Liv pulled the silencer from her pocket, wincing at the movement from her injured arm as she wiped it clean, still staring at the photo she’d laid on the table. When she finished, she set the silencer down and grabbed the picture again, and a second later she turned to me, sudden excitement firing like sparks in her eyes. “She isn’t Shen’s!”

“What?” I set my clean silencer down and frowned at the photo she held up.

“Hadley isn’t Shen’s daughter. Not biologically. She can’t be. Look, there isn’t a drop of Asian blood in her!”

Reluctantly, I glanced at the photo one more time—then couldn’t look away. Liv was right. Hadley had curly brown hair and deep blue eyes. But… “That might not mean anything. Genes are complicated. I’ve seen a bunch of kids who look nothing like their parents.” And that was the case here. It had to be, because if Hadley wasn’t Shen’s daughter…

No. I did the math in my head, my heart pounding so hard it echoed in my ears.

Hadley was five. I wasn’t sure how close she was to turning six, but either way, if Anne wasn’t already pregnant at the party—the one six years ago; the night Liv left me and never looked back—then she got pregnant very soon afterward. Maybe even that very night…

No.

No.

I’d know if I had a kid. Anne would have told me. She would never have hidden something like that from me, even knowow I felt about Liv.

No!

“We have to get out of here.” I plucked the picture from the table and slid it into my own pocket, then shoved a plastic canister of antibacterial wet wipes at Liv. “Wipe down the bathroom. Faucets, toilet, sink. Anything either of us might have touched. I’ll be there in a minute with the alcohol.”

Olivia looked at me as if I had brain damage and it might be contagious. But she took the wipes. While she worked on the bathroom, I did a quick, thorough job on the kitchen and the table where we’d worked on Liv’s arm. Then I dumped everything that had her blood on it in the tub and doused it with alcohol, which would destroy the blood as well as fuel the flames. Finally, I smashed the smoke alarm with one fist. Then I lit a match.

It was a brief, beautiful blaze of glory, and once I was sure the blood couldn’t be identified by the police or tracked, I turned on the shower to put out the flames. Then I dropped Hunter’s laptop into my plastic tub and followed Liv out of the building. But I didn’t relax enough to breathe normally until we pulled out of the parking lot, unassailed by police, local criminal elements or neighborhood vigilante mobs.

Two blocks away, I made the call from a pay phone—a dying resource, still favored by criminals everywhere. I kept it quick and simple: Hunter’s address and apartment number. When the police arrived, they’d find the body and do the cleanup we hadn’t bothered with. We didn’t care if they ID’d him, and with any luck, we hadn’t left any viable traces of ourselves for them to find. And if anyone had seen us, our descriptions would be reported to Tower’s men—de facto neighborhood security—rather than the police.

Behind the wheel again, I glanced at Liv. “How’s your arm?”

She lifted her elbow and glanced at the makeshift bandage in the glow from a passing streetlamp as I turned left onto a side street. “Starting to bleed through.”

“I have real bandages at home. We’re only a couple of minutes away.”

“I have everything I need at my office.”

But I didn’t want to take her back to the south fork, especially her office, because now that we’d killed Shen’s murderer, Liv was no longer being compelled to work with me. She could kick me out of her office—and out of her life—whenever she wanted, and I couldn’t let that happen again.

“My place is closer,” I pointed out, using logic to justify an admittedly selfish desire.

Liv sighed. Then, finally, she nodded. “But only because I’ll be dripping blood all over your car by the time we get to the south fork.” She leaned to the left and dug her cell phone from her pocket. “I’m going to call Anne. Want me to put her on speakerphone?”

No. Because Liv would ask her about Hadley’s father, and my worst fear in the world at that moment was finding out that I was—maybe—the father of Anne’s child. In front of Olivia. That potential complication would put a serious crimp in my efforts to stay in Liv’s life, and she should hear it from me.

But not now, when there was so much else to worryabout.

“Sure.” The most gutless word in the English language. Consent with no real feeling. The antithesis of certainty and determination. But if Liv noticed my lack of enthusiasm, I couldn’t tell. She scrolled through the recent calls on her phone and pressed a button, and a moment later, the electronic, bleating ring echoed in the confines of my car and the even tighter space inside my skull.

The ringing stopped with a soft click. “Hello? Olivia?” Anne said over the speaker.

“Yeah, it’s me. Cam’s here, too.” Liv glanced at me, but I couldn’t meet her gaze. Not knowing what she was about to find out. “We got him. Hunter’s dead.”

Anne burst into tears, sobbing and sniffling over the phone. “Thank you. Thank you both so much….” Another wet sniffle. “Maybe I can sleep, now that it’s all over.”

Liv met my gaze in the rearview mirror, and her disbelief echoed my own. “Annika…” she began, as I braked for a stoplight. “I don’t think this is the end of it.”