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Oath Bound
Rachel Vincent


Even the most powerful supernatural family can unravel… Sera Brandt, the secret daughter of the head of an infamous paranormal crime family, has hidden her past, her potential and especially her powers. But when a tragedy strikes, Sera needs justice. And the only way to get it is to reveal her heritage—including a rare and dangerous magical skill—and take the reins of the powerful Tower Syndicate.Kristopher Daniels has fought the Syndicate to protect his sisters, but he’d never realised just how close to the new heir he needed to get. His new bond with Sera could be the key to defeating them once and for all. Or, with a target on their backs, it could be Kristopher and Sera’s ultimate downfall.










Praise for the novels of

New York Times bestselling author

RACHEL VINCENT

‘I liked the character and loved the action. I look forward to reading the next book in the series.’

Charlaine Harris

‘Vincent is a welcome addition to the genre!’

Kelley Armstrong

‘Compelling and edgy, dark and evocative, Stray is a must read! I loved it from beginning to end.’ Gena Showalter

‘I had trouble putting this book down. Every time I said I was going to read just one more chapter, I’d find myself three chapters later.’

Bitten by Books on Stray

‘Vincent continues to impress with the freshness of her approach and voice. Action and intrigue abound.’

RT Book Reviews


Find out more about Rachel Vincent by visiting mirabooks.co.uk/rachelvincent and read Rachel’s blog at urbanfantasy.blogspot.com

Also available fromRachel Vincent

The Shifters series STRAY ROGUE PRIDE PREY SHIFT ALPHA



Soul Screamers series MY SOUL TO TAKE MY SOUL TO SAVE MY SOUL TO KEEP MY SOUL TO STEAL IF I DIE BEFORE I WAKE WITH ALL MY SOUL




Oath Bound

Rachel Vincent







www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


To the readers who travelled with me into this dark,

twisted world. I promise there is light at

the end of the tunnel …




One


Sera

I’ve never been very good with the word no. I have trouble saying it. I have more trouble hearing it. And accepting it … well, I find that damn near impossible. Always have. Which is why, when the guard at the gate in front of Jake Tower’s house—his estate—refused to let me in, I kind of wanted to pound his teeth into his throat, then out the back of his head.

Instead, I took a deep breath and counted to ten. “Let’s try this again.” I laid my left arm across the open window in my car door and glanced through my windshield at the huge house beyond the closed gate. The road actually ended in front of the Tower estate in a cul-de-sac of its own, so that drivers, rebuffed by the locked gate, could turn their cars around and skulk back the way they’d come, properly intimidated by a wealth and power most could never even touch.

I don’t skulk.

“Sera Brandt, to see Julia Tower,” I repeated, my voice firm with the kind of self-appointed authority only colossal loss and boundless rage can produce.

“I told you, miss.” The guard sounded exasperated this time. “Ms. Tower isn’t seeing anyone else today. She’s suffered a recent family tragedy, and—”

“She’ll see me. Just get on your little radio and tell her I’m here.”

“You don’t have an appointment, and she’s not—” My left arm shot out the open window and I grabbed the front of his black shirt. Before he could do more than grunt in surprise, I jerked him down and forward, smashing the front of his face into the top of my car.

Dazed, he backed away on wobbly legs when I let him go, blood dripping from his nose and down his chin, and before he could think clearly enough to go for his gun, I shoved my car door open, knocking him off his feet entirely. He landed flat on his back, his head inches from the guard booth, arms splayed out at his sides.

If his partner had been there, I’d have been in big trouble. But I’d waited until his partner left for the bathroom, or coffee, or a cigarette, or whatever the Tower estate guards spent their free time on, specifically to avoid that snag.

While the man on the ground moaned and held both hands to his bloody face, I unsnapped the holster exposed by his open jacket and pulled the gun out. I wasn’t sure what kind it was—I’d never shot one—but it was big, so I set it on the desk through the window of the guard booth, to keep it out of his immediate reach.

If I’d known how to get the bullets out of it, I would have taken them.

Then I pulled his radio free from the other side of his belt and pressed the button.

And that’s when I realized where I’d messed up. I’d introduced myself by the wrong name. The guard didn’t give a shit who Sera Brandt was, and Julia Tower—Lia, to those who knew her personally—certainly wouldn’t. So when I pressed the radio button and the soft hum of static was replaced with an even silence, I looked straight into the camera attached to the roof of the guard booth and gave them my real name.

“This is Sera Tower. Open the fucking gate.”

For a moment, radio silence followed my announcement while the camera whirred, zooming in on my face, and I wondered if my message would even get through to Lia, who surely had better things to do than listen in on the guards’ radio frequency.

According to the internet, both the official news sites and the often more reliable gossip pages, Lia Tower had taken over her brother Jake’s business affairs when he’d died four months before, and I could only assume she’d taken over most of his personal affairs, too. But that was truly just a guess. Until the guard refused to let me see her, I didn’t even know for sure that she still lived in his house—according to the obituary, Jake Tower also left behind a wife and two small children, who had surely inherited the property.

