But then a car engine started, stalled then restarted in the distance, and my life—the gritty reality—snapped back into place like emotional whiplash, leaving me gasping for breath.
Him showing up like this again wasn’t fair. But fair had never been less relevant.
“Not tonight, Cam.” Mentally steeling myself, I clomped toward him and my car, assuming he’d move when I tried to unlock my door. But instead of sliding out of the way, he stood, inches away now, intentionally invading my personal space. I could step back, but that would be acknowledging that being so close to him still affected me. Or I could stand my ground and make him back down.
“You know, someday you’re going to have to tell me what happened,” he said when neither of us moved, his voice an intimate, familiar whisper. “Why you left.”
“Today isn’t that day. Move.” I wanted to shove him out of my way, but touching him would have been a very bad idea. Maybe the best bad idea I’d ever had. “Don’t make me hurt you. I’ve already broken one face tonight.”
“I heard you were breaking faces professionally,” he said, still watching me as if nothing in the world existed, beyond whatever he saw in my eyes. “Then I heard you quit.”
I didn’t know what tsay to that, but as always, when I ran out of words, he still had plenty. “Would you really hit me?”
“Would you really make me?” I eyed him boldly and he sighed, and I could see that spark of possibility—of a rekindling—die in his eyes.
“No one makes you do anything, Olivia,” he said, and my chest tightened with the desperate wish that he were right. “A friend wants to see you.”
I reached around him and unlocked my car door, but he still leaned against it. “I don’t want to see your friend.”
He stared down at me from inches away, and I knew his eyes would be dark, dark blue, if they weren’t swimming in shadows. “Not my friend, Liv. Yours. She came to me looking for you. I think you should hear her out.”
But I couldn’t do anything that meant spending time with Cam, for both of our sakes. It was the same every time I ran into him: a jolt of memory, a spark of resurrected heat and a huge dose of regret I was sure he could see. That regret was what kept bringing him back.
It was what still drew me to him, even as I pushed him away.
“I don’t give a shit what you think,” I said, too late to be believable. I didn’t bother asking how he’d known where to find me. Cam was a Tracker—the best I’d ever met, other than…well, me. But whereas I was good with blood, he was good with names. Given a full, real name, he could find anyone, anywhere, and his range rivaled mine. And I’d made the mistake of telling him my full name—which no one else in the entire world knew—years ago. When I’d thought we’d be together forever.
That was one of the most foolish mistakes I’d ever made, but one he hadn’t given me reason to regret. Until now.
“Last chance, Cam. Move, or I’ll move you.”
He shoved his hands into the pockets of a snug pair of jeans and gave me this sad little smile, as if he missed me and wanted me gone, both at once, and I knew exactly how that felt. Then he stepped aside and watched while I slid into the driver’s seat and slammed the door.
As I pulled away from the curb, I glanced in the rearview mirror to find him still watching me, unmoving, until I turned at the corner and drove out of sight.
I unlocked my office door and shoved it open, then trudged across the small space toward the tiny bathroom. I had no waiting room and no fancy chairs. Just my desk, two cheap, upright cabinets full of my stuff and one old leather couch, stained and ripped, and more comfortable now than the day I took it from an ex’s house along with my own things—restitution for the car he’d stolen and nearly a year of my life wasted.
In the bathroom, I pulled off my top and grabbed a clean T-shirt from the cabinet over the toilet. The sun would be up in a couple of hours. I’d crash on the couch until dawn, then get an early start, because if I went home and crawled into bed, I’d lose most of the day to sleep, which would lead to me losing the job I’d just bid on to Travis Spencer, the runner-up, and his two meat-head associates.
With a quick glance at my pale, blood-splattered reflectionran warm water on a clean rag and scrubbed my face until I could no longer smell the energy signature of the blood I’d been tracking. But as I turned away from the mirror, the squeal of hinges bisected the silence, and my heart beat a little faster.
Someone was in my office. At four-thirty in the morning. Without an appointment.
I dropped the rag into the sink and squatted to pull a 9mm from the holster nailed to the inside of the cabinet beneath the sink. Aiming at the floor, I disengaged the safety and stood, ready to elbow the door open. I wasn’t expecting trouble, but honestly, I wasn’t surprised by it, either. Spencer had been gunning for me ever since he dropped the ball on the governor’s missing mistress, and I picked it up and ran for the goal.
“Once upon a time, four little girls, best friends, took an oath of loyalty,” a woman’s voice said through the door, and I flicked the safety back on. It can’t be…
Annika. Cam had sent her alone. Smart man.
We hadn’t spoken in six years, but hearing her voice was like peeling back layers of time until my childhood came into focus, gritty and rough around the edges—was I ever really innocent?—yet somehow still naive compared to what time and experience had since made of me.
“They promised to always help one another, whenever they were asked,” she continued, as I fell through the rabbit hole, flailing for something solid to grab on to. “They signed their names, and—”
“And they stamped their thumbprints in blood.” I pushed open the bathroom door to find Annika Lawson watching me, green eyes holding my gaze with the weight of shared youth and the long-since frayed knots of friendship. “That’s where those stupid little girls went wrong,” I said. “They disrespected the power of names and blood.”
