Blood Bound

  It shouldn’t have been possible.

  He shouldn’t have had a chance to live up to anything.

  But then I tripped, and he was there on the floor with me, and my body remembered what my head was trying so hard to forget—that I wanted him. All of him. That I missed him like I’d never missed anyone in my life.

  Sometimes I dreamed about Cam, then woke up heartbroken and tried to go back to sleep immediately, to recapture the fantasy. The what-ifs. What if I didn’t know what I knew? What if I’d never left? What if Noelle was wrong, and I’d spent the past six years running away from the best man I’d ever met—the only one I’d ever loved—and I’d ruined both our lives for nothing?

  But Elle wasn’t wrong. She’d never been wrong. Cam and I were dangerous to each other, and every second we spent together was a second ticking away on some countdown I didn’t truly understand. All I really knew was that when we got to zero, someone would die.

  Knowing he was alive but I couldn’t have him was infinitely better than knowing I’d gotten him killed because I had the willpower of a nymphet in heat.

  What the hell is wrong with me? I was deep in Jake Tower’s territory, sporting an intimately located binding mark from his nemesis, which could easily get me killed—or worse—if exposed. Yet all I could think about was the hurt look on Cam’s face when I let him kiss me, then pushed him away again. The confusion in his eyes when I refused to explain why I’d left.

  It wasn’t fair of me to keep that secret from him. I knew it wasn’t fair. But what if telling him only sped up the inevitable? What if telling him caused whatever Elle had seen?

  What if not telling him caused it?

  The doorbell rang, and my head popped up. I saw my reflection—never a good idea after a day of submission, coercion and sneaking around unfriendly territory—and I looked tired. But that was better than looking scared.

  After a long, slow exhale, I ran my fingers through my hair and tossed my damp jacket over one arm instead of putting it back on. Surely meeting Van would be easier if we got this whole mark search out of the way first.

  I was halfway down the short hall before I realized something was weird. Cam was laughing, and he wasn’t alone. And the other voice sounded distinctly…feminine.

  I stood in the living-room doorway for almost a minute before they realized I was there, watching them, surprised and a little disappointed to realize that Van was a girl. I was kind of ashamed of myself for assuming she’d be male, and even more ashamed of myself for wishing I’d been right.

  Then Cam noticed me, and when he stood, she swiveled on her chair to face me. And some fragile part of me withered and died. Van was gorgeous. Not just pretty, like I could be, with a day’s notice and an hour in the bathroom. Gorgeous like Elle had been—effortless, largely oblivious and completely natural. If she wore makeup beyond mascara, I couldn’t tell.

  There had to be a reason Cam hadn’t mentioned the fact that Van was a woman.

  “Van, this is Liv Warren,” he said as she stood and offered me her hand. I shook it, and held it for maybe a second too long, trying to decide how threatened I should be.

  “You’re Van?”

  “Vanessa.” She pulled her hand firmly from my grip, but offered me a friendly, if cautious smile. “And that’s all you need to know.”

  Smart, for someone unSkilled. But considering that I was evidently the talk of the west side at the moment, it did no good for Cam to withhold my name anymore; I’d just have to be content with the knowledge that—hopefully—my middle names were still my own little secret. Well, mine and Cam’s.

  “Cam says you need some technical assistance?” She wore a long, filmy black skirt and a green-and-black-patterned tank top beneath a bulky sweater that couldn’t quite hide how very well built she was. However, it did cover her markings, which left me no way to judge her rank within the Tower organization, or to guess what her job within it was.

  And suddenly I truly understood why Nick had insisted I remove my jacket earlier—so he’d know exactly who he was dealing with. And that point of commonality between us pissed me off.

  “Yeah.” I reached for the lunch I’d barely touched, then realized I no longer wanted it. “We’re looking for a full name and the owner of a certain bank account. But those’ll be two different people.”

  “Which do you want first?” Van bent to pick up a backpack I hadn’t noticed and set it on the extra bar stool.

