In the end, when my restraint wavered, the only thing that kept me away from her was knowing that she’d hate me for interfering. For wounding her self-respect by ending whatever abuse she couldn’t—or for some reason wouldn’t—put an end to. Even if it killed me to let her suffer.

In Hunter’s room, Liv knelt next to the body again, putting a clear end to whatever had almost happened between us. “I can’t figure this out.” She scowled at Hunter, as if he might open his eyes and submit to questioning. “He’s not Skilled. There’s no trace of it in his body. But the blood in my pocket is still humming with power—a low level, like his bloodline is diluted. Then there’s the sample Anne brought us—that one felt as Skilled as your blood. He was a shadow-walker. And now he’s not. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, staring at him isn’t going to change that. Come on, we need to get going. Find something to wipe down the guns with. And put these on.” I reached into the supply box and tossed her a set of surgical gloves, then I pulled on a pair of my own and scanned the wall opposite the bed. There it was, just above elbow height on me—a small round hole in the Sheetrock. It would have been just below shoulder height on Liv. In the center was the slug, smashed flat from impact with the fire walleight="0%">

I took the folding knife from my pocket and flipped it open, then carved the bullet out of the wall, along with a two-inch-wide disk of the surrounding Sheetrock. Then I soaked the resulting hole with the spray bottle of bleach solution from my box of tricks, just to be safe.

“Where’s your gun?” I turned, expecting to find Liv wiping down the pistol I’d lent her—mine were unregistered, filed free of serial numbers and equipped with silencers; an advantage of working for the syndicate—but she still knelt on the floor next to Hunter’s body. “Liv, we have to get out of here before the cops show up or you start bleeding through your bandages.” Or worse.

She didn’t even look up. “His cell’s in his back pocket. We need to know who he’s been talking to, if we’re going to find out who’s behind the hit.”

I twisted the Sheetrock and smashed the bullet into a paper towel and dropped the tiny, incriminating bundle into the plastic tub. Then I rounded the bed into the narrow space Liv had wedged herself into. But I stopped cold when I saw what she held between gloved fingers.

“It was with his phone.” She lifted the photograph for me to see, but I pushed her hand away. I didn’t want to see the blue-eyed, dark-haired little girl smiling at me from some happy moment frozen in time. And I certainly didn’t want to dwell on the fact that I’d killed her father—even if he was a murderer.

“Don’t think about it.” I reached down to help Liv up by her good arm. “He couldn’t have been much of a father—there’s no sign that a kid’s ever even been here. He probably hardly ever saw her.”

“She’s not his,” Liv said, and I recognized both the angry set of her jaw and the stunned distance in her eyes. “This is Hadley.”

“What? How do you know?”

She flipped the picture over and showed me the back, which read Hadley, Kindergarten Class Photo. “It’s Anne’s handwriting, Cam. Anne wasn’t the target, and neither was Shen. The bastard was after their daughter.”

My denial surfaced as confusion, and suddenly ignorance seemed like a blessedly blissful state. “Why the hell would Hunter want to kill a five-year-old?”

“Because that’s what your boss paid him to do.”

I ground my teeth over yet another reminder that she considered me a part of the problem. “You’re assuming Hunter was hired by Tower himself?”

Liv’s brows shot halfway up her forehead. “Hell yeah, I’m assuming it, and until we come up with some reason to discount that theory, I’m going to keep assuming it, because Tower’s at the top of the pyramid. No one beneath him would spend this much money and order a hit on a five-year-old—a PR nightmare, even if it only got around by word of mouth—without his blessing. And that’s not all. Look at this.” She slid the photo into her own back pocket and dropped into a squat next to the body.

I glanced at the man I’d killed, then looked away again. Yes, he was a murderer, and yes, I’d probably saved Liv’s life by tak">

“What am I supposed to be looking at, exactly?”

Liv huffed in exasperation, then grabbed Hunter’s limp right wrist and pulled his arm up as far as it would go without actually moving the body. I bent for a closer look and finally saw what she was getting at, there in the crook of his elbow.

“Track marks.”

“Fresh track marks,” she corrected.

“Some of them, yeah.” I shrugged. “So he was a junkie.” I rounded the corner of the bed and picked up my tub of supplies.

She followed me into the living room and when I shoved a clean shop towel into her gloved hand, she started wiping down her gun at the table. But a minute later, she set the gun down next to the one I’d cleaned and pulled the photo from her pocket. “Why would anyone want to kill a five-year-old?”

“Silencer, too,” I said, trying not to think about the little girl who could have died. Who could still die if Tower sent someone else after her. I needed to think about cleaning up our current mess and getting us both the hell out of there. We couldn’t be caught with guns the cops could match to bullets from Hunter’s body, so the guns would have to stay at the scene—without our fingerprints. Mine weren’t on file—yet—but hers would be, because she’d worked for a licensed bail bondsman.