Oath Bound

“Eat something first,” Vanessa insisted, and before Kenley could object, Van was halfway to the kitchen in search of food.

I followed her, headed for the coffeepot, and my grandmother looked up from the stove when she saw me. “Kristopher, the knobs are missing.”

“Really?” I frowned down at the stove. “That’s weird.” We’d had to take the knobs off the day before, when she lit the fire under one gas burner, but forgot to put a pot over the flame and nearly caught the whole damn house on fire.

“What happened to them?”

“I dunno, Gran. Maybe Liv or Cam will track them for us.” Olivia and her boyfriend were both Trackers, but he worked mainly with names, while she worked with blood.

“Don’t get smart with me, Kristopher Daniels,” Gran snapped. “I’ll ground you till you’re twenty-five years old, and you can forget the senior prom.”

She’d lit the candles on my thirtieth birthday cake six months earlier, and I couldn’t even remember most of my senior prom. Which is how I know I probably enjoyed the hell out of it. Or maybe that was the after-party …

“I’m not getting smart, Gran.”

“Well, that’s the truth …” Kori mumbled beneath her breath as she walked past on her way to the fridge, and I ignored her.

“I’ll look into the missing knobs, I swear.”

“Do it now. I want to make some—” Gran’s scowl morphed into an instant smile when she noticed Vanessa taking the lid off a plastic container of cookies. “You two make such a cute couple.”

“Gran …” I started, but she slapped my arm, which was only a minor improvement over the way she used to slap the back of my head when I was twelve and the occasional—okay, frequent—profanity slipped out.

She’d given up smacking Kori for cussing when my sister was ten.

“Don’t give up on him just because he pretends to be emotionally unavailable, Vanessa,” Gran said, and I realized for the first time that she’d never forgotten Van’s name. Not even once. “He’s a slob and he leaves his towel on the bathroom floor, but he’s a pretty good boy.”

“No, I’m not.” I shook my head at Van. “I’m very, very bad.”

Vanessa laughed as she wrapped two cookies in a paper towel, then took them into the living room for Kenley, leaving me to explain things to my grandmother on my own. Again.

“Vanessa’s not my girlfriend, Gran. She’s with Kenley, remember?”

“Oh, please.” Gran huffed in exasperation. “Anyone can see how much she likes you.”

No one else could see any such thing. But trying to explain to Gran that Kenni and Vanessa were more than friends was like trying to explain … well, like trying to explain anything to Gran. Futile. We’d had a few temporary victories in the battle against Alzheimer’s but the backslides all but killed any real hope.

While Gran searched the kitchen drawers and cabinets for the missing stove knobs, Vanessa joined me again at the coffeepot with an empty mug of her own. “I’ve been meaning to ask you …” she said as she filled her mug. “Does your grandmother have a Skill? I’ve never seen her use it.”

“No, thank goodness.” I pulled the sugar bowl closer and stirred a spoonful into my coffee. “Alzheimer’s and Skills don’t mix well.” You can’t just take the knobs off a Skill to make sure it isn’t accidentally left running when the user forgets what year it is.

“I’m ready,” Kenni called from the living room, and I looked up to find her brushing cookie crumbs from her shirt while Kori slid a 9 mm into the holster beneath her left arm. Ian handed her a light jacket to hide the gun, just in case. His jacket was already in place, and if I didn’t already know where his own weapons were hidden, I’d never have known he had any.

“I’ll go.” I set my coffee on the counter, untouched. “You and Ian can stay.”

Kori frowned, always unhappy to be taken out of the action. “Why?”

“Because I’m sick of watching the two of you actively hate the rest of the world for interrupting your privacy. And because I don’t trust you not to kill Rick Wallace before Kenni has a chance to break his bindings.”

“I wasn’t gonna do any permanent damage,” Kori mumbled.

“It’s my turn anyway.” I grabbed my own jacket from the back of a chair at the kitchen table.

When she started to protest, Ian pulled her close. “Shut up before he changes his mind.” Then he turned to me. “Go on. We’ll hold down the fort.”

“And I’ll pretend I don’t know what you’re about to do with my sister. Ready, Kenni?” But when I turned, I found her kissing Vanessa goodbye. “Damn it, people,” I groaned. “This is a hideout, not a couples retreat!”

