Blood Bound

  Thank goodness neither of the other children had to pee.

  Hadley opened her mouth, but Anne put one finger to her lips and waved her daughter forward silently, miming tiptoed walking. Hadley nodded, then tiptoed across the room without even a glance at the sleeping nanny. Anne pulled her out of the doorway, then wrapped her in a hug, and even in the dimly lit hallway, I could see the tears in her eyes.

  “Are you okay?” Anne whispered, and Hadley nodded, eyes wide and still sleepy. “Good.” Anne hugged her again. “Let’s go home.”

  “Who are they?” Hadley whispered, staring up at Ruben and Michaela as we tiptoed back down the hall, and I wondered if she thought this whole thing was a dream. I wondered if she could keep thinking that, and wake up in the morning completely untraumatized.

  Then Hadley noticed my gun, extra-long and intimidating with the silencer, and I realized that a little trauma was inevitable. Survival was the goal.

  “They’re…” Anne began, as I hid the gun behind my leg, and I watched her struggle for words. It wasn’t the time to explain about Hadley’s parentage and Cavazos and his wife could hardly be called friends. “They’re helping us,” she finally explained, and Hadley only stared up at Ruben—who stared back, openly curious—then squatted to be on her level and stuck one hand out for her to shake.

  “Hi. My name is Ruben.”

  Hadley took his hand hesitand shook it until Anne started tugging her gently down the hall.

  Ruben rose and as we retreated, as silently and carefully as we’d come, a spot on my inner thigh began to burn—a tiny ring of fire—and I smiled through the minor pain. My mark had just died. I was no longer bound to Ruben Cavazos.

  I hadn’t truly believed it would happen until that moment. In the back of my mind, I’d always assumed something would go wrong. I’d fail to actually physically hand the child to her father, or to jump through whatever crazy hoop I didn’t remember from the contract I’d signed. Or—Heaven forbid—Hadley would get caught in the cross fire and die before she’d officially been returned to her father.

  But now that was all over. I was unbound. I was free of Ruben. Free to be with Cam. And cedo nulli had regained its meaning for me. All that was left was to lead our little expedition safely out of enemy territory, and I could start trying to free Cam from his binding, so we could live the rest of our lives however the hell we wanted.

  We turned the corner onto the hallway connecting the two wings and with Hadley’s hand in Anne’s and that fresh, blissful burn on my thigh, I was feeling cautiously optimistic for the first time in a year and a half. Thanks to Elle’s foresight, Kori’s unwitting but heartfelt assistance and Anne’s determination to get her daughter back, I’d done the impossible—I’d found the child with no name and rescued a friend’s daughter. I felt invincible.

  Right up until the alarm started shrieking all around us.

  “Shit!” Meika shouted, but I could hardly hear her over the high-pitched screeching pouring from overhead. Hadley started crying, and Anne pulled her daughter close, eyes wide with terror, trying to see everywhere all at once.

  Cavazos drew his gun and pressed his back against the wall, motioning for the rest of us to do the same. Then he leaned closer to be heard over the alarm. “Lockdown!” he shouted into my ear, and my head swam from the cacophony. Gone was his typical look of amused schadenfreude, and in its place I found an even scarier mercenary determination. “The darkrooms won’t work now. We’ll have to find an exit and make a run for it.”

  But less than a second later, Kori stepped around the corner ahead, a gun in one hand, a handheld radio in the other. She aimed the gun in our general direction—a wordless order to stop where we were—and shouted something I couldn’t hear into the radio. A second after that, the alarm died, but its screeching echo lived on in my head.

  “Found them!” I heard Kori shout into her radio, once the ringing in my ears had mostly faded. “They’re in the back hall. Four adults and the girl.”

  I turned to head back the other way and a steel panel slid out from one side of the wall and slammed into the other, a security measure out of some over-the-top spy movie, meant to divorce the family living quarters from the danger. It worked. We were cut off from both sides.

  “Who do we have?” a staticky voice demanded over the radio, while Ruben and I aimed at the floor near Kori’s feet. I was starting to wish we’d given Meika a gun.

