“What…?” Anne glanced from me to Cam, and I looked up to see him leaning with both elbows on his knees, shaking his head slowly. He’d already deduced what I couldn’t say. “What the hell is going on here, Olivia?” Anne demanded.

I couldn’t answer her, but before that became an issue, Cam spoke up with another question I couldn’t answer.

“You’re serious? Hadley is Cavazos’s illegitimate son?” Another painful pause. “That means that Noelle…?”

I shrugged. “Well, obviously Hadley isn’t a boy, but beyond that, I can’t…” Another shrug, and I had to let them draw their own conclusions. “I’m sorry, Anne. I’m contractually prohibited from discussing most of this.”

“Fortunately, I’m not.” Cam sighed and twisted on the couch to fully face her. “Liv’s spent the last year and a half trying to track Ruben Cavazos’s illegitimate son, born by a mistress he had…” Cam’s eyes closed as another piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Damn. Eight years ago, or so. That makes sense now.”

Scary, beyond-coincidental sense. How much of this had Elle known?

“And you’re saying Noelle was this mistress?” Anne said, already shaking her head in denial of what none of us wanted to believe. “But why would he think Hadley’s a boy?”

Since I couldn’t actually answer that, I lifted Anne’s arm by her elbow, placing the photo she still held back at eye level. Cam scooted closer to her so he could see it, and another layer of confusion melted away.

“Because all he had to go on was this picture, and you have to admit, dressed in blue and wearing a baseball cap, she looks like a little boy. And Noelle was obviously in no rush to correct that assumption. If she even brought him the picture in person?” He glanced at me in question, but I couldn’t comment, even though his guess was spot on. She’d sent the picture in an envelope with no return address, accompanied only by a note card with one word handwritten on it. Yours.

Anne dropped the picture, and it landed facedown in her lap. “You’re telling me that my daughter’s biological father is Ruben fucking Cavazos, whose mortal enemy has kidnapped the daughter he doesn’t even know he has?”

“I’m not telling you anything. Because I can’t. I can make conjecture about what Elle might have done, but I can’t discuss anything Ruben told me. However, what I can say—since it doesn’t fall under the terms of my contract with her husband—is that Michaela Cavazos had her husband’s former mistress killed six years ago and was not happy to learn that said mistress might have—” I hesitated, tiptoeing carefully around verbal landmines. “—left a part of herself out there.”

“Shit.” Anne’s breathing quickened, and was starting to sound a little wheezy. “Shit, shit, shit!”

“Anne…” Cam said, in a low, soothing voice.

“What am I going to do? What the hell am I going to do now?” She turned on me and grabbed my arm before I even saw her hand move. “You can’t tell him. Liv, you can’t tell him about Hadley.”

“I have to tell him. And I have to tell him very soon.” My contract was very specific on that point.

“No!” Anne’s grip on my arm tightened painfully. “Elle hid her for a reason, and it’s obvious now that that reason was Ruben Cavazos! She went to so much trouble to protect her daughter, and you can’t just throw that away. You can’t just hand Hadley over to him!”

“Anne, think about the facts.” I pulled my arm gently from her terrified grip. “If she was afraid of Ruben, she never would have sent that picture. But she knew what I know—he may be a soul-rotting bastard in nearly every other aspect of life, but he would never hurt a kid. Especially his own kid. And she obviously thought he should at least know he was a father. Hadley was his first.” I paused a moment to let that sink in, then continued. “Noelle was probably hiding her daughter from Michaela. Not from Ruben.”

“Michaela Cavazos—the woman who had Noelle murdered? If you give Hadley to them, she’ll have her killed, too!”

“No.” I squeezed her hand, trying to pass along some of my own certainty. “He would never let that happen.” Even if he decided not to bring an illegitimate child into his house, he would never let Meika hurt her. “And the truth is that we need him to get Hadley back. He has the resources we need to get past Tower’s defenses.”

“That won’t happen without a fight,” Cam mumbled, as if withholding volume would make the words any less true.

“Even if he does fight for her—even if he can get her out of there intact—he won’t give her back to me, Olivia! He’ll take her, and I’ll never see her again, and she won’t be any better off with him than she is with Tower.”

“Okay, you have to calm down.” I held her hand tightly when she tried to pull away. “First of all, that’s not true. Ruben doesn’t want to lock her up and take her blood. Hell, we don’t know that he wants her at all. He’s expecting a son. He already has a legitimate daughter, and I don’t know if he’ll consider another one worth the fight, considering the monumental bitch-fit Meika’s going to throw when she finds out. So…there’s a chance he’ll let you keep her.”

Or…he might ship her off to a boarding school, from where he could control her, but never see her….