“Jealous?” Van teased, sinking into the chair Kenley had just vacated.

Was I jealous?

I might have been jealous of all the sex they were having, in their respective pairs, if each of those pairs didn’t involve one of my sisters. But because my sisters were involved, envy of their physical relationships wasn’t really … relevant. In fact, the very thought was vaguely nauseating.

As for the rest of it—the casual touches, intense looks and the feeling that the world would stop spinning if intimate eye contact was broken—I’d gone down that route once. The curves in the road were unpredictable, the speed bumps were more like small mountains, and the sudden roadblock thrown into my path had resulted in a collision I’d barely limped away from.

Since then, I stuck to the highway, with the other casual drivers. Regular shifts in the scenery, no stop-and-go traffic and the freedom to change lanes whenever I got bored.

“Let me get my stuff.” I jogged up the stairs and into the center bedroom, where I’d been sleeping for most of the three months we’d spent finding and contacting Tower’s remaining disgruntled employees and arranging clandestine meetings. Three months hiding from Julia in her own city while we slowly chipped away at the bedrock of indentured servants forming the foundation of the empire she’d inherited.

Eventually, that foundation would crumble, and its queen would plummet to the ground. And as with the fall of any corrupt dynasty, the peasants would rejoice.

I sat on the edge of my unmade bed and pulled open the nightstand drawer, and while my hand went straight for my gun, my gaze found something else instead.

What the hell?

My notebook. The indecipherable roadmap from my one disastrous trip down lover’s lane.

What the hell was it doing in the hideout house? In my bedroom? In my bedside drawer?

I lifted the notebook and flipped back the red cardboard cover. I hadn’t seen it in more than a year, but I still knew the curve of every G and the slanted cross of every T. I used to keep a yellow No. 2 pencil in the spiral, for when I needed to jot something down in the middle of the night.

But that was years ago …

The notebook was all I had left of Noelle. Twenty-three pages of dates and phrases—a visible reminder of the hardest lesson I’d ever learned, like an alcoholic’s sobriety chip or a junkie’s faded track marks. In the beginning, I’d read it so many times that now the cardboard cover had started falling apart and the entries in pencil had started to fade. Most of them, in retrospect, made no more sense than they had when I’d written them in the first place.

But … how the hell had the notebook gotten into my nightstand? It should have been in storage with everything else Gran and I hadn’t brought with us to the hideout house.

Kenley and Olivia were ready to go, so the notebook mystery would have to wait. I shook my head, trying to dislodge Noelle from my brain, then shoved the notebook back into the drawer and grabbed my .45. I popped the clip free and counted the rounds, then slid it back into place with a satisfying click. On my way down the stairs, I shrugged into my holster and jacket, then dropped the gun into place beneath my left arm.

“Ready, Kenni?” I said from the landing.

“Liv should be there waiting for you.” Kori sipped from my coffee mug. Without asking permission. “Call me if you need anything. I can be there in an instant.”

“I know.” Kori and I were Travelers—shadow-walkers—able to step into one shadow and out of another, anywhere within our range. When she was twenty-two, Kori got roped into using her Skill on behalf of the Tower syndicate to protect Kenley, who was already trapped in the same organization.

Tower signed Kori more for her skills with a knife and gun—and so he could use her to manipulate Kenni—than for her strength and range as a Traveler, which is mediocre at best.

My strength and range as a Traveler are better than most people know. Definitely better than Tower knew. And I’d like to keep it that way.

“We’re sure this guy’s for real?” I stepped into the hall closet with Kenley as she turned off the light.

“He’s an asshole, but he’s legit,” Kori said from the hall. “Anne listened in on the original call.”

As a Reader—a human lie detector—Kori’s friend Annika was less helpful on the front lines than Olivia was, with her gun and her Tracker abilities. Liv had helped us find those interested in breaking their bindings to Julia Tower, and she’d been my backup on more than one occasion. But Anne was invaluable behind the scenes. She helped keep us from walking into traps.

“Thanks for doing this,” Kenley whispered in the dark as her small hand slid into my grip. “I know your work is important, and you didn’t have to uproot yourself and Gran, and—”

“This is important, too, Kenni.”