“Sera … Tower?” a faceless voice asked over the radio a second later. His skepticism was clear. He’d never heard of me. I’d never wanted to be heard of, until then.

I’d never even said it out loud before—my real last name. I’d never claimed my connection to the family I’d never met. The family my mother had hidden me from, for most of my life. But there was no other way through that gate, and I couldn’t get what I’d come for without the resources locked away in the fortress of a house behind it.

“Do you have an appointment?” However, I could tell by his uncertain tone that the question felt as ridiculous to him as it sounded to me. I was a Tower, after all, if I were telling the truth. But protocol is protocol.

“I don’t need one. Just tell her Sera is here. Jake Tower’s love child has come home.”

The first-floor study they stuck me in could well have been called a library. Hardback books lined floor-to-ceiling shelves covering three walls. The center of the room held two couches and several small tables, but I sat on the window seat built into the fourth wall, so I could see the entire room.

A glance at my cell phone told me I’d been there for nearly forty minutes—8:00 p.m. had come and gone, without even the offer of a drink. No wonder my butt was going numb. But they’d stationed a guard outside the door and told me to stay put, and now that I’d already gotten Lia’s attention, creating another scene didn’t seem very likely to work in my favor.

Making me wait was a strategic move on Lia’s part. It had to be. To show me how unimportant I was. The internet was virtually void of information about the Towers’ personal lives, and my mother hadn’t been much more forthcoming, but I remembered every single thing she had told me over the years.

They are master manipulators.

Everything they do has a purpose—sometimes several purposes—whether you can see that or not.

Don’t think that being one of them makes you safe. They won’t hesitate to spill their own blood from your veins, if you become a threat.

With that in mind, I suddenly wondered if I was being watched. Studied. Or had I moved beyond simple caution and into paranoia? Either way, I couldn’t resist a couple of casual glances at the ceiling to look for cameras. But if they were there, they were hidden. Like I’d been for years.

On the first day of kindergarten I’d discovered that the dad I’d grown up with wasn’t actually my father, genetically speaking. My dad—he was Daddy, back then—was still waving goodbye to me through the classroom window when this little girl with curly pigtails asked me how come my dad was dark and I was light.

I’d never really thought about that before. I’d always assumed that I matched my mom for the same reason my little sister matched our dad. Just because. The same reason the ocean matched the sky, but the grass matched the trees. But before I could explain about how we each matched a different parent, a little boy with a smear of chocolate across one cheek poked his head into our conversation with an unsolicited bit of vicious commentary.

“That’s ’cause he’s not her real dad. She’s pro’ly adopted.”

I punched him in the nose, and then his cheek was smeared with chocolate and blood.

That was the very first punch I threw. It was followed, in rapid succession, by my first trip to the principal’s office, my first expulsion and my first visit with a child psychologist.

In retrospect, I can see that I overreacted. Pigtails and Bloody Nose were just naturally curious. They probably didn’t mean to throw my entire life into chaos and make me question my own existence at the tender age of five.

It took nearly an hour for the principal, guidance counselor, and my parents to calm me down enough to buckle me into my seat in the car. It then took another hour for my parents to explain that I wasn’t adopted. I was simply conceived out of wedlock, fathered by a man my mother knew before she ever met my dad.

That’s a lot for a kindergartner to absorb, but my parents seemed confident that I could handle it. My dad reassured me that he loved me more than I could possibly imagine, and that he would always be my dad. And that was that.

But my temper failed to improve.

When I was about fifteen, I overheard Mom tell Dad that I might have gotten my temper from my father, but my sharp tongue had come from Aunt Lia. Eight years later, as I stood waiting impatiently for an audience with her, nerves and anger buzzing just beneath the surface of my skin, that was still virtually all I knew about the aunt I’d never met.

That, and that Aunt Lia was perfectly willing to let her own niece stew in isolation. Obviously this wasn’t the hugs-and-kisses kind of family. But it was the only kind I had left.

My dad had been a mechanic and an amateur musician who smiled with his eyes, even when his mouth took a firm stand. My biological father had been the head of one of the largest, most dangerous Skilled crime families in the country who, according to my mom, probably smiled as he ordered people hunted down and executed.

I hadn’t come into the Tower house with blinders on.

Finally out of patience and buzzing with nerves, I crossed the room and pulled the study door open.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’ll have to wait inside,” the guard posted in the foyer said.

“Or what?” I propped my hands on my hips. “You’ll shoot me?”

His hesitation and confusion told me two things. First, he was accustomed to intimidating people with his size and his gun. Second, he wasn’t actually prepared to shoot me in broad daylight, in the middle of his boss’s formal entryway—an admirable trait in a human being, but quite possibly a liability in a syndicate muscleman.

