Oh, shit. I hesitated and lost count of the 9mm rounds I’d been counting. I’d thought that if Cavazos killed his longtime rival, all Tower’s people would be free of their bonds. Including both Kori and Cam.
“Clever,” Ruben said, and I could practically see the gears turning in his head. No doubt his team of lawyers would soon have a new clause to draft. “Who’s his successor?”
Kori looked at him as if he’d just asked her who shot Kennedy. “I couldn’t tell you even if I wanted to.” She dismissed him again and her gaze pleaded with me as I loaded an extra clip. “Liv, if you let him kill Tower, I’ll wind up…in a very bad position. And so will Cam.”
“A bad position? Like…working for someone you hate?” With a glance at Cavazos, I dropped the clip from my gun and slid a fresh one into place until it clicked home.
“Married to someone you want to kill?” Meika suggested.
Kori actually rolled her eyes. “No, much fuckin’ worse than those.”
“Like missing your daughter?” Anne asked softly, and the entire room fell silent.
Kori slumped against her bindings, as Ruben knelt to clean up his own spilled blood. “Yes, actually. Kinda like that. Only I don’t have a daughter,” she added, before any of us could ask. Then she turned to me again. “You may think you and Cam are star-crossed now, but if you kill Tower, things will be worse for the two of you than you can even fucking imagine.”
I dropped the newly loaded gun into my left holster. “I have a pretty good imagination.” Which was why the drawer full of ropes and handcuffs bothered me.
“Olivia. Nothing good will happen if Tower dies.” She closed her eyes, then met my gaze again. “Take Hadley home—I’d help you if I could. But don’t kill Jake Tower. You have to trust me on this.”
And the funny thing was that I did. I believed her.
“Okay,” I said finally, dropping the second pistol into the holster beneath my right arm, and Meika propped both hands on her hips, scowling at me.
“Niña, I don’t think you understand how this works. La puta in the chair doesn’t get to say how things go.”
“Neither does the bitch who killed Hadley’s mother,” I snapped, and Kori glanced at Meika in surprise, which morphed quickly into fury.
“Is there anything else we should know? Anything you can tell us?” I asked
“Yes, and no,” Kori said. “In that order.”
“Great.” I pulled my jacket on over the shoulder holsters and grabbed my smallest duffel, then glanced at the others. “Let’s go.”
“Olivia!” Kori called, as I headed toward the brightly lit hall, Cavazos close at my back. I stopped, but didn’t turn. “What?”
“He’ll kill you if he catches you.”
“Oh, good,” I said, already walking again, as Anne slapped another piece of tape over Kori’s mouth. “No one’s tried to kill me in hours.”
Twenty-Nine
In the hall, I turned to make a shh gesture to Ruben, Meika and Anne, then pushed the bedroom door open. The motion caught Cam’s eye and he took his headphones off, but didn’t rise from the edge of the bed, the only piece of furniture in the room.
“I need you to stay here,” I said, when he shot me a nervous, questioning look.
He nodded reluctantly and took his cell back when I handed it to him. “You know I wish I could help with…whatever you’re doing.”
“I know.” I also knew that it took a very trusting man to turn his back on the kind of job I was about to pull and believe that everything would be okay just because I said it would. I touched his cheek, letting the stubble scratch my palm, desperately hoping this job wouldn’t make a liar of me. I needed to survive the night, even if I might one day die at his hand. At least we’d have the years between, and I had to believe that a few short years with him were better than a lifetime without him.
“I don’t want to do this without you…” I began, but he shook his head.
“Don’t say anything else. I can’t know what this is,” he said, and I nodded. “But I don’t want you to do it without me, either.”
If all went well, what we were about to do would rescue Hadley and free me from Cavazos. But Kori and Cam would be screwed. Hell, they probably already were. Cam and I would have to run. Forever. But I could handle that, as long as we were together.
“Be careful,” he said, and I nodded, then I pueR headphones back over his ears. I kissed him, letting the moment linger, in case it was our last, while the ache in my chest swelled and threatened to devour me. Then I backed into the hall without breaking eye contact until Cavazos closed the door and stepped in front of it to capture my attention.
