And suddenly I wanted to throw up.

“How old were you?” I whispered, as Van lowered both her leg and her skirt.

“Fifteen.”

I could practically taste vomit at the back of my throat. “That can’t be right.” I took another sip, but alcohol couldn’t help me make sense of something that just didn’t add up. “Cavazos won’t sign underage girls. It’s too much of a liability.”

“Evidently the profit outweighs the risk,” Cam said, blatant disgust dulling the usual shine in his eyes.

I shook my head. “No. I know he doesn’t take them that young. Did you tell him how old you were?”

Van stared at me as if I’d just lapsed into nonsense. “I never even saw him. Not while I was conscious, anyway. I was just one of dozens of girls, probably nothing more than names and numbers on a profit-and-loss statement to him.”

“If he’d known, he would have fixed it.” I had to believe that. Cavazos was an abusive, lying, murdering bastard. I’d seen him hit his wife. I’d seen him shoot a trespasser through the forehead in the middle of his living room, then complain about the stain on the carpet. He’d done everything but violate our contract to humiliate me. To break me. But he wouldn’t hurt a kid. He wouldn’t even let someone else hurt a kid. That was the only marginally human trait I’d been able to find in him, and I needed to be able to believe in that. Otherwise, I’d lose my mind the next time he touched me. I’d just fall right over the edge of sanity into oblivion.

“Liv, if he didn’t know, it’s because he didn’t want to know,” Cam insisted. “His men can’t lie to him, right?”

I started to nod, then reconsidered. “Well, there are certain exceptions, for plausible deniability…”

“Exactly.” He opened another beer for himself and frowned at me over the bottle. “Why are you so sure he’d care, even if he knew?”

“Because he has a kid of his own. A daughter.” I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead, battling a stress headache strong enough to rival the typical breach-of-contract pain. “I’ve seen him with her. He may be the scum of the earth in every other respect, but he’s a good father. As good a father as a felon can be, anyway.”

“Charles Manson had kids, too.” Van pushed her empty bottle across the counter toward Cam, who dropped it into the trash, then opened the fridge for more.

After several more sips from my own bottle, my stomach had mostly settled, and I turned to Van. “You were bound by force. That shouldn’t have been possible. Not for the long term, anyway.”

“What do you mean? Why not?”

And that’s when I realized how viciously unfair her situation truly had been. She wasn’t Skilled. Her family wasn’t Skilled. So she’d grown up with even less insight into the way the world really worked than I’d had, and clearly, even after years spent bound to first one syndicate, then the other, she still didn’t fully understand the chains she was tangled up in.

“How much do you know about bindings, Van?” I asked. She frowned at me, then glanced at Cam, and when he nodded, I realized what she was doing—looking to him, her superior in the organization, for guidance on what she should and shouldn’t say in a situation that wasn’t strictly governed by the mark on her arm.

“I know what I can and can’t do, based on my mark. Though honestly, some of that comes from trial and error.” She shrugged, and I nodded. That was typical. “And I know what I have to do, to fulfill my contract.”

“Okay, but beyond your specific case, how much do you know about the binding process in general? About how it works?”

“Only what Cam’s told me.”

“Which isn’t much,” he admitted. Because he wouldn’t be allowed to say anything that might scare her away from extending her contract, whenever it came up for renewal—also typical.

Fortunately, I had no such restrictions.

“Okay, here we go—a crash course in binding.” I set her bag on the floor and took the stool next to her. “You know you can be bound to anyone, right?” I began, and she nodded hesitantly. “All it takes is an oath and a seal. Bindings can be as simple as a pinky promise between classmates, or as complicated as a two-hundred-page contract negotiated for a year by attorneys on both sides and eventually sealed by the best binder in the country. Regardless, the key ingredients remain the same—an oath and a seal.”

“The oath, I got,” Van said, lifting her beer for another swig. “What’s the seal?”

“The seal is what makes a binding final and official. Think of it like one of those fancy wax impressions they used to use to seal documents, a couple hundred years ago. It’s the metaphysical version of that. And only a Binder can seal a binding, usually by signing it or stamping it with blood. Or both.”

“So, those kids with the pinky promise…” She held up one hooked finger to demonstrate. “One of them would have to be a Binder?”

“In that scenario, yes. Because there are no written words or blood, one of the kids would have to actually be a Binder for the promise to hold. Though it’s really rare for Binders that young to even know their Skill yet. That was just an illustration.”

Van nodded. “I’m with you so far.”

“Good. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. I know there are probably times when you feel…enslaved. Times when you physically can’t say no, even when it kills some vital part of you to just…let horrible things happen.”