you even go?”
“No, Liv, I didn’t go. Okay?” I dropped my fork on my plate, and the clang of metal against glass was louder than I’d intended. “I didn’t go on the fucking interview. I didn’t join the FBI. I don’t fight on the side of truth and justice, and frankly, having been out in the real world for a while now, I can say with some measure of certainty that it was a dumb idea in the first place. Just the stupid dream of a stupid, idealistic kid with a shiny diploma and no clue how the world really works.”
At twenty-two, I’d thought I was going to change the world. Or, at the very least, I was going to clean it up. I was going to join the FBI and use my Skill—secretly, of course—to track serial killers and pedophiles, and make the world a better place, one conviction at a time.
“It wasn’t dumb,” Liv insisted. “A little naive, maybe, but you could have pulled it off. You should have pulled it off.” She pushed one of the bar stools out with her foot and sat. “So what happened? How did you get tangled up with Tower instead?”
“I got shot.”
“What?” Her fork hovered over the open carton.
“I got shot. The week I moved here.” I took my first bite while she stared, obviously trying to decide what to ask first.
“How? What happened?”
I shrugged and swallowed, my favorite food suddenly tasteless with the memory. “I don’t know. I was walking down Hyacinth, about four nights after I got here, all farm-fresh and clueless—”
Liv frowned. “Hyacinth. That was in my neighborhood.”
“I know.”
She stabbed a dolma with her fork and the leaf started to come unwrapped as she gestured with it. “Do I even want to know what you were doing two blocks from my apartment?”
“Tracking you. You owed me an explanation—and, frankly, an apology—and I’d come prepared to demand both. But obviously, I didn’t find you.” Not that night, anyway. “I found the business end of a bullet instead.” I stood and pulled up my shirt to expose the small, round puckered scar just to the right of my navel. “I never saw the shooter or the gun. I was just walking down the street one minute, then flat on my back the next, lying in a pool of my own blood. I was trying to hold my guts in with one hand and dig my phone out of my pocket with the other when these guys just showed up out of nowhere.”
“Tower’s men?” she asked, her food untouched.
“Yeah.”
Her brows rose in challenge. “You do know they’re probably the ones who shot you.”
“Probably.” I certainly couldn’t prove otherwise. “All I know for sure is that they’re the ones who saved me. They took me to one of their doctors and paid the bill. They destroyed all the blood I spilled. Then, when I was released, they took me to Adler’s house—he’s my direct supervisor now. His wife put me in their guest room and took care of me for weeks, while I recovered. After that, how could I not sign with Tower? I’d come to town with nothing, spent more than I had on a hotel room I never actually checked out of. By the time I was able to get out of bed, I was flat-ass broke, unemployed and—”
“And you didn’t have a friend in the world to turn to,” Liv interrupted. “Because I wasn’t speaking to you.”
“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