the city?” she said, and I could only nod. “Because of me?”

“There were other factors….” Other people I didn’t want to leave behind. “But yeah.”

“Cam …” Her voice was more breath than sound, and it echoed in every cell of my body. And suddenly the memories were too much to fight. She was right there, after so many years, and she wasn’t pushing me away.

So I kissed her, and she kissed me back, and for several seconds, it was as if she’d never left at all.

Then pain slammed into my chest and I fell backward on my ass. By the time I realized she’d shoved me, she was on her feet, staring down at me. Glaring at me.

“Don’t. Touch me.” Her voice shook, and she couldn’t hide the tremor in her hands, even when she shoved them into her pockets. “This isn’t what it used to be. We can’t … We can’t ever go back to that.” She jogged toward the hall, pulling her jacket off as she went, and I only recovered enough to stand when I heard water running in the bathroom.

Anger warred with something else inside me. Something deeper and older. Something that bruised me from the inside out every single time I heard her name, either out loud or in my own head. I followed her down the hall and stopped outside my own bathroom, where she stood with her jacket spread across the counter, trying to scrub drops of beer out of the leather.

“This is bullshit, Olivia.”

But she just scrubbed harder, so I snatched the cloth from her and she turned on me, eyes blazing with some dizzying combination of anger and … regret. “Don’t do this, Cam. This isn’t the time to open old wounds.”

“There’s never going to be a time, is there?” I pulled the cloth back when she reached for it. “Every time I see you, you tell me to go away, but you look like you want to cry when you say it. You don’t mean it, and we both know that.”

“I mean it …” she insisted.

“No, you don’t!” I shouted, and this time she didn’t argue. “What happened, Liv? Why are you lying to me? Why are you lying to yourself?”

She blinked up at me, eyes damp, in spite of the stoic set of her jaw, and I was nearly knocked off balance by the storm of conflicting urges raging inside me. How could I be so furious with her, yet so in love with her at the same time? How could she be so maddeningly closed-off, yet so obviously vulnerable beneath her shield of denial?