Oath Bound

He pulled me into the living room. When I refused to sit on the couch, he gave my left shoulder a small shove, and I fell onto the center cushion, my hands trapped behind me.

He sat on the coffee table facing me, at eye-height again, and that’s when I saw where he was bleeding. My blade had sliced across his right forearm in two different places.

“Has anyone ever told you you’re a total pain in the ass?” He rolled back his sleeve and flinched with one look at the long, shallow cuts. “I’m sorry about the zip tie. I don’t usually tie women up, but I don’t know what else to do with you.”

“Don’t apologize because I’m a woman. Apologize because you’re an asshole!” I shouted.

His grandmother laughed out loud from the kitchen doorway, holding her still-steaming mug of coffee. “I like her, Kris. I doubt Vanessa will, though.”

Who the hell was Vanessa?

Kris’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t even glance at his grandmother. “Just so we’re clear, the zip tie isn’t the only equipment at my disposal. I’m also fully prepared to tape your mouth shut.”

In reply, I leaned back on the couch and kicked him off the coffee table.

Four

Kris

The closet door opened down the hall as I was rinsing my cuts in the bathroom. I went for my gun out of habit, trailing water across the floor and blood across my arm.

“Kris?” Kori called, and I slid my gun back into its holster and stepped out of the bathroom with a clean white towel pressed to my arm. “What happened? Liv said you went after Kenley, but she lost your scent.”

She meant my psychic scent—the personal energy signature given off by my blood, which blood Trackers, like Olivia and Cam, could use to find people.

“No surprise there. The Towers’ nanny is a Jammer, right?” Being near a Jammer is like being in a psychic dead zone—you can’t be tracked, either by name or by blood. That’s a benefit those who can afford it will gladly pay for, but it comes with a couple of obvious disadvantages, as well.

“You went to Jake’s house?” She lifted the towel from my arm and her pale brows furrowed over eyes as deep a brown as our mother’s had been. “What the hell were you thinking? It’s a miracle you walked out of there with only—”

“Hey!” Sera shouted from Gran’s bedroom—the only one on the first floor.

I groaned. There was no good way to tell Kori about our new guest, but letting Sera deliver the news herself was number one on a long list of bad ways to get the job done.

Kori’s focus shifted from my wounds to the closed bedroom door. She dropped the rag into place on my arm and her hand found the grip of the gun holstered beneath her jacket. “Who the fuck is that?”

Gran chuckled from the living room, where she was sipping iced tea in front of the muted television. She’d refused to help me with Sera on the grounds that I deserved whatever I got for bringing a stranger back to our hideout, even though she only remembered who we were hiding from about half the time.

“Hey!” Sera shouted again, while I actively regretted not gagging her when I’d had the chance. “Whoever’s out there, if you’re even marginally sane, please consider calling the police. But if you’re as psychologically damaged as Kris and his grandmother, then by all means, carry on with whatever the descendants of Norman Bates do for fun on the weekend. I’m sure I’ll still be here whenever you get around to stabbing me and laughing maniacally over my cooling corpse.”

“That’s Sera.” I pressed the rag tighter against the cuts on my arm. “She’s rational and calm, and just generally pleasant to be around. I think you’re gonna like her.”

“I like her!” Gran called over the wooden creak of her rocker.

Kori took a single, cautious step back and slowly pushed the bedroom door open.

Sera sat in Gran’s rolling desk chair, kind of tilted to the side because I’d used a leather belt to secure her bound arms to the back of the chair.

Kori made a noise deep in her throat. It sounded like an angry mutation of my name. “Who the fuck is that, and where the hell is Kenley?”

“The short version?” I said, and she nodded without taking her focus from Sera. “I went to Tower’s looking for Kenni, but Julia was more interested in having me shot than in answering my questions, and I didn’t have time for a leisurely search of the compound.” Not that I’d expected her to actually be there. I’d hoped Julia might value her own life enough to order my sister’s return. Or at least tell me where to find her. “I didn’t find Kenley, but I did find Sera, and they seemed willing to shoot through her to get to me, so I figured she wouldn’t mind being removed from immediate danger.” I shrugged. “Turns out they might have had the right idea.”

