Blood Bound. Rachel Vincent

through clenched teeth, her voice low and sharp enough to cut glass, “is that you signed on for this voluntarily, but I don’t have any choice.”

      “What does that mean? Why don’t you have a choice?” I asked, and her face went as pale as my white Formica countertop.

      “I …” Liv blinked, as if she’d confused herself. Or said more than she’d meant to. Then she grabbed her bottle and chugged the rest of it. “I just meant that I have to take whatever work I can get. I’m not exactly rolling in commissions since I left Rawlinson, and yes, I’ve done some jobs for Cavazos, but that doesn’t make me his bitch, or his whore, or anything else.”

      “I never said it did.” But she was already backing across my living room, headed straight for the coffee table on her way to a dramatic exit fueled by something I didn’t understand. “Liv, wait,” I called, already rounding the countertop into the living room when the back of her leg hit the corner of the coffee table. She went down on one hip, and her bottle smashed against the side of the table, spraying her jacket with the last droplets.

      “Shit.” She started picking up the sticky pieces of glass and I knelt next to her to help.

      “You okay?”

      “Yeah. Sorry.”

      I shrugged. “It’s just a little glass.”

      “I meant about … that whole thing. It’s none of my business what you do for a living.”

      But I wanted it to be. “They offered me a step promotion,” I said, dumping the glass I’d gathered onto the coffee table.

      “What?”

      “When my five years were up. Tower called me in the week my mark would have gone dead, and I would have been free, and he told me I’d become very important to the operation. He said I had two choices—I could sign on for another five years, or I could leave the organization. As incentive to stay, he offered me a step promotion—two chain links for the price of one. Instant seniority.” I’d since learned that that offer was seldom extended, and even more seldom refused. “But if I opted out, I’d have to leave the city entirely.”

      “Was that in your contract? Part of the noncompetition clause?” she asked, staring into my eyes from inches away, and I realized I hadn’t been that close to her in years. She hadn’t let me get that close….

      “No. But he wouldn’t have had any trouble enforcing it.”

      “You signed an extension so you could stay in the city?” she said, and I could only nod. “Because of me?”

      “There were other factors….” Other people I didn’t want to leave behind. “But yeah.”

      “Cam …” Her voice was more breath than sound, and it echoed in every cell of my body. And suddenly the memories were too much to fight. She was right there, after so many years, and she wasn’t pushing me away.

      So I kissed her, and she kissed me back, and for several seconds, it was as if she’d never left at all.

      Then pain slammed into my chest and I fell backward on my ass. By the time I realized she’d shoved me, she was on her feet, staring down at me. Glaring at me.

      “Don’t. Touch me.” Her voice shook, and she couldn’t hide the tremor in her hands, even when she shoved them into her pockets. “This isn’t what it used to be. We can’t … We can’t ever go back to that.” She jogged toward the hall, pulling her jacket off as she went, and I only recovered enough to stand when I heard water running in the bathroom.

      Anger warred with something else inside me. Something deeper and older. Something that bruised me from the inside out every single time I heard her name, either out loud or in my own head. I followed her down the hall and stopped outside my own bathroom, where she stood with her jacket spread across the counter, trying to scrub drops of beer out of the leather.

      “This is bullshit, Olivia.”

      But she just scrubbed harder, so I snatched the cloth from her and she turned on me, eyes blazing with some dizzying combination of anger and … regret. “Don’t do this, Cam. This isn’t the time to open old wounds.”

      “There’s never going to be a time, is there?” I pulled the cloth back when she reached for it. “Every time I see you, you tell me to go away, but you look like you want to cry when you say it. You don’t mean it, and we both know that.”

      “I mean it …” she insisted.

      “No, you don’t!” I shouted, and this time she didn’t argue. “What happened, Liv? Why are you lying to me? Why are you lying to yourself?”

      She blinked up at me, eyes damp, in spite of the stoic set of her jaw, and I was nearly knocked off balance by the storm of conflicting urges raging inside me. How could I be so furious with her, yet so in love with her at the same time? How could she be so maddeningly closed-off, yet so obviously vulnerable beneath her shield of denial?