And look where it got us—my entire life ruled by one careless promise the year I was twelve.
“We didn’t disrespect the power, Liv.” Her gaze was steady, holding me accountable for every truth I’d ever tried to hide—that much hadn’t changed, even after six years apart. “We just didn’t understand it.”
Because no one had told us. We didn’t know we were Skilled, because our parents thought they were protecting us with ignorance. Insulating us from the dangers of our own genetic inheritance.
In the first years after the revelation, people sometimes disappeared. Government experiments or eager private industry research, no one knew for sure, but the disappearances terrified already worried parents into a perilous silence. They could never have known that Kori’s little sister was a Binder, or that at ten years old, she’d be strong enough to tie us to one another for the rest of our lives.
“Well, the power understood us.” And our ignorance didn’t make that binding any less real. Or any easier to undo. We’d bound ourselves together so tightly that as we grew up, the bonds chafed, wearing away at our friendship until nothing was left but resentment and anger.
I pulled the bathroom door closed and sank into my desk chair, fending off a battery of memories I’d thought buried. It felt weird to see Anne in my office, out of place in my adult life when she’d been a central figure of my youth. Part of me wanted to hug her and get caught up over drinks, but the stronger part of me remembered what went down that night six years ago, the last time we’d all four been together.
A reunion wasn’t gonna happen. Ever. And not just because Elle was dead and Kori was MIA. Anne had disappeared when I’d needed a friend. I could have tracked her, but why, when a dozen unanswered calls and messages said she didn’t want to talk to me? So I’d struck out on my own, and never once looked back at the past. Until now.
“What are you doing here? Is a third ghost from my past going to show up and take me to my own grave?” But that possibility struck a little too close to home, and I had to shru
g it off.
She sank onto the couch and her composure cracked, then fell away, revealing raw pain and bitter anger, and suddenly I wanted to hurt whoever’d hurt her. In spite of what she’d done to me—what we’d all done to one another—I wanted to protect her, like Kori and I had looked out for her as kids, and that impulse ran deeper than the oath connecting us. Older. All the way back to the day Anne and I had first met, before Kori and Elle even moved to town.
But it wasn’t that simple. I knew what she was going to say, even though it shouldn’t have been possible.
“I need you, Liv. Will you help me?”
No! Shock sputtered within me, synapses misfiring in my brain as I tried to make sense of what she’d just said. Of what she shouldn’t have been able to say.
“How did you…?” But my voice faded into silence as the answer to my own question became obvious. “You burned it. You burned the second oath.” Damn it! “We swore, Anne. We swore to let it stand.”
In spite of unshed tears shining in her eyes, Anne’s gaze held no hint of shame or regret. “You’re the only one who can help me with this and I couldn’t even ask you with the second oath binding me.”
“That’s why we signed it!” I leaned forward with my arms crossed on the desktop, and my chair squealed in protest.
That second oath was our freedom. It couldn’t truly sever the ties binding us, but it prevented us from tugging on them. In the second oath, Anne, Kori, Elle and I had sworn never to ask one another for help, because once asked, we were compelled to do everything within our power to aid one another. Which, we’d learned the hard way, could only lead to disaster. And resentment. And expulsion from school. And arrest records.
“I’m sorry. I really am,” Anne insisted, tucking one coppery strand of shoulder-length hair behind her ear. “I know you probably don’t believe that, and I can’t blame you. But I truly had no choice. Will you help me, Liv?”
“Hell no, I’m not going to help you!” But as soon as I said the words, breaking my oath to her, the pain began. It started as a bolt of white behind my left eye, shining so bright that everything else seemed dim by comparison. When I closed my eyes, the light sent pain shooting through my skull, and in less than a second, it was a full-blown migraine. Then came the muscle spasms—a revolt of my entire body, the consequence of going back on an oath signed voluntarily and sealed in blood by a child who’d turned out to be the most powerful Binder I’d ever met.
Defaulting on an oath sealed by an amateur—or even a weak professional—could put you in the hospital. Defaulting on an oath sealed by anyone with real power and/or training could kill you.
First, your brain sends warnings in the form of pain. Migraines. Muscle cramps. General abuse of the body’s pain receptors. Then it starts turning things off, one by one. Motor control. Bladder and bowel control. Sight and scent. Hearing. But never the sense of touch. Never the nerve endings. They remain functional so you can feel every second of your body’s decision to self-destruct.
I’m a little fuzzy on the order of betrayal by my own internal organs, but among the first to go are the kidneys, liver, gallbladder, intestines and pancreas, any one of which would probably kill you eventually. Then the big guns. If you hold out long enough, you’ll lose respiratory function, then circulatory. And without those, of course, your brain has only minutes—minutes—for you to try to think through the pain and humiliation and decide whether you’re going to stick to your word, or die breaking it.
Most people never get that far. I’ve never gotten that far, as evidenced by the fact that my heart continues to beat, in spite of several times I would have declared it broken beyond repair. But everyone has a limit. A point past which you can’t be pushed.