I knew much more about her work—and our work to undo her work—than she knew about what I’d been doing while she and Kori were slaves to Jake Tower’s every whim. While they were bound to the syndicate, there was so much I couldn’t tell them. So much I couldn’t show them. So much I couldn’t do for them, without putting them in greater danger and risking the lives of everyone else counting on me.

Knowing that didn’t ease my guilt over the years they’d spent bound to Tower, out of my reach. But finally, all that had changed. Now I could stand with them. Fight for them. Protect them.

Now I could help them take down the organization that had broken Kenley’s spirit bit by bit, with every binding Tower had made her seal. The criminal underworld that had heaped unspeakable abuse on Kori, left her scarred physically and psychologically.

Julia Tower was the brain at the center of her late brother’s operation, and with him gone, there was no one to apply the brakes to her ambition or restrain her psychotic enthusiasm for backstage world domination, or whatever evil scheme was currently sparking across her synapses.

“No one deserves to be tied to Julia Tower. Not even the assholes.” And if we actually managed to take down the Tower syndicate, one human brick at a time, no one would benefit more than the people I worked with. “So let’s go make this asshole a free man.”

Kenni squeezed my hand—as good as a smile in the dark—and I tugged her forward one step. Two.

Then the room around us changed.

The air tasted different at Meghan’s childhood home. Cleaner, with an antiseptic aftertaste that told me she was a much better housekeeper than anyone living at our hideout.

Meghan’s bathroom was colder, too, and the tiles sounded different beneath my boots—harder, and more echoey than the linoleum in the house we were renting under a false name.

Kenley released my hand and flipped a switch on her side of the wall, and soft light from one of those old-fashioned round bulbs lit the bathroom with a yellowish glow. Everything here was a little older. The tub was porcelain, standing on claw feet, and the rest of the house had real hardwood floors. Tongue and groove. Not that we could see much it from the bathroom, because the rest of the house was dark.

Unease crawled across my back. Why was the rest of the house dark?

Stay here, I mouthed to Kenley, and she nodded, eyes wide. She could feel the wrongness, too.

I stepped into the hall and the floor creaked beneath my feet.

“Kris?” Olivia called, and the pain in her voice triggered alarms like bolts of electricity shooting through me.

“Liv!” Kenley cried, and I was so busy trying to hold her back that my brain didn’t process what else Olivia had said until it was too late. Until Kenley had already pulled free from my grasp and was halfway down the hall, her shoes squeaking on those hardwood floors.

“Run!” Olivia’s frantic shout ended abruptly, then echoed in my head as a hand shot out from a bedroom on the left side of the hall.

Kenley screamed as the hand dragged her into the room, pulling her right off her feet. I charged into the bedroom an instant later, my gun drawn, and nearly ripped the light switch out of the wall as I flipped it. Bright light flooded the unused bedroom, but I was too late. They were already gone.

“Kenley!” I shouted as I threw open the closet door and checked under the bed, just in case. But no amount of screaming my little sister’s name would bring her back.

Furious, and more scared than I could ever remember being, I raced out of the room and down the hall in the direction of Olivia’s shout, but my footsteps went silent the moment I stepped into the living room.

I froze, trying to puzzle out the problem. Trying to hear around the sudden, unnatural silence.

“Wallace.”

I said his name aloud as the realization sank in, but though I could feel the rumble of air being forced over my vocal chords, they made no sound. Or, rather, the sound they made was swallowed before it could be heard.

That same silence swallowed my roar of frustration.

The lights were off in the living room, just like in the rest of the house, but the drapes were open and the light shining in from the street was enough to illuminate Olivia, hunched on the floor with one hand pressed against her bloody temple. A man knelt behind her, the barrel of his gun pressed into the back of her head.

Olivia was saying something. No, she was shouting something, but I couldn’t hear her. Wallace—the human Silencer—wouldn’t let me hear her. But her point was obvious.

This was a trap.

My teeth ground together and my finger tensed on the trigger of my gun.

“Where is she?” I shouted, but no sound came out. “Where the hell is my sister?”

Wallace only smiled at me, one half of his face shrouded in shadow.