“I need your word that you won’t kill Tower,” I said. Ruben shook his head slowly, and I crossed my arms over my chest. “We’re not leaving until I have your word.”
Cavazos nodded firmly. “Fine. We don’t need you to get into Tower’s house.”
“But you need me for backup, and you sure as hell need me to find Hadley. What do you think the chances are that he’s keeping her anywhere near one of the darkrooms?” When he didn’t answer, I turned to Michaela. “How close is Isabel’s room to any of the exits?”
She didn’t reply, but I could see the answer in her face. Isa was more closely guarded than the president. It would be no different for Tower’s kids, and we had every reason to suspect Hadley was being kept very near them. Maybe even with them.
“Hadley won’t come with you,” Anne added, sounding very much like that mother lion again. “She doesn’t know you. She’s never even seen you. And she knows to scream if a stranger ever tries to take her.”
“You don’t want to traumatize your own daughter, do you?” I asked, and Meika glared at me, clearly pissed over the reminder of her husband’s infidelity. But she didn’t try to stab anyone. Maybe my little talk had gotten through to her.
“Beyond that,” Anne added, “if you want her to trust you—ever—you’re going to need my help.”
I was so proud of her I almost smiled, in spite of the circumstances.
“Fine,” Cavazos said at last, and I could see that eagerness was eating at him, too. “You have my word.”
But without his blood to seal the deal, his word was worth no more than the unrealized ideals tattooed across my own back. Fortunately, as soon as I’d united him with his daughter—however temporary—the mark on my thigh would die and I would no longer have to obey his orders. Which meant I’d be free to stop him from killing Tower. Or to die trying.
“Okay…” I turned back to Meika. “Take me first, then Anne, then Ruben.” That way she couldn’t just disappear with her husband and leave us behind. “Once we’re there, I’ll take point.” Because I’d be tracking. Or trying to, just in case the Jammer moved far enough from Hadley for me to get a read on her. “Ready?”
The others nodded. Cavazos looked distinctly uncomfortable with following someone else’s lead, but he didn’t openly object.
All four of us piled into the bathroom and Meika stood in the middle of the floor. “It’ll take me a minute to find his darkrooms,” she said, and I pictured her closing her eyes in concentration, though I couldn’t see a single detail of her face in the darkness. “Okay…” she said finally. “I can feel two of them. Two cool, dark spots in a raging inferno of light.”
Th#8217;ras an elaborate description coming from the woman who usually referred to me as “la puta blanca.” I decided that meant it was accurate.
Meika fumbled for my hand in the dark and I gave it to her reluctantly. “Take a couple of steps forward, when I squeeze your hand,” she said, and for once I felt no urge to argue. “Stop when I squeeze again.”
Before I could acknowledge the directions, she squeezed my hand hard enough to grind my knuckles together, then jerked me forward into the darkness.
I stumbled into obscurity, then righted myself in the artificial night of a cold room I’d never been in before. I was sure of that, even though I couldn’t see
my own fingers in front of my face.
Meika dropped my hand as if it was made of fire, and in the next instant, I felt her absence like a safety net dropped from beneath me, leaving me flailing. I reached into the dark, and in the cold, still silence, panic gave rise to the thought that I’d given her too much credit. She’d probably dropped me in a bank vault, or a museum, or something like that.
But if she had, the joke was on her, because I still had Kori’s key card. They weren’t getting into Tower’s house without me.
Fortunately, two steps later my outstretched hand landed on a cold, smooth, featureless wall, and I decided I was where I was supposed to be. And that if I wasn’t, panicking would do no good.
After a couple more seconds in absolute darkness, doubts simmering on my mental back burner, the feel of the air around me changed and something collided with my back, shoving me forward.
Anne gasped, and I exhaled with relief so deep I almost cried. They’d nearly materialized right over me.
