“So…how long have you been bound?” Cam asked, when I motioned for him to take the next left.

My heart jumped so high I could practically taste it on the back of my tongue. “I told you, Cavazos doesn’t—”

“I meant Anne. How long have you and Anne been bound to the others?”

Oh. Yeah.

I tried to relax, but that was hard to do, considering I was clutching the bloody evidence from a murder scene, riding into the territory of a man who’d kill me as soon as look at me and sitting next to the man I’d thought I’d spend the rest of my life with. “Fifteen years. Since I was twelve.”

Cam whistled, as if he was impressed. Or horrified. “So, the whole time we were together, you were bound to your three best friends?”

“And vice versa.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“After high school, it didn’t seem to matter. We hardly saw one another.”

“Anne said it was an accident…?” he prompted, and I wondered how much else she’d told him.

“Yeah. We didn’t know what we were doing. Some guy at school made Anne cry, so Kori made him cry. Then we went back to Kori’s house to comfort Anne with junk food, and we wound up swearing lifelong loyalty and assistance instead.”

“How do you accidently sign and seal a lifelong binding?”

“We didn’t know it was a binding.” I twisted to half face him, and only then realized how comfortable that felt. How easy talking to him had become—again—as if we could just pick up right where we’d left off.

But we couldn’t. Ever. And forgetting that would get one of us killed.

“It was different then, you know?” I made myself stare out the window to avoid looking at him. “The revelation was still recent, and our parents hadn’t told us we were Skiled. They were afraid that if we knew, we’d be in danger. Turns out ignorance is more dangerous than the truth.”

“It usually is,” Cam said, and suddenly my throat felt thick. He was talking about his own ignorance, about all the things I still couldn’t—wouldn’t—tell him.

“We were just being kids. Best friends standing around the kitchen, making promises we probably never would have kept, just to make Anne smile. But then Kori’s little sister, Kenley, came in and overheard us, and she wanted to help. She said it wouldn’t be official unless we wrote it down.”

Cam’s brows rose halfway up his forehead, and he looked away from the road long enough to make me nervous. “Kenley Daniels was your Binder? Sixteen years ago?”

I nodded. “If we’d known that ran in her family—turns out her mother’s a Binder, too—we probably would have realized what she was doing, even if she didn’t.”

“Displaying the first instinctive manifestation of a very serious Skill?”

I couldn’t resist a smile. “Good guess.”

“How old was she?”

“Ten.”

“Damn. It doesn’t usually show up so early.”

“I know.” I’d met more than my share of Binders since that day fifteen years ago, and not one of them had displayed a stronger Skill or instinct than Kenley Daniels had at ten years old. Without even knowing what she was.

“So…she what? Scribbled a promise in crayon and told you to sign it?”

I laughed again, but more out of nerves than amusement. He wasn’t far off. “It was pink glitter pen, actually. And after we signed, she said it still didn’t feel right. She said it wouldn’t be ‘real’ unless we used blood.”

The four of us had been losing interest by then, but Kori had perked up when she realized that meant she’d get to use her knife. And I have to admit, I was curious—perhaps the beginnings of my own talent with blood.

“Oh, shit!” Cam glanced at me again, then back at the road. “Kenley’s a blood Binder? I thought she worked with signatures….”

“Actually, it turns out she’s a double threat.”

Blood binding was a much rarer Skill than name binding—binding a written oath with a signature—and those who could do both were rarer still. And someone with the power to do both at such a young age was almost unheard of.

“So, I’m guessing that contract is ironclad…?” Cam said, flicking on his turn signal when I pointed toward a side street ahead.

“Yeah. And what’s worse is that she had plenty of Skill, but no training. It was really more an oath than a contract. Just a promise that we would help one another whenever asked. There was no expiration date, no stipulations and no exceptions. There weren’t even enough words to form a decent loophole.”

“Why ddn’t you just burn it?”

Burning it to ashes was the only surefire way to destroy a blood-sealed contract, which is why certain notorious crime lords had started sealing their employee bindings in the flesh—literally—with tattoo marks as a fail-safe in case the corresponding written contract was destroyed. Fortunately, Kenley hadn’t foreseen that advancement. I wasn’t even sure she was capable of flesh binding, not that any of us knew what that was fifteen years ago. Her first sealed contract could easily be destroyed—if it could be found.

“By the time we realized what we’d done—the first time Kori’s grandmother had to pick her up from the police station—the oath was gone. We looked everywhere. Our parents got together and tore the Danielses’ house apart, and when it wasn’t there, they searched their own houses. But we never found so much as a scrap of powder-blue paper or pink glitter pen.”