I aimed at his head, and my gun made no sound as I clicked off the safety.

Olivia shouted harder, shaking her head, her face red with the effort, but Wallace didn’t look worried. He wasn’t prepared to actually shoot Olivia, because he didn’t think I’d pull the trigger. He kept not-thinking that until the moment I shot him in the forehead, and his brains sprayed the wall at his back.

The first thing I heard was the thunk of his body hitting the floor.

Olivia gasped, and the sound was as sharp as a scream after such heavy, unnatural silence. She scrambled away from the dead man and stood, gaping at me. “You could have hit me, you asshole!”

“Give me a little credit, Liv.” I hadn’t missed anything I’d aimed at in the past decade. “Kori learned to shoot from me. Remember?”

“Kenley?” Liv grabbed a dusty white doily from the nearest end table and pressed it to her bleeding forehead.

“They got her. Dragged her out through the shadows, right in front of me.” My baby sister was gone, and I felt her absence like a gaping hole in my own heart. I’d lost her, but I would damn well get her back. “Was it the Tower bitch?”

“That’s my guess.” She stomped into the kitchen and started rooting around under the sink, presumably looking for bleach, or something else that would destroy the blood she’d spilled to keep it from being used against her.

I popped the clip from the grip of my gun and replaced the spent round with an extra from my pocket. Something told me I was going to need them all. “Where would they take her?”

“No idea. Cam might know. Or Kori.” Because they’d both served in the Tower syndicate.

Olivia already had her phone out, but she looked up when I pulled the drapes closed in the living room, blood boiling in my veins. “Where are you going?” she demanded a second before I would have stepped into the darkness.

“To get Kenley.” I wasn’t sure what the Towers had done to Kori when she was locked up, but I could not let that happen to Kenni. “Tell the others I’ll be right back.” Then I stepped into the shadows, leaving Olivia gaping at the space I’d just vacated.

A single step later, my foot hit the floor in Jake Tower’s darkroom. Only now it was Julia Tower’s darkroom. I’d never been there before—the one time I’d been in Tower’s house, I’d come in through the basement, after Kori shot a hole in the infrared grid built into the ceiling—but I’d mentally scouted it out a million times in the past six years. Every time I’d briefly considered simply charging into the heart of Tower’s empire and demanding my sisters’ freedom.

I’d never been stupid enough to actually go through with such an asinine plan.

Until now.

For the span of four heartbeats, I stood alone in the enemy’s darkroom, breathing. Thinking. Steeling myself. If I pressed the intercom button, the man in the security control room would see me with the infrared camera mounted in one corner of the ceiling. Then he’d press a button, and toxic gas would be pumped in through one of the vents overhead. I’d die in a pool of my own blood. Or vomit. Or both.

So instead, I felt for the light switch by the door—thank you, Kori, for the inside information—and flipped it up. Light flooded the tiny room from a fluorescent strip overhead.

The monitor built into the wall buzzed to life and a man’s face appeared on the screen, frowning at me.

I shot the monitor.

I shot the camera in the corner of the ceiling.

Then I turned away from the door without compromising my aim and shot the door lock—absent knob—once, twice. On the third try, as the hiss of air overhead told me my extermination had begun, the lock exploded and shrapnel sprayed my jacket, but the lack of pain told me none of the metal pieces had penetrated the leather. The door swung open two inches.

The alarm sounded as I stepped into the hall, scraping the insides of my skull raw while I tried to remember everything Kori had ever told me about the layout of Tower’s house.

Second floor. Employee’s wing. To the left are unused bedrooms and the path to the family wing.

I turned left, just as two men rounded the corner toward me, guns drawn. I squeezed off two shots, and both men went down with blood roses blooming on their abdomens. I could have shot again, but they were no threat, bleeding on the floor, and I’d probably need all my ammo.

To the right, the stairs lead to the foyer, my sister said in my memory.

I turned right and jogged down the stairs while the alarm repeatedly skewered my brain, and I took out two more guards on my way down. I’d aimed to disable, not kill, but I had no time to check my accuracy. By the time I hit the floor, doors were flying open. People were pouring into the two-story foyer.

My heart thumping in my ears, and on the lookout for more guards, I scanned the shocked, growing crowd, but didn’t find the face I was looking for. Julia’s.