“Move over, puta!” Meika snapped in a harsh whisper. Then she was gone again, and I pulled Anne closer and backed up until my spine hit the wall. I had no idea how big the darkroom was, but it felt small enough to be claustrophobic, if I could have seen my surroundings.
Less than a minute later, the air felt different again—a change in pressure?—and I recognized the sound of Cavazos breathing less than a foot in front of me.
“Everyone ready?” I whispered, and got three hushed replies in the affirmative. “Okay, here goes…” I felt my way along the wall, then around the room until I felt the door, flush with the wall itself. Heart pounding in my ears, I dug my phone out of my pocket and flipped it open for the bare minimum of light. But after several minutes in absolute darkness, the dim glow of my cell display was blinding. It took a second for my eyes to adjust, then I glanced around briefly—trying not to see the ominous-looking air vent built into the ceiling—before sliding Kori’s key card into the scanner next to the door.
A small LED light flashed green, then metal whispered against metal as the dead bolt—obviously huge—slid back. And that was it. No hiss of released air pressure. No alarm announcing our home invasion. No computerized voice welcoming me into the future.
It was kind of anticlimactic, really.
I verified that my phone was on Silent, then slid it back into my pocket and pressed down on the lever-style door handle. I pushed the door open. Te rubber weather seal squealed softly against the floor and I froze, holding my breath, certain someone had heard, and the entire Tower arsenal was now being sent to intercept us. To eliminate us.
But the slice of hallway I could see was dark and quiet. And still. If we’d been detected, the squad coming to kill us was really good.
Carefully, I pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped into the hall. The others followed, and Cavazos let the door close slowly behind us—lit only by the flashing glow from a television somewhere down the hall.
We were upstairs—I could see the corner of a rail overlooking the first floor at one end of the hall—and there were at least a dozen doors opening on either side of the hallway ahead. Before choosing a direction, I closed my eyes and said Hadley’s full name in my head, vaguely aware that for the moment at least, I was the only one in the world who knew the entire thing. I felt for the pull of her energy signature—I searched for it—but came up with nothing. She was still too close to the Jammer to be detected. We’d have to find her the old-fashioned way.
I glanced at the railing one more time, then took off in the opposite direction, walking carefully, glad my boots were too well-worn to squeak on the tile. The others followed me, and we paused in front of every door to make sure no one inside would see us pass.
The third room on the left held the flashing television, but no sound. Leaning against the wall next to the open door, I pulled Cam’s silencer from my pocket and screwed it onto the end of the gun I’d borrowed from him. I peeked into the room slowly and carefully, gun aimed at the floor several feet ahead, safety off. Then I exhaled silently and slid the safety back into place.
The room was a bedroom with an attached bathroom, set up a bit like a motel suite. The occupant—a slightly thickening man in his mid-fifties—was sound asleep in his recliner, head flopped forward, chin dragging his chest.
I led the others past the open door quietly, and when we were clear, Cavazos stepped close to whisper into my ear. “Ray Bailey,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder to the room we’d just passed. “Tower’s best Blinder.”
Unwilling to speak, I gave him a questioning look, and he shrugged. “I do my homework. Tower probably knows who you and Meika are, too.”
Which meant we’d be shot on sight. Of the four of us, Anne was the only one who might survive discovery, because if Tower had done his own homework, he’d know she’d raised Hadley and had no affiliation with the Cavazos syndicate. And that she was no threat to him.
“Olivia, we can’t leave him,” Ruben whispered, and Anne and Meika turned back to watch us, Anne visibly antsy. “If this goes wrong, he’ll be used against us. We’ll be blinded and vulnerable.” Ruben pulled his gun and started to step into the bedroom, but I put one arm out to stop him.
“You can’t shoot him—he hasn’t done anything.”
“Everyone’s guilty of something.” He pushed my arm out of the way and stepped silently into Bailey’s room, over my whispered protest.
“Wait!” I grabbed his arm Cavazos shoved me back and pulled the trigger without hesitation. His gun thwupped, and the far side of Bailey’s head exploded in a shower of red droplets.
