Blood Bound Read Free

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