Or, if her binding to Tower was extraordinarily strong, trying to follow both conflicting bindings would have killed her.

We’d been playing nice, trying not to put her under conflicting orders, but Tower never plays nice. If he ordered her to take th child and she had no conflicting directive, she’d have no choice but to do what he wanted.

“Call her!” Anne demanded, gesturing to the phone I still held in my lap. “Get that bitch back here with my baby!”

Speechless, I could only nod and finish dialing. A second later, Kori’s computer-voiced message system picked up, inviting me to leave a message. So I did.

“Korinne, where are you?” I said into the phone, and Anne’s shadowed face gaped at me. I’d considered ranting and screaming like she probably wanted me to, but pissing off the woman who had her daughter—at least, I hoped Kori still had Hadley—seemed stupid at best. “You can still fix this, Kori. You can bring her back. You still have time to do the right thing….”

“Give me the phone,” Anne demanded, and I started to pull my cell away from her until I realized what she was doing—pulling on strings we should have pulled in the first place.

I handed her my phone and she practically shouted into it. “Korinne, it’s Anne. I need you to—” Then she screamed in rage and frustration and flipped the phone closed. The machine had hung up on her.

A single heartbeat later, she flipped the phone open again and hit Redial, and this time she was talking before the beep even faded from my ears. “Kori, it’s Anne. Will you please bring my daughter back, unharmed? Immediately,” she added as an afterthought. Then she slammed the phone closed and dropped it into my lap.

Anne stood, pacing furiously in front of me.

“You have to calm down,” I said, trying to tug her back onto the couch, but she dodged my reach as if my hands were on fire. “Give her a chance to listen to the message. You have to believe that if she had any other choice, she wouldn’t have done this.”

“No, I don’t have to believe that.” Anne spoke through clenched teeth, and I was sure that if her face weren’t layered by thick shadows, her cheeks would have been flushed red with fury and fear. “What I have to believe is that Korinne stole my child. My daughter is out there somewhere, with people she doesn’t know, in a place she’s never been. I don’t know if they’re hurting her, and if they are, there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I don’t know if she’s cold, or in the dark, or all alone, or in pain. She’s probably crying, calling for me, and I’m not there, and she doesn’t know why.”

“Anne, it’s going to be okay.” That was a lie, and we both knew it, but that lie was all I had to offer her, and I’d never felt so helpless in my entire life.

Anne turned on me, fists clenched in shadows at her sides. “No, it is not okay. It may never be okay again. I don’t know what they’ve told her. What if they told her I don’t want her anymore? What if they told her this is because of something she did? Some people are monsters, Cam. We both know that, but I’ve spent the last few years telling her there’s no such thing as monsters so she can sleep at night, and now Kori, and Tower, and some husband-murdering bastard have made a liar out of me, and even when I get Hadley back, she’s never going to trust me s, her #8221;

She sucked in a deep breath, then more words fell from her mouth before I could interrupt. “My only function in this whole world is to protect that little girl. It’s part job, part moral mandate and part intrinsic maternal urge I never expected and could never even begin to explain. I’m supposed to protect her, and I failed, and she could be dead or dying, or just scared to death, and I can’t help her!”

Her tears were flowing freely now, and each breath was a hiccuping sob. I tried to pull her close, but she backed out of reach again and banged her hip on an end table. “No. Don’t touch me. I don’t want your sympathy or your pity. This is your fault, Cam, and you will help me fix it.” She scrubbed her cheeks with the palms of both hands, then stood straight to wag one finger at me like my grandmother had done all my life. “So you…get Kori back here, and you make sure she has Hadley with her. Or I swear on my own soul, Cam Caballero, I will kill you and go after her myself.”

Twenty-Two

Cam was sitting on the couch in the dark when I opened the door, hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his head hanging low. He looked up when a slice of light from outside fell over him, and my first thought was that he’d aged ten years in the half hour since he’d walked into the shadows with Kori.

If she weren’t dead yet, I’d kill her myself for what she’d done, not just to Anne and Hadley, but to Cameron, too. And to me by extension.

“Any news?” I asked, when I’d closed and locked the door.

“I left Kori two messages—the second much angrier and more demanding than the first—and Anne left one of her own, outright asking her to bring Hadley back, but Kori hasn’t responded. I don’t know if she’s even heard them yet.”

I flipped the switch to the left of the door and light from overhead flooded the living room as I set my bags on the floor. “How’s Anne?”

For a second, Cam just blinked at me, clearly trying to decide how to say something I wasn’t going to want to hear. Then he stood and grabbed the duffel I’d filled with food from his apartment. “I…um…” He set the bag on the table and started pulling out boxes of toaster pastries and mac and cheese Hadley wasn’t there to eat. “I had to kind of…sedate her.”