I blinked through my own shock and Ruben hauled me out of the room by my good arm, whispering fiercely in my ear. “It was us or him. If you don’t have the balls to do what needs to be done, then stay the hell out of my way.”
In the hall again, scrambling for composure, I realized that the Bailey’s own television had covered the sound of his murder. Anne hadn’t seen or heard, thank goodness.
“What happened?” she asked, but I only shook my head and led us farther down the hall, hating Ruben a little more with each step.
We passed several more closed doors until there was only one room left—open and spilling light into the hall—before a ninety-degree turn to the right. Pressed against the wall, I listened for sound from inside the room, but heard nothing.
So I peeked.
And froze at what I saw. A bed, unmade, with blankets spilling over the edge. A chair, clothes tossed over the back. And a dresser, two drawers open and spilling jeans like a denim spider had tried to crawl out. I might have assumed the room had been searched—in a hurry—if not for the framed photo standing on the dresser. Kori, around fourteen years old, one arm around her younger sister, Kenley, the other around their older brother’s waist.
Kori’s room had been a mess as long as I’d known her. That much clearly hadn’t changed.
“Those were his employees’ rooms,” I whispered as we rounded the corner into another empty hall. “All of them.” We’d shadow-walked into the wrong wing of the house.
The hall ahead held rooms full of books, theater seating and a projection screen, or collections of couches. One room held a pool table and an oak bar. But they were all empty, and at the end of that hall was another right-hand turn, leading to more rooms. This hall was different, though. I could feel it. This hall was populated, and that could only mean one thing.
“The family wing,” Cavazos whispered, and I nodded, having come to the same conclusion.
At the end of this new hall was another set of stairs and a rail presumably overlooking the same great room we’d glimpsed before. And between were six doors on one side of the hall, half open, half closed, and one grand, double set on the other side—obviously the master suite. Closed, thankfully.
We snuck down the hall, on pins and needles, fully aware that any sound could trigger a lockdown and get us all killed. Pulse roaring in my ears, I glanced carefully into
each room we passed—most were unused guest rooms—and discovered that Michaela had been right. What looked like normal, if opulent family quarters was actually more of a fortress. The windows each bore decorative but functional iron bars. The ceiling was dotted with recessed lighting—an entire grid of infrared bulbs, no doubt blazing in the nonvisible spectrum of light. And the walls, I’d bet anything, were solid concrete beneath expensive paneling.
Two of the rooms obviously belonged to children—privileged, overindulged children—but both beds were empty. Which I found odd, until a couple of doors later, when I peeked into a plaom lined with shelves full of toys and carpeted in thick rubber mats.
In the center of the room was a big pile of pillows and giant beanbags, illuminated by a huge flat-screen television—was that sixty inches?—glowing with the solid blue screen that shows up after the DVD has run its course. In front of the television, a little boy slept sprawled half over a beanbag three times his size and half over his sister’s tiny legs. They were out cold.
Not ten feet away, a woman slept curled up on a plush leather couch, facing both the kids and the television, a novel open on the floor beneath her outstretched arm.
“Slumber party?” I whispered to Anne, and she nodded.
“Probably in Hadley’s honor.”
“That’s Katherine George,” Meika whispered, pointing to the woman asleep on the couch. “We tried to get her for Isa, but Tower got to her first. Jammer nannies are in high demand among the wealthy.”
Ohhhh. The nanny was the Jammer. No wonder she lived with Tower—she had to be near his children. And while she was Jamming their energy signatures, she’d been Jamming Hadley’s, too. But…
“Where’s Hadley?” Anne asked. There was a third beanbag half-draped with a fuzzy pink blanket, but she wasn’t in it.
Before I could answer, the rush of running water sounded from inside the room, and a moment later, a door squealed open, backlighting a small form in the bathroom doorway. Hadley froze with one look at us, and the blue light from the television lit her face as it cycled through surprise, fear, then blessed recognition. Thank goodness we’d brought Anne.
Blood Bound Page 36