“Fuck you.” If Sera’s eyes could have shot flames, I would have been nothing but a pile of ash. “Untie me.”

Kori turned to me, both brows raised. “Wait. Julia took our sister, and your brilliant plan was to break into her house and return the favor?”

“No, my intent was to get Kenni back. But Sera was there, and she got between my gun and Julia.” And she was wearing a yellow scarf … “Then they started shooting at us—at both of us—so I had to take her with me.”

“You had to take her?” Kori pushed pale hair back from her face, then crossed her arms over her chest. “Fine. What are you planning to do with her? She’s a bargaining chip? A trade?”

“I’m a hostage,” Sera said.

Kori turned on me, but the anger I expected to find in her eyes was backlit by something more bitter. More personal. “We don’t take hostages, Kris. And we damn sure don’t take prisoners. That’s not how we operate.”

“I’m aware. She’s neither prisoner nor hostage,” I insisted as I lost the battle not to stare at Sera some more. At her scarf. At her eyes. At the tension in her frame, telling me she would fight until the very last breath was forced from her body, if that’s what it took. She didn’t need a reason to fight—she just needed an excuse.

I didn’t want to be her reason or her excuse. Or her jailer. In spite of her sharp knife and her even sharper tongue, I was captivated by the fire inside her and curious about the fuel that fed it.

And I needed to know why Sera had shown up in my notebook, nearly a decade before I met her.

“She’s a guest,” I continued, watching Sera while I spoke to my sister. “She’s a reluctant guest who really shouldn’t be thrown out in the cold until we know whether or not she’s bound to tell Julia Tower about everything she’s said and heard here.”

“Agreed. Although she wouldn’t have seen or heard anything if you hadn’t brought her here.” Kori exhaled and crossed her arms over her shirt. “So … who is she?”

A pang of disappointment unfurled in my chest. “I was hoping you could tell me that.”

“I don’t recognize her. But she could have signed on with Julia after I left the organization.”

Understatement of the decade. Kori hadn’t just “left” the Tower syndicate. She’d fought her way out in an elegant clusterfuck of a showdown, in which Ian, Olivia and I all kicked ass and fired guns on her behalf.

They say combat is a bonding experience for those who survive. They’re right.

Kori eyed our guest’s awkward tilt. “Why is she tied up?”

“Because he’s psychotic,” Sera spat.

“Because she’s a flight risk,” I corrected, and I got the distinct impression that she was flipping me off behind her back. “Did I mention she’s feisty? Because she’s also stubborn.”

“Fascinating.” Kori glanced at the long sleeve covering Sera’s left arm. “Does she have marks?”

Sera groaned, still glaring up at me. “I told you, I don’t work for Julia Tower!”

I could only shrug. “She keeps saying that, but she won’t prove it.”

“You have to prove it. That’s the way the world works.” Kori studied Sera’s scowl. “Either you know that, and you’re refusing because you’re marked, or you’re naive enough to think you actually have a choice in the matter. That’s adorable, but completely erroneous.”

“She’s not from around here,” I said, while Sera shot rage daggers at us both.

“No shit. Did you ask her nicely?”

“I said please and everything, but remember how I told you she was gentle and pleasant? I lied.”

“So what’s the plan?”

I leaned against the door frame and eyed Kori expectantly. “I was hoping my sweet, gentle little sister could use her charms to verify that our guest doesn’t have any marks.”

Kori huffed, still eyeing Sera as if she were a puzzle she didn’t have the patience to solve. “Kenley’s unavailable at the moment.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to do.”

Kori turned on me. “She’s your problem. You check her for marks.”

I groaned, then tugged Kori into the hall after me, where I lowered my voice. “I’ve already had to catch her, restrain her, catch her again, then tie her up, and after all that, cutting her shirt open just feels like crossing a line.”

Sera huffed from the bedroom, where she could obviously still hear us. “So you’re saying there is a limit to the cruelty and unreasonable demands you’re willing to inflict on the woman who saved you from a future as a human sieve?”

Gran laughed from the living room. “I like her! I think we should keep her!”

“We can’t keep her, Gran. She’s not a kitten!” Kori shouted.