  “Anne Liang,” Kori said through clenched teeth, staring at me in some intense combination of anger and remorse. “Olivia Warren. Ruben Cavazos and his wife, Michaela.”

  “Cavazos? What the hell is he doing here?” the radio voice asked, and as the last of the ringing faded from my ears, I recognized the voice as Tower’s. The man himself was on the way.

  “The girl is Cavazos’s daughter, sir.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Tower roared, and we all breathed through a single moment of tense silence while he recovered from the shock. “Get the girl. Kill the rest.”

  Hadley screamed and Anne pushed her between us, trying to guard her from all sides, while Ruben stepped in front of us all, drawing Kori’s aim and ready to fire in return.

  Kori’s jaw tensed and her forehead crinkled with obvious pain. “Can’t, sir. Contractual conflict with two of the intruders.” Her voice was taut with the conflict, and for one brief moment, I thought it might all work out okay. She couldn’t kill me or Anne—at the very least, that should give us a few extra seconds to work with.

  Then Tower’s voice crackled from the radio again. “Fine. Shoot those you can. Caballero, kill the rest.”

  I froze in shock as Cam stepped around the corner to stand next to Kori, aiming an unfamiliar .45 in our direction. “I’m so sorry, Liv,” he said, so softly I could barely hear him. “Tower called my new phone. I had to answer.”

  Fuck! That was my fault. I’d called Kori from Cam’s new number. She’d obviously given it to Tower before she walked into our trap—she’d probably had no choice.

  “Liv, help us.” Anne squeezed my arm and I pulled it from her grip to keep from compromising my own aim.

  And in that moment, all of Elle’s planning swirled around in my head, winding rapidly toward a single point of darkness that was this specific instant in time. She’d seen this. Me and Cam, guns pointed at each other across the gulf of our divided loyalty.

  He’d kill me because he had to.

  I’d kill him to protect Anne. Because I had to. I’d have to even if I weren’t bound to her, because she was innocent, and so was Hadley.

  Light flashed from the end of Kori’s gun, and an instant later I heard the thwup. Anne and I lunged in front of Hadley. Cavazos threw Meika against the wall, covering her with his own body, even as he returned fire. Kori’s bullet split the air between me and Ruben. He fired again. Kori screamed and lurched to one side, then grabbed her left shoulder. Blood poured between her fingers and over the grip of the gun she still clutched.

  Cam still held his gun, his aim wavering as his hands shook. He was fighting the order. But he couldn’t last.

  “In there!” I hauled Ruben off his wife and pointed at the open billiard room across the hall. Meika shoved Anne aside and dove into the dark room just as a third figure stepped into sight around the corner ahead, bringing yet another gun to the party. We were officially outgunned, and I recognized Jake Tower in spite of the indignity of addressing his nemesis in nothing but a pair of pajama pants.

  “Shoot Liang in the leg,” he ordered, and Cam’s face was a violent collision of guilt, remorse and bitter obligation. But that order was too specific and direct to fight. He hesitated for one long moment, then roared with frustration as he squeezed the trigger.

  Anne screamed and collapsed to the floor, blood pouring between her fingers from the hole in her thigh. Hadley’s sobs became wrenching gasps for air between tear-strangled cries, and she backed away from us all.

  “Hadley,” Tower called across the chaos of guns drawn and bl
ood spilled, and she watched him through her tears. “Your mom’s hurt, but if you come to me now, I’ll call for a doctor. She’ll be fine. You can save your mother. You want to be a hero, don’t you?”

  Hadley glanced at her mother, then back at Tower, and she started to step forward. “No!” Anne shouted through her own pain, and I put a hand on the child’s shoulder to stop her, my own gun aimed at Tower’s head now. But I couldn’t pull the trigger, even if I’d been sure I could hit him from that distance with almost no light. I didn’t know what his default, preprogrammed orders might be upon his death.

  And I didn’t know who his successor was.

  Cavazos was also aiming at Tower, and the only thing keeping him from shooting—as far as I could tell—was the reluctance to subject his daughter to any more bloodshed than necessary.