  “The name,” Cam and I said in unison. If we could find Eric Hunter’s full, rightful name, Cam could track him from that, while I made what use I could out of the strange blood samples. We’d come at him from two different angles, and hopefully arrive at the point where they met.

  Van set up her laptop and several other pieces of equipment on the kitchen peninsula while Cam told her what we already knew and I…watched them. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t be with him—not like I wanted to be—but that didn’t make it any easier for me to see him with someone else. And the fact that he still wanted me clearly hadn’t stopped him from exploring his options.

  They were obviously close—they laughed easily and seemed to share several private jokes no one bothered to explain to me. He knew what she liked to drink, and she knew where he kept the glasses, paper towels and extra notepads.

  Conclusion: she’d been over before. A lot.

  “Okay, let’s see what we can find on Mr. Hunter.” Van took her sweater off and draped it over the back of her stool, and that’s when I got my first look at her mark. A single greenish chain link. She’d served less than five years, based on the fact that she hadn’t earned a second mark yet, and the color green said she worked in some kind of unSkilled staff capacity. That could be anything from bookkeeping to housekeeper, but based on the equipment she’d unloaded, I was guessing Van served in a more technically apt position.

  Did Tower have a dedicated hacker?

  For several minutes, she clicked away at her keyboard while Cam finished his lunch and I stared at her arm, trying to guess how someone like that—someone beautiful and talented enough to have a zillion other options—had gotten mixed up with Jake Tower.

  “Just ask me,” Van said, without looking up from her screen, and it took me a minute to realize she was talking to me. “I’d rather be questioned than gawked at.”

  I glanced at Cam, and he nodded hesitantly. As if he was afraid I’d scare her.

  “Okay…how’d you get your tattoo?” I glanced at her arm for clarification, in case she had any more I couldn’t see.

  “The usual way. Ink and needles.” Van looked up from her screen to smile at me, but her clacking never stopped.

  “No, I meant…”

  “Why did I sign on?” she finished for me, when I let my question trail off.

  Cam shot me an irritated look, but spoke to her. “You don’t have to answer that.”

  Van shrugged. “Everyone else knows anyway.” She swiveled away from her equipment and met my gaze. “You want the long version or the short?”

  “Whatever you want to tell me.” And I knew from Cam’s clenched jaw that it wouldn’t be a pretty story.

  Van stared into my eyes as if she were assessing me. Then she shrugged again. “You look like you can handle the unabridged version. Here goes.” But then she turned to Cam, who popped the top from a bottle of Corona and handed it to her. Then he handed one to me. Van chugged half of hers, then glanced at me apologetically. “Goes down better this way.” She set the bottle on the counter next to her computer. “I grew up in the south fork. My dad was a gambler and a drunk, and when I was a kid, he lost the rent money once too often and had to borrow from some guy on the east side to keep a roof over our heads.”

  The east side? That was Cavazos’s side of town. I took the first sip of my beer. How the hell had she gotten tangled up with Tower, if her dad was borrowing from one of Cavazos’s usurers?

  “For a while, my dad made the payments okay, but then he lost his job, and we fell
into the red pretty damn fast, and when he couldn’t pay, we got a visit from a guy with four interlong rings on his left arm.”

  Four rings… “One of Cavazos’s thugs?” I asked, and she nodded.

  “He brought some papers and said my dad had to pay his debt in blood—either his or mine. My dad was drunk, of course. Maybe it woulda made a difference if he’d been sober. But I doubt it. Either way, my dad sliced my thumb, then slammed my hand down on that contract before I even knew what was happening.”

  “He sold you?” Horror engulfed me, growing deeper and darker with every breath I took. What kind of parent sells his child to pay off bad debt?

  “Lock, stock and barrel.” Van took another swig on her beer, then propped her boot on the next bar stool. “They shot me up with something right there in front of my dad, and I woke up two days later with this.” She pulled her long skirt up to reveal a single ring tattooed on the inside of her left thigh, the faded grayish hue of a dead mark. “It used to be bright red.”