I tried to not to dwell on the fact that way too many of the women in my life communicated at top volume and maximum ridicule. Then I lowered my voice even further. “Wasn’t checking for marks part of your job description? Aren’t you supposed to be good at this?”

My sister shrugged. “I know seven different ways to get a look at her bare arm in the next thirty seconds, but none of them are gentle, and a couple of them would obligate me to marry her in several third-world cultures.” She slapped me on the arm. “You’re on your own. But I will give you a little advice.”

I groaned. “Don’t you need wisdom in order to dispense advice?”

“Nah, just experience. Listen up.” Kori tugged me farther from the half-closed bedroom door. “Don’t force her into showing you her arm. Talk her into it. Otherwise, she’ll never forgive you.”

“What makes you think I want her forgiveness?”

My sister’s eyes narrowed, but the real censure was in the contempt behind them. “Don’t be an asshole, Kris. We both know you care what she thinks of you.”

“And you’ve drawn that unlikely conclusion based on …”

“Oh, please. You took one of Julia’s pretty young women instead of one of the many fat, balding men bound to her. Though I hope it’s obvious now that you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.”

“You think I took her because I wanted her? What am I, a caveman?”

“In her opinion?” Kori shrugged. “Probably.”

“I took her because they were going to kill her to get to me.” And because she was wearing the yellow scarf. But I couldn’t tell my sister that. She didn’t know about the notebook. She didn’t even know about Noelle. “I couldn’t just leave her there.”

Kori rolled her eyes. “Julia would have killed anyone to get to you, or to any one of us, but you will never convince me that you’d have pulled one of her meathead laborers through the shadows to ‘protect’ him.”

There was no use arguing with her when I couldn’t explain myself without mentioning the notebook, and I couldn’t tell her about that because I’d never told anyone about the notebook or about how I’d filled it. About how, for the first time, one of those indecipherable lines had made sense, and I’d pulled Sera through the shadows just in time to prevent us both from being killed.

If the woman in the yellow scarf was real, then everything else I’d written down could be real, too. What had I missed in that notebook? What had I ignored? What other horrible things could I have prevented?

“Go talk to her, Kris. We can’t keep her tied up, but we can’t afford to let her go, and the only other option isn’t going to sit well on my conscience.”

“You have a conscience?” I went for the obvious joke, so I wouldn’t have to think about what she was really saying, because if I thought about that, Kori and I would fight.

I hadn’t fought with Kori in a very long time. For a very good reason.

“I have a conscience and you have a brain, and I suspect they’re both getting rusty, so let’s put them to use. Kenley needs us, and your Sera’s getting in the way.”

“I know.” But if Sera did work for the Towers, she might be able to help us find Kenley. “Did Liv catch Kenni’s scent?”

“Not a trace.” Kori didn’t look surprised. When the Towers wanted someone to disappear, that someone disappeared.

“They won’t kill her,” I whispered, trying to reassure us both. Killing Kenley would release Julia’s remaining employees from their bonds of servitude and obedience, and that was the last thing Julia wanted.

“I know. But the Towers are capable of far worse than death.” Kori shook her head, jarring loose memories I could almost see floating beneath her carefully controlled expression. She nodded once, curtly, then headed back into the bedroom, where she studied Sera’s face again with no sign of recognition. “She’s definitely not one of Jake’s, but if she’s Julia’s, you can’t trust a word she says without third-party verification.”

“You knew him?” Sera’s eyes widened and a little of her hostility melted beneath the curiosity she couldn’t quite hide. It looked genuine, and I was as fascinated by what she didn’t know as I was by what she might be able to tell us. “You actually knew Jake Tower?”

Kori sank onto the bed, which put her at eye level with Sera. “I knew him very well.” She shrugged out of her jacket and pushed up her short left sleeve to reveal two chain links tattooed on her upper arm, now the faded gray of dead marks. “I served him for six years—most of that spent under his direct supervision—which is how I can say with absolute confidence that he was one of the cruelest, most recreationally sadistic men to ever walk this earth.”

Sera shifted uncomfortably in her chair, but didn’t break Kori’s gaze. She looked the way I felt every time a pill I had to swallow got stuck in my throat.

