“Cam, I don’t know what to do. I can’t protect her. Liv, I need your help!”

“I know. Give me a minute….” I leaned with my elbows on my desk, forehead in my hands, thinking aloud. “Do they have her blood?”

“No,” Anne said, without hesitation. “There’s no way they could. We’ve burned every drop she’s ever spilled.”

“’Cept the drops in the trash,” a young voice said, and chills shot up my spine so fast I broke out in goose bumps all over.

“What?” Anne said, and again her mother reminded her to watch the road.

“I’m sorry, we forgot!” the child howled, then burst into sobs. “I fell and cut my knee yesterday. Daddy burned the tissues, but we…mighta forgot the Band-Aids. I think I threw them away.”

“Was there much blood?” I asked, holding my breath for her answer, and based on the silence in the car, I think they were all doing the same thing. But the child didn’t seem to know how to answer, so her mother rephrased my question.

“Hadley, honey, how many Band-Aids did it take?”

“Three!” she cried, half choking on her tears, and my sympathy for her was the only thing rivaling my fear and frustration at that moment. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to forget!”

“It’s okay, sweetie,” Anne said, and in the background, I could hear her parents comforting aloud.their granddaughter.

Cam looked as if he was holding back a string of profanities with sheer will. “I don’t suppose you know whether or not anyone actually found the blood, do you?” he asked, with more patience than I could have mustered.

“I have no clue,” Anne moaned miserably.

“Okay.” Another breath, while I waited for my thoughts to fall into some kind of coherent order. “We’ll have to assume they did, just to be safe. Which means they can track her. So we need to hide Hadley someplace where Tower can’t find her.”

“Is that even possible?” Anne asked.

Cam shook his head, though no one over the line could see it. “No. Short of putting her on a plane—and you can bet they’re watching the airport—there’s no way to get her out of tracking range fast enough for the Tracker to lose the pull of her blood, right?” He glanced at me with brows raised in question.

“Right.” Damn it. “Okay, then, what about a Jammer? Does anyone know a Jammer we can trust?” A good Jammer could block Hadley’s energy signature, preventing her from being tracked.

“No,” Anne said over the line. “I’ve never had use for one before.”

Cam scrubbed his face with both hands. “All the Jammers I know are loyal to Tower. If we hire one of them, we may as well hand her over to him ourselves. Not that we could actually afford a syndicate Jammer…”

And, naturally, all the Jammers I knew were bound to Cavazos.

I leaned back in my chair, eyes closed, searching the dark behind my eyelids for a stroke of brilliance, trying to ignore the certainty that the metaphorical lightbulb hanging over my head was surely sputtering its very last spark. Then, suddenly it flared to life so brightly I was nearly blinded. I sat up straight, hands flat on the desktop. “If we can’t put her somewhere he can’t find her, we’ll have to put her somewhere he can’t get to her.”

“Where’s that?” Anne asked, the first ribbon of hope in her voice battling a darker thread of skepticism.

“I’m not sure yet, but I have an idea.” I pushed my chair back, wishing there was room to pace in my office, so I could burn some of my nervous energy. “How far are you from the city?”

“Um…an hour?” Anne said.

I glanced at the clock on my computer screen. It was twelve-thirty. They’d be in town by 1:30 a.m.

“Okay, here’s what I want you to do. First, drop your parents off somewhere where they can take a cab or a bus home. They shouldn’t be in any danger so long as Hadley’s not with them, because she’s the one they’ll be tracking.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Anne said, “Okay, then what?”

“Then drive straight to Cam’s apartment. Do you know where that is?”

“No,” Anne said, so I listened while Cam recited his address and Anne asked her mothr to write it down. “But you said not to come to the city.”

“Change of plans.” I dug through my drawer for a spare box of 9mm shells. “Don’t worry, you won’t be there for long.”

We said goodbye and hung up, and Cam watched me expectantly from the couch. “Well?”

I pulled a spare clip from the bottom drawer and started loading it, in spite of the tug on my injured arm. “I know where they can stay. Where we all can stay. If we keep all the lights on, Tower’s men can’t get in through the shadows. And if my plan works out like I think it will, they won’t be able to get close enough to break in the traditional way.”

Cam’s brows rose halfway up his forehead. “Why do I get the feeling this plan is more dangerous than it is clever?”

“I’d call it a fifty-fifty mix of risk and genius.” I grinned as I forced the last shell into the extra clip. “You know how Cavazos is having me followed, and Tower’s men think I’m sleeping with the enemy, and Ruben wants me to stay away from you?”

“I don’t think I like where this is going…”