“Or basic housekeeping,” Liv added, as I pressed the second wad of paper towels to the back of her arm and reached for the duct tape with my free hand. We’d used Hunter’s entire supply of bleach that afternoon, and so far, we’d found nothing else capable of destroying blood, other than a box of matches in one of the kitchen drawers.

“I have emergency supplies in my trunk.” Using my teeth, I tore off a length of gray tape and dropped the roll on the table, then wound the tape around her upper arm, careful not to let the bandages slide out of place. It didn’t have to be perfect. It just had to keep her from dripping blood until I could get her back to my apartment.

Duct tape and paper towels. No one who has any idea what can be done with a viable od sample would ever keep an apartment so empty of supplies. And if Liv were right about the fading power in his blood, something really strange was going on.

“Okay.” I stood while she examined the makeshift bandage. “I’m gonna grab the stuff from my trunk. Could you gather up everything you bled on and throw it in the tub?”

“Sure,” she said, and when I started to leave, she grabbed my arm. “Thanks, Cam.” She looked as if she wanted to say more, but when nothing else came out, I shrugged.

“You got lucky. It’s barely gonna scar.”

I jogged down the stairs and into the parking lot, where I grabbed the plastic tub of emergency supplies from my trunk. On the way through Hunter’s hallway again, I listened for any unusual noises—or any unusual silences—from the other apartments, but everything sounded pretty normal. People watching TV. The soft buzz of conversations I couldn’t quite make out. The occasional shout from a fighting couple.

It was kind of disturbing to realize we could commit murder without even bothering the neighbors who shared the victim’s walls.

In the apartment, I pushed Hunter’s broken front door shut and shoved an end table in front of it to keep it closed. “Liv?”

“In here,” she called from the bedroom. I glanced into the bathroom on the way and saw that she’d thrown the used bandages and discarded tissues into the tub, along with her own bloodied shirt.

I stopped in the doorway to find her kneeling next to the body, only her head and bare shoulders visible over the bed between us, and for a moment, my breath froze in my throat. I hadn’t seen anything more intimate than her forearm in six years, and now she’d taken her shirt off in front of me twice in twenty-four hours.

With my next breath—a conscious effort—I set down the supply box and pulled my T-shirt over my head. It would be huge on her, but that was better than nothing, at least in public. “Here.” I held the shirt out and she stood, and I tried not to stare.

Her eyes widened, and she stared, and I couldn’t resist a grin, in spite of the circumstances. “What?” I knew what she was looking at, but I wanted to hear her say it.

“You’ve…um…changed.” She took the shirt, but flinched when she tried to lift her arm over her head. “You got…bigger.”

I took my shirt back and gathered the material, then slid the sleeve over her injured arm, acutely aware that very little stood between us now. “As it turns out, tracking is kind of a worthless skill, if you can’t bring down the target.”

“So you trained.” She slid her other arm through the second sleeve, and watched me for a moment over the material sagging between us. “Like a soldier.”

“Yeah.” Only I didn’t believe in the war.

I tugged the shirt over her head carefully, then let my fingers trail slowly over her ribs and the hollows of her waist along with the material, waiting—fully expecting—for her to yell at me, or step out of reach.

Instead, she closed er eyes and exhaled slowly, and only met my gaze again when my hands rested on her hips. Her mouth was open, as if she wanted to say something, and I wanted to kiss her to show her that sometimes you don’t need words. Sometimes they only get in the way, and you end up talking yourself out of things you need. People you want.

She inhaled, and her warm hand found my chest and trailed toward my stomach, and I almost forgot we were supposed to be fleeing the scene of a crime.

Then she blinked and snatched her hand away, and though I knew it was for the best—this wasn’t the time—I missed both the warmth of her hand and the heat in her gaze.

Liv turned around, and the moment was over, and I knew that if I called her on it, she’d deny that moment ever existed. But she’d be lying. She’d been lying for six years, and that’s why I hadn’t given up on her. Why I couldn’t give up on her, even when she was with someone else, and I was with someone else. I couldn’t give up because I could still feel her.

All I had to do was think of her name—her real, full name, which no one else in the world knew—and I could feel her, all the way across the city. Hell, I could feel her all the way across the state. I couldn’t tell what she was doing—tracking didn’t work like that—and with anyone else, someone I didn’t know as well as I knew Liv, I wouldn’t have gotten anything more from the pull of her name than a direction.

But with Liv, it was different. I knew her name, and I knew her, and when I thought of her, sometimes I could feel what she was feeling. And all too often, that was pain. Physical pain. Emotional pain. Anger. Humiliation and degradation. Olivia wasn’t happy, and maybe it was egotistical of me to think that I could fix that—that being with me again would make her happy like we used to be happy—but ego or not, it sometimes took every single ounce of self-control I could muster to keep from tracking her and killing whoever was hurting her. Whoever was making her hate herself.