“No, you don’t, Vanessa. You can’t possibly, because any one of them would kill you with one word from Jake Tower, just like you would kill any one of them if he told you to. You can’t help it. Obedience is in the boilerplate contract. And since you signed willingly, this one would be much harder to get out of than the first one.”
She huffed, a harsh, bitter sound. “I don’t see how that’s possible, if the last binding was strong enough to hold me against my will.”
“How’d you get out of it?” I asked—she’d only served four years of a five-year term. If they were willing to sign her underage, against her will, there wasn’t much they wouldn’t have been willing to do to keep her, even after her contract officially expired.
“Cam got me out.” She glanced up at him, and my heart ached at the look that passed between them.
“How?” That was all I could manage through the bitter jealousy I had no business indulging.
“One night a few years ago, they rented me out to this bad apple. A real asshole. He…” She stopped and drank from a glass of water Cam set in front of her, and he took over the story, when it became obvious that she couldn’t.
“I found her on the side of the road, beaten half to death and barely conscious. I wanted to take her to the hospital, but she begged me not to.”
“So he brought me here.” Van glanced around the apartment, picking up the thread where he dropped it, and I hated myself for wishing she’d never been in his home. “I was here for nearly a week, but I couldn’t give him my name. I wasn’t allowed to. But he saw my mark, and he knew…what I was.”
Cam nodded, picking up the story again. “We talked, and bit by bit, I realized what had happened to her. How they got her so young. She coldn’t tell me who she was, but I finally convinced her to give me the name of the Binder.”
I glanced at Van in surprise. “You knew the Binder?”
She nodded. “Not personally, but he was kind of a legend to most of the girls. Like the bogeyman.” Which was no wonder, considering he was evidently strong enough to bind people against their will, and to enforce an underage binding past the age of consent.
“So she gave me the name, and I…” Cam broke off with a shrug, part modesty, part shame. “I took care of it.”
“He tracked the bastard down and killed him,” Van finished, the words lingering on the end of her tongue, as if they tasted too good to let go.
I blinked at Cam. Then I blinked again. “You killed Cavazos’s Binder?”
“Yeah,” Van answered for him. “Shot him in the groin first, then twice in the head.” Cam flinched, but didn’t deny it. “Tower was so impressed he offered him a step promotion.” She beamed at Cam, obviously proud for him. But Cam looked sick, and I understood that there was more to it than that. Some part of the story that he hadn’t told her.
“They gave you a step promotion for killing one Binder?” I said, picking at the seams of his secret.
“It wasn’t just a Binder,” Van said. “It was Cavazos’s top Binder. When Cam killed him, he nullified every contract that bastard had ever sealed. Three dozen of the girls went free—at least until a few of them were rounded up again—and Cavazos lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in unenforceable contracts.”
And suddenly I remembered. “Lorenzo…”
“Yeah.” Van looked surprised, but Cam frowned. “You knew him?”
“No, I…” It was just before I signed with Cavazos. His men were still talking about it—all the money they’d lost, and what they were going to do when they found the bastard who killed Lorenzo…
Son of a bitch! Puzzle pieces fell into place in my head, and the thuds echoed through not just my mind, but my past. And Cam’s past. We were tangled, even beyond what I’d known….
“No, I just… I heard about it. Cavazos had Lorenzo brought in from Spain, at a huge expense.”
Van’s smile was a grim parody of joy. “Good—I hope Cam cost him a fucking fortune. Doesn’t matter, though. No amount of money can give any of us back what he cost us.” Van drained her second bottle, then stood, looking just a bit unsteady, but whether that was from the beer or the memories, I couldn’t tell. “Be right back,” she said, on her way down the hall.
As soon as the bathroom door closed, I turned on Cam, pleased to note that my angry face could still make him squirm. “What aren’t you telling me?” I demanded in a whisper. “What aren’t you telling her?”
It was something about his promotion. He’d accepted it because of me. So he could stay in the city. But why had they offered it? It wasn’t just because he’d killed Lorenzo. Whatever it was, it had something to do with Vanessa. Something he didn’t want her to know.
Then it hit me, like a knife to the chest, disappointment so sharp I couldn’t breathe. “You son of a bitch,” I hissed, fury burning through me as if my blood was on fire. “You fucking recruited her. You didn’t get promoted because you killed Lorenzo and freed all those women. You got promoted because you brought the women over with you—straight into Tower’s grasp.”
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 o 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 sot. 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 loo
ked 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.”