“Yes.”

“Where is she?”

I hesitated a little longer than I should have, unsure how best to break the rest of the news to him. “That’s where this gets complicated. A couple of hours ago, she was in Cam’s apartment, but—”

“You brought him in on this? You took my daughter to Caballero’s apartment, before you even told me you’d found her?”

“No, on both counts. Cam and I were working on something else entirely. We were trying to protect a mutual friend’s daughter. But then it turned out that her daughter and your son were the same person. Only she was a little better informed about the child’s gender. And location. And name.” But not by much.

His forehead furrowed and his voice dropped into the dangerously angry range. “You and Caballero knew Tam—Noelle?”

“I grew up with her. Cam only met her once, through me. But we never knew she had a baby. Elle and I were out of touch the whole time she was with you, and afterward…she didn’t tell anyone.”

“If Noelle is dead, how did she hire you to protect her daughter from me?”

“We weren’t protecting her from you, Ruben. I’ve found no indication that she ever thought you’d hurt your own child.”

He looked so relieved by that fact—so uncharacteristically human—that I had to press the ice into my battered cheek again to remind myself that he really was a world-class asshole in everyday life.

“And she wasn’t the one who hired us. Before Elle was murdered, she sent Hadley to another friend to raise, in the event of her death. Which she obviously knew was coming. You knew about her Skill, right?”

Cavazos nodded and waved that bit of trivia off as unimportant. “Get on with it.”

“Anyway, she gave the bby to Anne and forbade her from telling anyone the child wasn’t hers. Which is one of the reasons you’ve had trouble finding her. Well, that, and you thought she was a boy. Clever on Elle’s part, huh?”

“I should have expected no less.”

“Yeah, well, she’s given all of us a bit of a postmortem surprise. But the weirdest part is that I randomly wound up working for you six years after she died, looking for the daughter you never knew you had. It’s almost too coincidental to believe.”

Ruben brows rose in mild amusement. “It’s neither weird nor coincidental, Olivia. It’s my Tamara. Your Noelle.”

“You think she knew I’d wind up working for you? And that Anne would hire me to protect Hadley in the middle of all that?” I shook my head slowly, trying to wrap my brain around the impossibility.

“I’m saying she pushed you into working for me, just like she pushed your friend Anne into raising her child and protecting her from Michaela.”

Did he really think we were all trying to protect his illegitimate child from his own psychotic wife? A valid assumption, I guess, but way off base…

“Ruben, I know she was a Seer, which is part of the problem with Hadley, but she couldn’t have seen everything. No one can see everything.”

“Is that what you think?” He laughed, as if he hadn’t even heard the part about his daughter. “You think she was just a Seer? Tamara—Noelle—was so much more than that. She didn’t just see the possibilities for the future, she saw the strings connecting all those possibilities. She could mentally pluck one string and watch how it rippled along all the other lines, changing things. Rearranging them. She pulled my strings, Olivia. It sounds like she pulled yours, too—yours and your friends. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she pulled the string that put you in the city—in my line of sight—in the first place.”

“No.” I shook my head, trying not to see all the pieces of the puzzle that was Elle, suddenly falling into place now that he’d revealed the pattern they formed. “I came to the city to get away from Cam.” Because Elle had said one of us would kill the other.

Shit!

Ruben laughed at my expression. “It was her, wasn’t it? She’s the reason you’re here?”

“Not just me…” I mumbled, before I realized I wasn’t obligated to tell him this part of it, and that if I did, he’d no doubt use it against me someday.

But the unspoken words still echoed in my head. The truth was that Elle hadn’t just pulled my strings. Cam had followed me to the city and wound up working for the other side—the side that had kidnapped her daughter—and that no longer felt like an unfortunate-but-random occurrence. If Ruben was right about Elle’s Skill, she could have put Cam where he was. She’d placed a mole—an insider’s set of eyes and ears—into the organization she knew we would someday have to infiltrate.

But she hadn’ placed Kori in the Tower syndicate. I was virtually certain of that. She never would have put a friend in the position Kori was in. Kori was a wild card—the one element Noelle, for whatever reason, hadn’t been able to account for.

“Oh, wow.” I had no other words for it. No wonder Tower wanted her child. He might not even know Hadley was also the daughter of his mortal enemy—knowing she might inherit the kind of serious Skill her mother had was temptation enough to snatch the child while she was still small and helpless, even if there was no proof yet that she’d actually be a Seer.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Cavazos said, and I saw a hint of a nostalgic smile on his face, so out of place it was startling. “She was also impossible to surprise on her birthday. Though I still have no idea what she saw.” He spread both arms to take in the whole tangled catastrophe. “Why she did any of this.”