  I could hardly breathe through my own horror and revulsion.

  The ring meant she’d been bound to the Cavazos syndicate, a plight I could certainly sympathize with. Together, the color red and the placement of the mark—on her thigh—meant she’d been sold into the skin trade. As a minor. Against her will.

  And suddenly I wanted to throw up.

  “How old were you?” I whispered, as Van lowered both her leg and her skirt.

  “Fifteen.”

  I could practically taste vomit at the back of my throat. “That can’t be right.” I took another sip, but alcohol couldn’t help me make sense of something that just didn’t add up. “Cavazos won’t sign underage girls. It’s too much of a liability.”

  “Evidently the profit outweighs the risk,” Cam said, blatant disgust dulling the usual shine in his eyes.

  I shook my head. “No. I know he doesn’t take them that young. Did you tell him how old you were?”

  Van stared at me as if I’d just lapsed into nonsense. “I never even saw him. Not while I was conscious, anyway. I was just one of dozens of girls, probably nothing more than names and numbers on a profit-and-loss statement to him.”

  “If he’d known, he would have fixed it.” I had to believe that. Cavazos was an abusive, lying, murdering bastard. I’d seen him hit his wife. I’d seen him shoot a trespasser through the forehead in the middle of his living room, then complain about the stain on the carpet. He’d done everything but violate our contract to humiliate me. To break me. But he wouldn’t hurt a kid. He wouldn’t even let someone else hurt a kid. That was the only marginally human trait I’d been able to find in him, and I needed to be able to believe in that. Otherwise, I’d lose my mind the next time he touched me. I’d just fall right over the edge of sanity into oblivion.

  “Liv, if he didn’t know, it’s because he didn’t want to know,” Cam insisted. “His men can’t lie to him, right?”

  I started to nod, then reconsidered. “Well, there are certain exceptions, for plausible deniability…”

  “Exactly.” He opened another beer for himself and frowned at me over the bottle. “Why are you so sure he’d care, even if he knew?”

  “Because he has a kid of his own. A daughter.” I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead, battling a stress headache strong enough to rival the typical breach-of-contract pain. “I’ve seen him with her. He may be the scum of the earth in every other respect, but he’s a good father. As good a father as a felon can be, anyway.”

  “Charles Manson had kids, too.” Van pushed her empty bottle across the counter toward Cam, who dropped it into the trash, then opened the fridge for more.

  After several more sips from my own bottle, my stomach had mostly settled, and I turned to Van. “You were bound by force. That shouldn’t have been possible. Not for the long term, anyway.”

  “What do you mean? Why not?”

  And that’s when I realized how viciously unfair her situation truly had been. She wasn’t Skilled. Her family wasn’t Skilled. So she’d grown up with even less insight into the way the world really worked than I’d had, and clearly, even after years spent bound to first one syndicate, then the other, she still didn’t fully understand the chains she was tangled up in.

  “How much do you know about bindings, Van?” I asked. She frowned at me, then glanced at Cam, and when he nodded, I realized what she was doing—looking to him, her superior in the organization, for guidance on what she should and shouldn’t say in a situation that wasn’t strictly governed by the mark on her arm.

  “I know what I can and can’t do, based on my mark. Though honestly, some of that comes from trial and error.” She shrugged, and I nodded. That was typical. “And I know what I have to do, to fulfill my contract.”

  “Okay, but beyond your specific case, how much do you know about the binding process in general? About how it works?”

  “Only what Cam’s told me.”

  “Which isn’t much,” he admitted. Because he wouldn’t be allowed to say anything that might scare her away from extending her contract, whenever it came up for renewal—also typical.

  Fortunately, I had no such restrictions.