  So instead of shooting, I glanced into the billiard room where I could barely see Meika watching us in the dark, her arms tense at her sides, eyes wide with fear. “Take her!” I snapped, nodding at Anne, who sat just inches from the doorway, but wouldn’t crawl out of the line of fire without her daughter.

  “No!” Anne screamed again, when Meika grabbed her arms from behind and hauled her into the dark. A bullet shot past where her head had been an instant earlier. Hadley screamed, but she was too scared to move.

  “Bust up the grid and get her out of here!” I shouted to Meika, and after a second to process what I’d said, her dark silhouette climbed onto the pool table with a pool cue in hand. She jammed the thick end into the ceiling, and glass shattered, then fell all around her, reflecting the little available visible light.

  “Shoot them, now!” Tower ordered, when he realized what Meika was doing.

  Obviously reluctant to shoot me as long as they had a choice, Cam and Kori both fired on Cavazos, who returned two shots as he lunged toward Hadley and hauled her into the unlit billiard room. I was right behind them, and more bullets thunked into the door-jamb as I passed it.

  Peppered with glinting broken glass, Meika’s silhouette had Anne’s limping silhouette around the waist, presumably standing in an infrared shadow she could feel much better than I could see. “Go!” I shouted, and Meika stepped into oblivion, dragging Anne with her in spite of sobbing protests.

  I pulled Hadley away from the door as footsteps pounded down the hall toward us. But they stopped just out of sight. “Don’t shoot, you can’t see in there!” Kori yelled, and I could feel the blood she was still dripping—I could practically smell it. “You might hit the girl.”

  “e don’t even know if she’s still in there,” Tower pointed out. “Caballero?”

  “She’s there,” he said, and I could hear the reluctance in his voice as he tracked her from only feet away.

  “The others?” Tower asked.

  “Just Cavazos and Warren.”

  “Shit!” Tower shouted, and I spared a moment to thoroughly enjoy his anger.

  A moment later, the air changed and I turned to see Meika’s dark form in the spot she’d disappeared from a minute earlier. I pushed Hadley toward her and Cavazos glanced at them both, then returned his attention and aim to the doorway, even as he whispered to his wife, “Take her to our house and lock the place down.”

  “But then how will you…?” Meika began, but her husband cut her off.

  “Go! And don’t come back!”

  Because without Hadley there, they would open fire on us. Plain and simple.

  An instant later, Meika and Hadley were gone, and that time Tower must have felt the shift in air pressure. “Caballero?” he said, still just out of sight, and I ran for the window farthest from the open doorway.

  “Hadley’s gone.”

  I pounded on the glass, but it didn’t even rattle. It was thicker than my thumb and probably bulletproof.

  “Motherfucker!” Tower shouted, ripping the word right out of my own mouth. We were trapped. “Open fire.”

  “I can’t,” Kori insisted, her words half sobs of obvious agony. “I might hit Liv.”

  Tower swore again. “Caballero, kill them.”

  Cam thundered a wordless sound of rage and pain. I held my breath, gun aimed, heart pounding fiercely. Cam opened fire.

  Cavazos glanced at me as the first bullets punched through the air, inches away, and thunked into the walls at my back. I raced farther into the room, away from the door. Anne was no longer in danger, which meant I couldn’t shoot Cam. I wouldn’t. Not even to save myself. But Cavazos wouldn’t hold his fire—he wasn’t willing to die for me.

  Ruben stepped into the doorway, already returning fire at Cam. I rammed him from the side, as Cam fired again.

  Pain ripped through my stomach and I fell against the wall, fighting to breathe. Cavazos crashed into the door frame, still shooting.

  A grunt of pain echoed from the hall, and Jake Tower fell to the tile, half blocking the doorway. “No!” I shouted, as Kori dropped to his side to feel for a pulse, still bleeding from her own wound.

  Cam rushed into the billiard room and pulled the duffel from my shoulder, already digging inside. He pulled out a cloth diaper—the best for absorption—and pressed it to the explosion of agony my stomach had become, to keep my blood from dripping on the floor.

