What did it matter? I winced at the pain in my arm as I unhooked my bra, then dropped it into the tub. We couldn’t be with each other anyway, so we were both better off not looking at what we couldn’t have. But knowing that didn’t make his ironclad restraint any easier to take.

I took off my boots, then unbuttoned my jeans and pushed them to the floor one-handed, while metal scraped metal from down the hall—Cam sorting through the clothes hanging in his closet, by my best guess. I emptied the contents of my pockets—a convenience-store receipt and a handful of change—onto the counter, then dropped my pants into the tub. What a shame. They were my favorite pair.

Fortunately, my underwear looked “uncompromised.”

I gave my left side a once-over with one of the wipes, then dropped it into the tub, too.

The hangers went still, and a moment later, Cam’s footsteps echoed from the hall. Trying to ignore the throbbing in my arm, I sat, arms crossed over my chest, legs crossed in a vain attempt to lookmal, while sitting on a toilet in my underwear. And as he rounded the corner into the bathroom, wearing a clean shirt and critically eyeing the one he carried, I glanced down at myself self-consciously and noticed the black ring tattooed on my left thigh.

Shit!

As he looked up, I recrossed my legs in the other direction, covering the tattoo. My heart raced from the near-catastrophe. He couldn’t know. Ever. I’d rather cut the mark out of my own skin than ever let Cam know I was bound to Ruben Cavazos.

“Van left these here after she…” Cam blinked, and his next words were lost to us both as he stared. He hadn’t seen the mark, but he was seeing everything else. Finally.

For both of our sakes, I shouldn’t have let him look. And I certainly shouldn’t have enjoyed letting him look. But mistakes are just another kind of choice, and saddled with two bindings, I’d had precious few choices lately. So I let him look, for several long seconds.

“After she…?” I prompted finally, fighting a smile at his reaction, and at the fact that I could still provoke it.

Cam blinked again, and I could practically see the return of upper-level reasoning as blood was diverted back into his head from…wherever else it had been. “After she got her own place,” he finished, glancing at the clothes he held to avoid looking at me. “You guys are about the same height, so this should work until you can grab a change from home.”

And there was nothing stopping me from doing that. I could throw on Van’s clothes and make Cam take me back to my office right then. I could even explain why I’d left him in the car. But I didn’t want to go. Once this was over, I’d have to leave him again, but until then, I had a justifiable excuse for hanging around. And a dark spot of guilt on my soul for not entirely hating the circumstances that had brought us together.

“Here.” Cam handed me a black baby-doll-style T-shirt. On the front was a beautifully detailed golden dragon clutching a human skull with one clawed foot. The crinkled, gauzy black skirt was ankle length, and heavier than it looked. It wasn’t something I would ever have bought for myself, but I couldn’t afford to be choosy, considering the alternative.

But there was no bra.

“Thanks.”

When he turned to give me privacy—which I would have found pointless, if not for the mark on my thigh—I stepped into the skirt first and didn’t fully relax until it was tied at my waist, my secret safely hidden.

“Okay, assuming you’re right about these transfusions, where’s Hunter getting the blood?” Cam asked, as I carefully pulled the shirt over my head.

“I don’t know. But the implications of this are beyond terrifying.” I tugged the shirt into place, trying to ignore the pain reawakening in my arm, then tapped him on the shoulder. Cam turned and met my gaze in the mirror as I ran my hands through my hair, trying not to look at the rest of me. Blood loss and exhaustion were not good looks for me. “I mean, if the resources are there, men like Hunter—or anyone else—could be Travelers one day, Blinders the next and Seers the day after that. Men like Tower could hirne thug and get a whole series of Skill sets. Maybe even more than one at a time. Though I’m not sure how that would work.”

I wasn’t sure how any of it would work, but the concept alone was staggering. It was world-changing. And if the government couldn’t even officially recognize the existence of Skills, it would never be able to regulate the renting of them.

Rented Skills, like everything else private industry couldn’t legally provide, would be offered up to the black market on a silver platter. And presumably, those who could provide the rarer Skills—Seers, Bleeders and Jammers—and those with extraordinary ability in any of the more common Skill sets would be in high demand.

And worth even more to the syndicates than they already were.

“Okay, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s clean this mess up, then we can figure out our next move.” Cam doused the contents of the tub with rubbing alcohol while I took a match from the box. When he was done, I lit the match and tossed it onto the pile.

Flames erupted immediately, and the fire burned hot and fast. Cam flipped on the ceiling vent to suck out the smoke, and when the flames started to threaten the shower curtain, I pulled the plastic liner out of reach. Thank goodness for porcelain tubs—fiberglass would have burned right along with the clothing and bandages we needed to destroy.

When we were sure all the blood was destroyed, Cam turned on the water and aimed the handheld shower head at the base of the flames. The blaze was out in seconds, leaving only the soggy, charred rubble in the tub and another layer of smoke on the ceiling—a common sight in most Skilled households.