“I’m sorry.” I glanced at him, but his gaze never left the road. “I don’t think I’ve actually said that yet, but I’m sorry for…the way it happened. But none of that matters anymore. What matters is that for some reason, Eric Richard Hunter went home again, and we need to make sure he never leaves.”

I could see his building now, and for a second, I worried that I might be tracking the same cold trail that had led me there earlier—the pull of his spilled blood. But then I remembered that I’d destroyed what he left. And that the name pull Cam was tracking could only lead to the man himself.

Cam parked in the unlit lot behind Hunter’s building. As the engine cooled and ticked, he watched me in the last dying rays of light, painting his dashboard red. “Sorry isn’t good enough.”

“What?” I frowned, trying to ignore the discomfort buzzing beneath my skin, now that we were so close to the goal, yet not actively pursuing it. “Good enough for what?”

“Not good enough for me. Not good enough for us. For what we still have, even if you’re too damn stubborn to admit it. You owe us better than a half-assed apology, six years too late.”

“I owe you…?” My words expired on a cloud of disbelief.

“No, you owe us.”

Itching to get going, I pulled my 9mm from the holster and released the clip to check it, though I already knew it was full. “There is no us, Cam. Not anymore.”

“The hell there isn’t.” He twisted in his seat to face me. “You can keep saying that if you want. You might even convince Anne. But you’re not going to convince me, and you’re sure as hell not going to convince yourself. You’ve had years to forget about me and move on, but you haven’t done it.”

“Yes, I…”

“No, you haven’t!” he thundered. His anger seemed to echo in the confines of the car, and that time, I didn’t bother arguing. “If you had, this wouldn’t be so hard for you. And I can see that it’s hard. I don’t know why you’re still trying to push me away, but it obviously isn’t because you want to.”

My next breath hurt. It ached in my lungs, as if my heart was bruised. “You’re right,” I admitted, but the truth didn’t set me free. It felt like a whole new set of chains. “This isn’t how I want it, but this is how it has to be.”

“Why?” he demanded. “i>us.are you doing this? I need to know, Liv. You owe me that much.”

He was right. Hiding what I knew when I could just walk away from him was one thing, but now that we were stuck together? Keeping my secrets—this one, anyway—was too much for us both. “Fine. But it’s a little complicated, and we need to move on Hunter now.” Before the buzzing beneath my skin ushered in full-scale resistance pain. Before Hunter stepped through a shadow and we lost his trail again.

“You swear?” Cam wasn’t happy, but was obviously willing to delay full satisfaction if he had my word.

“On my life. When this is over, I’ll explain why I left. Why I had to.”

“Fine. For now. But don’t think you can just disappear on me again. I know how to find you, and there’s nothing stopping me from showing up everywhere you go, until you tell me what I want to know.”

Actually, Cavazos would have been happy to stop Cam from showing up everywhere I went. But that was one secret I couldn’t give up. What little self-respect I still had would bleed into humiliation if Cam found out I was bound to Ruben. I didn’t want him to know what I’d agreed to. I didn’t want him to know about the things I couldn’t say no to, or how much worse it would be if—when—I couldn’t fulfill my contract.

I didn’t want him to know that the words on my back were just that: words. An ideal I’d failed to live up to.

“Are you ready?” I asked, one hand on the door handle. He nodded stiffly, and I pushed the door open and stepped into the parking lot. It wasn’t fully dark yet, which meant my gun would have to stay holstered for the moment. People on the west side almost never spoke to the police, but their silence wasn’t my license for carelessness.

Cam followed me across the lot and through the rear door, which opened into the opposite end of the long, dark hallway we’d entered from the front earlier. After a second to check the pull from Hunter’s blood, I pointed to the rear staircase with my brows raised in question. Cam nodded, confirming that the target’s name was pulling him upstairs, too.

We took the steps quickly and quietly, and I let him lead. This was his neighborhood and the residents would be less likely to interfere with or report us if they recognized him. But both the stairs and the hallway were deserted, either because it was dinnertime, or because the occupants sensed that something was going down. TV applause and canned laughter rang out from behind some of the doors, and muffled conversation from others, but no one came out to investigate our soft footsteps.

On either side of Hunter’s door, we drew our guns, and I attached the silencer Cam had lent me. A seam of light showed around three sides of the frame—it was still broken from when Cam had kicked it in. I heard movement from inside. A scrape of something against the floor. Light footsteps. A quiet curse.

Hunter was alone, and he wasn’t happy.

I lifted one brow at Cam, and he nodded. So I knocked on the door frame.

Silence from inside. Then two more footsteps, and the floor creaked. I could practically hear his heart beating. His brain racing. Should he answer? Or just wait? Would he have time to go out the fire escae? Or simply step into a shadow and disappear?