  “He’s alive,” Kori called. “But he can’t give orders while he’s unconscious. Let’s get you out of here.” She holstered her gun and stepped into the billiard room, one hand covering her bullet wound, as she squinted into the dark, feeling for the hole Meika had hammered into the infrared grid.

  Cam put one arm around me and led me toward Kori and the scattering of broken glass. “Wait! Anne’s blood!” I cried, wobbling as a newer, more personal darkness washed over me. I was going to pass out.

  No, I was going to die. Elle had been right all along.

  “I’ll get it later. I swear,” Kori promised. “Let’s get you out of here before I have to sterilize yours, too.”

  “I’m not leaving here while her blood’s viable,” I gasped, scared to realize that my voice was unsteady and sounded kind of hollow. But I wasn’t going to be there to protect Anne anymore. The least I could do was make sure Tower didn’t have her blood.

  Kori groaned, still clutching her shoulder. Cam handed her my duffel and she dug inside, one-handed, until she found my squirt bottle of bleach and dumped the whole thing on the small pool of blood Anne had left behind. Then she pressed another diaper to her own shoulder.

  “Now, let’s go!” We could already hear footsteps pounding our way from the hall. Kori took me from Cam and the world tilted around me as we crunched on broken glass.

  “Take her to my place,” Cavazos insisted. “The house is locked down, but the gazebo in back has infrared shadows. Meika will have already called in my staff doctor for Anne.”

  I think Cam nodded, but that could have been a trick of the light as the shadows closed in on me. And then I couldn’t feel my legs. The dark room spun around me, and suddenly I was looking up at Cam. He was shouting something, but I couldn’t hear him over the rush of my own pulse.

  Then that stopped, too, and the last thing I felt was the warmth of his lips on mine.

  Then there was nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  Thirty

  Bright lights. Flashes of pain. Glimpses of faces I should have known, but couldn’t place.

  Then more silence. Numbness. And the blessed, blessed darkness.

  The cold came first. Then the smooth touch of expensive sheets against my skin. By the time I opened my eyes, I’d decided I was either dreaming or in Heaven, and I didn’t really care which.

  Blinking, I turned my head to the left and saw Cam slumped over in a recliner, sound asleep. I tried to sit up, and fire shot through my center. My gasp of pain woke Cam and he sat up, startled.

  Then he saw me, and he smiled, and an instant later he was perched on the edge of the bed next to me.

  “Am I dead?” I asked, surprised when my voice creake like a frog’s.

  “Not an
ymore.”

  I blinked. “You actually killed me, you son of a bitch.”

  Cam flinched. “Yeah. I’ll spend the rest of both of our lives trying to make up for that.”

  I laughed, then flinched when the pain resurfaced. “I’ll let you.” I cleared my throat. “Where are we?”

  “Casa Cavazos.”

  “No…” I winced when protesting tugged at the muscles in my stomach. “Cam, I can’t be here. This isn’t free.” I waved one arm carefully to indicate the dubious nature of Ruben’s hospitality. “Nothing from him is ever free.” Nothing except the bruises… “Just be cause he hasn’t killed us yet doesn’t mean he won’t.” Or worse.

  “I worked it out.” Cam’s smile was too bright. Like a mask, hiding something ugly. “It’s going to be fine.”

  “Worked it out?” My pulse spiked painfully. “What have you worked out? What did you do?”

  He shrugged. “We’ll talk about it later. Anne’s in the next room.”

  Anne… “How is she?”

  “Better than you.” Cam smiled. “Her heart never stopped. She’s fucking pissed at me, though.”

  “Women get like that when you shoot them.”

  He frowned. “So I noticed.”

  “Hadley? Is she here?” I listened, but if there were any voices coming from Anne’s room, I couldn’t hear them.

  “Down the hall, playing with Isabel. She seems to like having a little sister. Don’t worry, though,” he said, before I could ask. “Cavazos is sending her home with Anne, as soon as she’s well enough to go. Michaela agreed to finally let his affair with Elle go, if he’d agree not to press for full custody of Hadley.”

  “I hope he got that in writing….” I mumbled, wondering just how much drama I’d slept through.

  “You know he did. He’s having Anne’s house retro fitted with an infrared grid and assigning full-time security to them both.”