“I knew his brother, too, until I had the privilege of ending the bastard’s cold-blooded existence,” Kori continued. “I know Julia Tower better than anyone should ever have to know Julia Tower, and with every single breath I take, I regret my decision to let her live. Instead of cursing my own foot when I stub my toe, I’ve taken to cursing the foul womb that produced all three of the Tower siblings. Their family tree is rotten all the way to its decayed-ass roots, and I don’t see how Jake’s kids—as innocent as they look now—can possibly rise above the malice and brutality that is their birthright.”

Sera flinched as though she’d been slapped, and Kori frowned.

“You never met him, did you?” she asked. Sera shook her head. “But you know Julia?”

“I just met her today. You …” She blinked and shrugged, as if her shoulders were sore. “You killed Jonah? Jake’s brother?”

“Yes.” Kori’s eyes glittered with the memory, but her gaze was unflinching. “I stabbed him in the throat with a chunk of porcelain from a smashed toilet, and the only regret I have about killing him is that so many people were denied the opportunity to see him die.”

“Damn, Kori,” I said, and my sister glanced up at me for a second, then returned her attention to an obviously shell-shocked Sera.

“Does that bother you?”

Sera stared at her lap, evidently considering the question, and when she finally looked up, her gaze was so sharp it could have drawn blood. “Did he deserve it?”

“Jonah Tower was a rapist, torturer and murderer.” Kori spoke as if the words meant nothing to her, hiding the truth behind a battered stoicism that made my chest ache. “He was a sadist son of a bitch who deserved a much longer, more painful death than he got.”

“Then may he rot in hell for all of eternity.” Sera’s voice hinted at everything my sister’s hid. There was a perilous depth to her conviction, and I wondered just how closely to the edge she was teetering. How little would it take to send her tumbling over the edge? Why did I want so badly to pull her back from that abyss?

I knew nothing about her—not even her last name—but I recognized so much of what I saw in her. There was pain behind her anger. A lot of pain. I may have been a convenient target—I had locked her up in a strange house—but I wasn’t the true cause of either her pain or her anger.

“How did Jake … die?” Sera asked.

“Ian shot him,” I said.

Kori nodded. “It was a clean death. Fast. Better than he deserved.”

“Ian is …” Sera glanced at both of us, in turn.

“He is the other half of my soul. The good half.”

It was amazing to see the change in my sister when she talked about Ian. She was still fierce and dangerous—Korinne would never be anything less. But with his name on her tongue, she looked as if she may not hate the world after all. Not the whole world, anyway.

“But you didn’t kill Julia?”

Kori shook her head slowly, looking as if she was remembering that day, and I remembered it with her. Though the Towers were a huge obstacle in my life’s work, I’d never been in their house before that day. I’d never dealt with any of them face-to-face. “I wanted Julia to suffer. She deserved to suffer,” Kori said. “I changed my mind a second later, when I realized that leaving her alive would really mean making the rest of the world suffer, but by then I’d lost my chance.”

“Why did you hate them?” Sera asked. “I mean, other than the whole ‘birthed from an evil womb’ thing. What did they do to you?”

For a minute, I thought Kori might actually answer. That she might finally talk to someone other than Ian about what woke her up screaming in the middle of most nights. Kenley knew part of it. I think even Vanessa knew more than I did. I’d started to ask, once, but Gran, in a rare moment of absolute lucidity, told me to leave it alone.

I did, because when she’s thinking clearly, Gran is never wrong.

But after nearly half a minute of considering, Kori only stood and glanced at me on her way to the door. “You got this?” she asked, and when I nodded, she disappeared into the hall and pulled the door shut behind her.

“Is she okay?” Sera asked as I sank onto the bed, where my sister had been seconds earlier.

“Kori’s always okay.” Even when she isn’t. “All right. Here’s what I need you to understand. I don’t know you—”

“I understand that.”

I resisted the urge to growl at her. The woman was as infuriating as she was fascinating. “I wasn’t finished. My point is that since I don’t know you, I have no idea whether you’re telling the truth or just acting. I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, and I’d appreciate it if you’d return the favor. I’m not asking to see your arm out of any testosterone-driven need to boss you around or make you do something you obviously don’t want to do. I’m asking to see your arm because that’s what I have to do to protect my friends and family.”

