Van tugged free from Liv’s grip, and I pulled Olivia back, in case she was tempted to reach out again. Vanessa didn’t like uninvited touches.

“Let her go,” I said, recognizing the frustration and fear cycling in a never-ending loop beneath Van’s sudden mask of disinterest. “If she says she can’t help, she can’t help.”

Liv whirled on me, confused and angry. “She found the account! You know she did. She knows who hired Hunter to kill Anne’s husband, but she’s not telling. That is in no way okay with me.”

“I’m sorry.” Vanessa backed toward the door, the strap of her bag clenched in a white-knuckle grip. “I just can’t.” She was upset—I could see that much. She liked Liv, probably because of what she’d told Van that I couldn’t. They could have been friends, if not for that damned Tower binding.

Liv was right. No one bound to a syndicate could ever really have friends.

She reached for Van again, and again I pulled her back, and Van slipped out of the apartment and into the hall. When I wouldn’t let Liv go, she spun into a right hook that caught me square on the jaw.

“Damn it, Olivia!” I rubbed my face with one hand and held her arm in the other, forced to tighten my grip until it probably bruised. “Just let her go.”

“She knows who paid him!”

“That’s exactly why she can’t tell you!” I shouted, hoping—wishing—that she would just calm down long enough to draw the obvious conclusion, a fact I wasn’t allowed to outright divulge. “I can’t tell you this, Liv. You’re going to have to think it through for yourself.”

And finally she stopped struggling, and her arm went limp in my hand. “It was there all along, and we didn’t see it.” She swallowed thickly, and suddenly looked sick to her stomach. “It was Tower. Jake Tower hired Hunter to kill Anne’s husband.”

Ten

“Tower.” Stunned, I sank onto Cam’s couch and closed my eyes. But that didn’t make it any less true. “Are you sure?”

Cam sat next to me. “If that money had come from anywhere else in the world, she’d tell us. But she can’t say anything that might incriminate the syndicate, so it has to be from one of Tower’s accounts.”

I frowned at him, confused. “Are you allowed to say that?”

Cam shrugged. “Now that you’ve already guessed, I’m not divulging incriminating evidence.”

“Is she going to get into trouble for this?” I felt sick, knowing I might have made things worse for Van, after everything she’d already been through.

“Not unless someone asks her a direct question. And that can’t happen unless someone finds out what she was doing here. So, obviously, don’t tell anyone.”

I nodded absently, but my brain had already moved on. “Why the hell would Jake Tower want to kill Anne’s husband? I can’t imagine him being tangled up with the syndicate without her knowing about it.” And if she’d known about it, surely she would have told us—not telling us would only make it harder for us to find Shen’s killer.

“It’s probably not actually Tower,” Cam pointed out. “It could be anyone with access to a syndicate bank account.”

But that wasn’t really true. “It’d have to be someone high up enough to have access to the account, and the clout to spend funds autonomously. Maybe even anonymously, right?” I had no personal knowledge about the Tower syndicate, but I knew how Cavazos ran his operation, and I was willing to bet my unmarked left arm that their day-to-day operations had a lot in common. “I’m guessing that’s no more than a handful of people, right?”

Cam nodded, looking distinctly uncomfortable, and I took that to mean we were getting close to a line he couldn’t cross.

“I’m also guessing you can’t tell me who those people are, can you?”

“No,” he said, and my sigh sounded almost as heavy as it felt. “But I swear, Liv, I had no idea the syndicate was involved until Van came out of the bedroom.”

I believed him. I don’t know why I believed him; he’d lie to protect the syndicate if the situation required it. But when I looked into his eyes, I believed him, and I felt a ghost of his touch on my back, tracing the words I wanted so desperately to be true. For both of us.

“Okay. I can get those names on my own.” Most of them, anyway. I wasn’t without resources. “But first we need to update Anne. And she needs to know about your binding, Cam.”

“I know.” He took my hand and pulled me closer, and I let him, against my better judgment. “Maybe you should let me talk to her. Alone.”

“Why?” I didn’t even bother screening suspicion from my voice. I hated knowing that even though he still loved me—I had no doubt about that—I couldn’t trust him. As long as he bore a live mark, no one would be able to fully trust him. Not even the syndicate. They may have had his service and obedience, but they didn’t have his heart—maybe they never had—and that meant he would use whatever loopholes he found.

But I still couldn’t trust him.

Cam looked up at me from the couch, and I let him pull me forward until I stood between his thighs, my knees brushing the front of the couch cushion. “Olivia, if you go up against the Tower syndicate, I can’t help you. And if Anne asks you to, you’ll have to do it. So it seems to me that the only way to avoid being asked to go up against the syndicate is to let me deal with Anne.”