“Please don’t do this, Olivia,” Anne said, when my fingers began to twitch on my desk. A second later, my legs began to convulse, banging against the bottom of the pencil drawer, but I only stared at her through the ball of light in the center of my vision, breathing steadily through the pain. “I’m not going to take it back, Liv,” she insisted, leaning forward on the couch. “I can’t. Not this time. Will you help me?”
Her repetition of the original request escalated the process, and I gasped at the pain deep in my stomach. I couldn’t identify it, but I knew what that pain meant. One of us would have to back down in the next few minutes, or the last thing I saw would be her bright green eyes, full of tears and regret, and her stubborn lips sealed against the sentence that could make it all go away.
“Please, Liv,” Annika begged, and this time her voice came from behind me. Water ran in the bathroom. A second later, she leaned my chair back and laid a cold, wet cloth over my eyes and forehead, and my hands twitched violently in my lap. “You don’t even know what I need you to do.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I gasped, helpless to keep the rag from slipping down my face. Until I gave in to the compulsion to help her, I would feel nothing but the systematic shutdown of my entire body. But still I fought it. She had no right to make me do something I didn’t want to do, no matter what stupid mistake we’d made as children! The compulsion was like having my free will stripped. It was humiliating, and infuriating, and it was the reason we’d all gone our separate ways after high school without even a glance in the rearview mirror. “The point—” I growled through a throat that wanted to close around my words “—is that I…have…no…choice.”
Leather creaked as she sat on the couch again, and the hitch in her breath said she was fighting sobs. “I’m sorry, Liv. If I could ask you without compelling you, I would, but I don’t have that option.”
She was right—her very request triggered the compulsion—but that didn’t help. And neither did the regret obvious in her voice. “What do you want?” I whispered with all the volume I could manage, as pain ripped through my stomach again, and my arms began to contract toward my torso.
“I need you to find someone.”
No surprise, considering I was a Tracker, both by birth and by profession.
The rag slipped from my eyes and I saw her wipe tears from her cheeks with an angry stroke of one hand. “I need you to find the bastard who killed my husband and return the favor.”
Two
For a moment, I could only stare at her, and as my resistance began to fade in the face of surprise, so did the pain, though it wouldn’t completely subside until I’d said the magic words.
“Whoa, you got married?” I couldn’t picture it, and I hadn’t even noticed the wedding band that now seemed glaringly obvious on her left hand. Did she have a house in the suburbs? A mortgage? A dog in the backyard?
I frowned and sucked in a deep breath, relieved to feel the convulsions in my arms downgrading to mere spasms.
“Yes. Then I got widowed,” she said, and more tears fell, even as her jaws clenched in some powerful combination of rage and devastation. “I need you to track the murderer and kill him.”
“That’s…that’s not really what I do, Anne,” I said, careful not to refuse—so soon after that last refusal, anyway. I stared at her, surprised by the vengeful impulse in a woman who, when we were kids, was a turn-the-other-cheek kind of girl. “I just find people. That’s it.”
Anne blinked, as if she hadn’t heard me. As if she didn’t want to hear me. Then she plucked her purse from the center couch cushion and dug through it with trembling hands. “Here.” She produced a wallet-size photo album and flipped to the second page, already pulling a picture out before I realized what she was going to do.
“No, don’t…” Show me a picture of your dead husband… That was a low blow. But before I could finish my sentence, she’d leaned forward and slid the photo across my desk. I looked at it, against my better judgment, and found a handsome Asian man with a nice smile, one arm around an obviously happy Anne.
It was like staring at a ghost, though I’d never even met the man.
“His name was Shen Liang. He was thirty-four, and the nicest man I ever met. He wrote proprietary so
ftware for a company here in the city, but they let him work from home. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to kill him.” The tears were back, and I stared at my desk to avoid seeing them.
“What did the police say?”
“They’re investigating. But, Liv, his killer was Skilled. A Traveler. The police aren’t going to be able to find him, and even if they could, without traditional physical evidence, they can’t make the charges stick. You know what they’re up against.”
Yeah. I knew. Nearly half my business came from victims trying to catch people the cops couldn’t identify. “I’ll find him for you.” I had no choice about that. “But the rest…” The killing… “It’s not that simple.” Even if I found the suspect, and even if I was one-hundred-percent certain that he was guilty of cold-blooded murder, I couldn’t just kill him—not if I valued my own life—until I knew for sure what his connections were. Who, if anyone, he was bound to.
“We have a daughter.”
“No…” I shook my head when she started digging in her purse again. No more pictures…
“Hadley.” More tears, and when her jaw began to quiver, something inside me twisted painfully. “She’s five years old, and tomorrow I’m going to have to tell her that her daddy is dead. I can’t let her grow up knowing the man who killed her father is still out there. You have to help me. I need you to find Shen’s killer and kill him. I’m asking you, Olivia.”
I groaned out loud. Those were the magic words. This had gone beyond a general request for help: it was now a specific request that I commit murder, regardless of the cost to me, personally. Now, unless I could somehow talk her out of it without actually refusing to do what she’d asked, I’d have to either kill her husband’s murderer or die fighting the compulsion. Or die when the police caught up to me. Or wish I’d died if the murderer turned out to be connected and his connections caught up to me.
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