Sera lifted one brow and tossed her head in the direction of the door Kori had just closed. “I don’t think she needs your protection.”

I shrugged. “Maybe she doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to protect her. Either way, Gran and Kenley do need protection, and frankly, I care more about keeping them safe than I do about respecting the modesty of your covered arm. I care more about keeping them safe than I care about anything else in the world. I wish that was something you could understand, but even if it’s not—”

Her eyes widened in surprise, and I realized something I’d said had gotten through to her. “I do understand that.”

“Then give me a look at your arm, Sera. A couple of inches below your shoulder. I won’t touch you. You don’t have to take anything off. Just give me a reason to trust you enough to untie you and let you be in the same room with my family. Okay?”

She frowned. “You don’t trust me? You kidnapped me.”

“Okay, we’re going to have to agree to disagree about that particular descriptor, but I’m very sorry for dragging you out of there. There were guns aimed at us both and I didn’t have time to think it through, but that was my mistake. If I could do it over, I’d do it differently.” Though I wasn’t sure how … “But since I can’t, we have to deal with the situation as it currently stands. That would be a lot easier for me if you’d show me your arm, and it’d be a lot easier for you if you weren’t tied to a chair. You can make both of those things happen. It’s your choice.”

“Are you patronizing me?”

“No. I’m asking you to play nice and I’m giving you my word that I’ll do the same. I’d like to take knives and zip ties out of the equation.”

“After I show you my arm, then what?”

“If it’s unmarked, I’ll let you out of that chair and out of this room. Then we’re going to have a civil drink or a cup of coffee—your choice—while we wait for a friend of Kori’s.”

“What friend?”

“She’s a Reader.” Annika, the human lie detector, who would always owe Kori a favor and would always be owed one from her in return, because of Kenley’s binding. “She’s going to listen while we ask you some questions, and if she likes your answers, we’re going to take you home and you can go on with your life. Which, incidentally, will last much longer if you stay away from Julia Tower.”

The door opened behind me, and Kori appeared in the doorway. “I’ll go get her in a minute,” my sister said, and I realized she’d been listening through the door. And that she’d already called Anne.

Sera frowned. “And if your friend doesn’t like my answers?”

Kori shrugged. “Well, then we’ll all have some difficult decisions to make. But I promise that if we have to kill you, it’ll be a quick death.”

Sera turned to me, suddenly pale. “Is she serious? Is that supposed to be comforting?”

I held her gaze, because that was the least I owed her. “Coming from Kori? Yes.”

“You people are so screwed up!”

Before I could reassure Sera that I wouldn’t let my sister deliver a mercy killing, Kori leaned against the door frame and made a thoughtful sound. “I think the problem here is that you don’t understand the alternative.”

“The alternative, wherein you open the door and I walk out, and we never have to see one another again?”

“Um, no. The alternative that actually bears some resemblance to reality.” Kori looked poised to continue with her typical colorful, disturbing delivery, so I cut her off and stepped into Sera’s line of sight before my sister could make things worse.

“We hope to convince you to talk to us by giving you coffee and deploying a Reader. The Towers would substitute an experienced torturer for our cup of dark roast.”

“Seriously?”

Before I could answer, Kori turned and pulled up the back of her shirt to reveal a canvas of scars I’d only seen once, myself. Thick welts. Mottled burns. And at least two complete sets of bite marks.

Sera gasped and Kori lowered her shirt, then turned, her expression as empty as I’d ever seen it. “They didn’t even want information.”

“What did they want?” Sera whispered.

“To hear me scream.”

Sera looked queasy, and I knew how she felt. The evidence of Kori’s suffering made me sick to my stomach, and the empty way she spoke about it made me want to kill someone. But she’d already taken out one of the men responsible. Ian had killed the other.

Kori had nothing left to battle but her own memories.

“They will want information from Kenley,” I said. “They’ll want to know where we are, and how many of us there are, and how easy it would be to erase us from existence. If we let you go and you are obligated to report to Julia, she won’t have to torture you to get that information. But they will have to torture Kenni for it, and we won’t let that happen.”