  “Okay, here we go—a crash course in binding.” I set her bag on the floor and took the stool next to her. “You know you can be bound to anyone, right?” I began, and she nodded hesitantly. “All it takes is an oath and a seal. Bindings can be as simple as a pinky promise between classmates, or as complicated as a two-hundred-page contract negotiated for a year by attorneys on both sides and eventually sealed by the best binder in the country. Regardless, the key ingredients remain the same—an oath and a seal.”

  “The oath, I got,” Van said, lifting her beer for another swig. “What’s the seal?”

  “The seal is what makes a binding final and official. Think of it like one of those fancy wax impressions they used to use to seal documents, a couple hundred years ago. It’s the metaphysical version of that. And only a Binder can seal a binding, usually by signing it or stamping it with blood. Or both.”

  “So, those kids with the pinky promise…” She held up one hooked finger to demonstrate. “One of them would have to be a Binder?”

  “In that scenario, yes. Because there are no written words or blood, one of the kids would have to actually be a Binder for the promise to hold. Though it’s really rare for Binders that young to even know their Skill yet. That was just an illustration.”

  Van nodded. “I’m with you so far.”

  “Good. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. I know there are probably times when you feel…enslaved. Times when you physically can’t say no, even when it kills some vital part of you to just…let horrible things happen.”

  “More so with the red mark,” she said. “It’s not so bad on this side of the river.”

  I shook my head, horrified that she seemed to actually believe what she was saying. “If that’s really what you think, it’s only because they haven’t made you do something you don’t want to do yet. But that day will come. Jake Tower may not be renting you out by the hour, but he is using you for profit, one way or another. As long as you lack the ability to say no to something, you’re not truly free. You’re his.”

  She shook her head, visibly frustrated. “You don’t understand. You’ve never been bound like I was,” she insisted, and the irony stung all the way into my soul. “For four years, I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t fight back. I couldn’t even complain. I could do what I was told, or die fighting the impulse.

  “Now I work with computers, fully clothed, and I’m allowed to take down any bastard who tries to touch me. Which would you prefer?”

  I exhaled slowly. “I’d prefer not to need permission to defend myself.”

  Van blinked, and a single, unguarded thought crossed her expression. In that moment, I could see that I’d gotten through to her. It was like seeing the light for the first time in a decade—so many of us had forgotten the sun even existed.

  ?
??But you have a valid point, and I’m not trying to minimize that,” I assured her. “The difference between your first binding—the red ring to Cavazos—and your current one is the difference between full-on slavery and indentured servitude. The first time around, you were bound by force, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to work. In fact, it takes a very powerful Binder to be able to seal a nonconsensual oath. Most of those break as soon as the ink dries. Or the blood, depending on the binding method. Flesh bindings, bonds sealed with a tattoo, are a little more stable, but unless the Binder is a real rock star, all it takes is a couple of intentional breaches—something small enough to survive—and voilà, you have a dead mark, as worthless as the artist who inked it.”

  Van frowned, obviously confused. “But my mark never died.”

  “Which means that whoever sealed it was pretty dam badass. But that…” I gestured to the mark on her left arm. “That’s the way it’s supposed to work. The syndicate doesn’t give as much as it takes, but it has to give something. Otherwise no one would ever be willing to sign. It’s still not a fair trade for you—thus the indentured servitude—but at least you’re getting something in exchange for your service to Tower, right?”

  “Yeah.” She looked a little relieved—as if maybe she hadn’t made the worse decision of her entire life—and I almost hated to burst her bubble. “I get protection. A salary. A family.”

  “No.” That came out harsher than I’d meant for it to, and she practically jumped. “Protection, yes—at a cost. Salary, yes—because it doesn’t do them any good for you to starve to death before you’ve served your term. But Tower and his men will never, ever be your family.” Though considering that her own father had sold her into prostitution as a teenager, the distinction seemed a little less clear than it should have. “They won’t even truly be your friends. Not even Cameron.”

  For a minute, Cam looked as if he wanted to argue. Then he just looked miserable. The truth does that to people.

  “I have lots of friends in the syndicate,” Van insisted, and I almost felt sorry for her.