“Everyone over there!” I shouted over the alarm, directing Tower’s confused employees away from the front door, toward the atrium at the center of the house, its entrance nestled between the two mirror-image staircases.

Startled men and women in suits followed my directions, but most of them didn’t look truly scared. They saw guns on a daily basis, and once the rest of the security team arrived, I would be both outnumbered and outgunned.

“Where’s Julia Tower?” I demanded. No one answered, but several people glanced at a frosted-glass door to my left. The only one that hadn’t opened when the alarm went off.

I backed toward the closed door, adrenaline pumping through my veins, still aiming at the small crowd, but before I could reach for the knob, the door swung open on its own.

Inside, three women stared out at me in various stages of shock, fear and anger. I recognized Lynn Tower immediately, her hand still on the doorknob, and I dismissed her almost as quickly. She wasn’t a threat, nor would she have the information I needed.

Julia stood behind the desk, telephone in hand, halfway to her ear.

I aimed at her, and she froze.

“Where’s my sister?” I shouted, still competing with the alarm, but Julia only smiled. She knew I couldn’t kill her until I had the information I’d come for.

Then the third woman turned in front of the desk to look at me, blocking my aim at Julia. Her eyes were wide and green, her features delicate. She held her hands out at her sides, showing me she was unarmed.

“What’s the problem?” She rounded the chair slowly to stand in front of me and the yellow scarf draped loosely over her shoulders caught my gaze and refused to let go. “Who are you looking for?”

I could hardly hear her over the alarm, and my brain didn’t process a single thing she’d said, because in my mind, I heard another voice, speaking to me from my own past.

Take the woman in the yellow scarf.

Someone, somewhere pressed a button, and the alarm died, though it still echoed deep inside my head.

“Why don’t you put the gun down, and we can work this out,” the woman in the scarf said, slowly walking toward me. She looked scared, but calm. Determined.

“Sera …” Lynn Tower backed away as the woman in the scarf approached.

Sera. The woman in the yellow scarf.

“It’s okay,” Sera said, and I backed away from her in shock, one step for each of hers, my gun aimed right at her. But I wouldn’t shoot her. I couldn’t. I needed her, though I wasn’t sure why. Was she supposed to help me get Kenley back? Was she a hostage? An informant? A lieutenant in the Tower army?

Was that even possible for someone so young?

“Freeze!” someone shouted, and I looked up to find three of Tower’s guards aiming large guns at me from the center of the foyer.

My guts twisted into knots while I waited for gunfire, and there was nothing for me to do but hold my aim. This was a fool’s errand from the beginning, but I wasn’t fool enough to let go of my gun.

“Stop!” Sera yelled, and the men hesitated, confused. “He’s looking for someone. There’s no reason for this to get any bloodier.”

I recognized her tone. Gentle and patronizing. That was the voice you’d use to talk a man down from a ledge. A crazy man.

“Shoot him!” Julia yelled from inside her office, heedless of the fact that I was still aiming at Sera, and the men raised their weapons.

“No!” Sera turned on Julia. “Tell them to drop their weapons. Please!”

Julia scowled, and her anger was like black clouds rolling over the sun—I felt like I should duck before I got struck by lightning. Julia Tower didn’t take orders—she gave them.

But then she spoke, clearly enough for everyone to hear. “Put down your guns!”

The men obeyed instantly—so fast it was almost comical—squatting to set M16s on the ground at their feet, their faces fixed in identical masks of confusion.

Sera turned back to me. “Give me your gun, and you can go home.”

Surely she lacked the authority to back up a promise like that. Julia held all the power in Tower’s territory. But if that was true, why had Julia ordered her men to stand down at the request of a woman little more than half her age?

The girl in the scarf had guts—I had to give her that.

Or maybe she was just trying to disarm me, so I couldn’t shoot her when they shot me.

Sera held out her hand for my gun.

I glanced at the disarmed guards. Then I glanced at Julia and Lynn Tower, watching us both from inside the office, one nervous, one furious. Then I glanced to my right, and saw the open storage closet a few feet away, where a housekeeper had been digging for supplies when I’d come down the stairs waving my gun.