“Fine. Shoot me,” I called over my shoulder as I marched past him on the marble tile, headed for an office whose blurry occupants I could see through the frosted-glass door. I was halfway there, irritated guard on my heels, when something small and mechanical raced across the tile in front of me, and I stopped inches short of tripping over it.

I bent to pick up the remote control car just as two small children stumbled to a stop in front of me.

“Sorry.” The little girl pushed tangled brown hair from her face and stared up at me through huge, bright blue eyes. “Ms. George says Kevin drives like a maniac.”

“She also says you suck your thumb like a baby.” The boy—Kevin, evidently—snatched the toy car from my hand. I started to tell him exactly how rude he was being, but then I saw his face and the words froze on my lips. It was like staring at a younger version of me, with shorter hair. He had my pale skin and ruddy cheeks, and those greenish eyes no one else in my family had. And based on the utter disdain for adults that shone in his eyes, our similarities went far beyond the physical. I’d never met an authority figure I hadn’t challenged.

If my mother hadn’t had the patience of a saint, life would have been very difficult for us both.

“Where is Ms. George?” The voice—feminine, but completely lacking in warmth—was accompanied by the click of heels on the marble floor. I looked up to find Julia Tower, the aunt I knew only from my mother’s description and photos found online, crossing the foyer toward us, looking not at me, but at the children.

The little girl clasped her hands at her back and stared up at her—our—aunt. “She fell asleep during Charlotte’s Web.”

“She lost interest when I told her the spider dies,” Kevin added. “I shoulda told her they’d butcher the pig.”

Julia exhaled slowly, as if clinging to her patience, then frowned at the guard coming to a stop behind us. “Take them back upstairs and wake up that worthless nanny.”

“Should I tell Mrs. Tower—”

“No.” Julia’s features scrunched up with the word as though she found the thought revolting. “There’s no reason to bother Lynn.”

As the guard herded the children back upstairs, my aunt finally looked at me for the first time. The weight of her gaze made me want to squirm, but I knew better. Show the wolf a weakness, and it’ll rip out your throat. Stare it down, and it might back off.

But Julia Tower didn’t back off. She didn’t rip my throat out, either, but I couldn’t dismiss the certainty that she was holding that option in reserve.

“You’re Sera?” She studied my face as intently as I studied hers. In person, her eyes were bluer than they’d appeared online, but the real-life version lacked the warm, approachable quality she’d evidently worn like a costume at various social and political gatherings.

In person, her eyes were more of an ice-blue, as if I were looking into the soul of a glacier, rather than that of a warm-blooded human being.

When she’d finished her silent assessment of me, she gestured stiffly toward the office I’d been headed for in the first place. Two large men dressed in black followed us inside, and I wondered what it said about her that she employed not one but two personal guards to protect her in her own home.

Just how many people currently wanted my aunt dead?

“I asked you to wait in the study,” Lia said as one of the men at her back closed the office door and lowered blinds to cover the frosted glass, effectively isolating us from the rest of the house. I blinked at him, and my pulse tripped a little faster. Were they closing the blinds for a private conversation, or so they could shoot me without witnesses?

Did that kind of thing really happen?

“Yeah. I’m not very patient.”

Julia’s brows rose. “Well, you certainly sound like my brother.” From the liquor cart to the right of her huge dark wood desk, she poured an inch of amber liquid into a glass, then sipped from it while she examined me from across the room. Without offering me any.

Finally Lia set her glass on the desk blotter, but before she could speak the office door opened behind me and another man in black stuck his head into the room. “Sorry to interrupt, Ms. Tower,” he said without even a glance at me. “But they’re ready. Just waiting on your authorization.”

“Do it,” Lia said. “And let me know the moment it’s done.” The man nodded once, then backed into the hall and pulled the door shut.

I wondered what order she’d just given, and whose life it would ruin. Just because the Tower syndicate knew nothing about me didn’t mean I knew nothing about it. I hadn’t been able to find many day-to-day specifics online, but the overtones of greed, violence and corruption came through loud and clear, even in vague articles citing anonymous sources, who may or may not have disappeared shortly after they were interviewed.

My birth family was dangerous and evidently unburdened by scruples. I’d come to the right place.

My aunt focused on me again, as if she’d never been interrupted. “What do you want?”

“Couldn’t I just have come to meet the rest of my family?”

“Of course you could have.” Still standing behind her desk, she stared straight into my eyes without a hint of doubt. “But you didn’t.”

That’s when I realized I was being tested. My mother was right; Lia Tower never did anything without a reason. Lying to a Reader—someone who could scent dishonesty in the air, the way the rest of us might smell meat on the grill—wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

“No. I need a favor.”

“Of course you do.” Her slow smile made my skin crawl. “Let’s sit and chat.” She gestured toward a chair in front of the desk and when I sat, she sat behind the desk, clearly establishing our roles—my aunt and I would begin our relationship on opposing sides.

“First of all, who are you?” she said, and I realized that our chat would actually be an interrogation.

“I’m Sera Tower. Your niece.”

When she glanced at the open laptop on her desk, I wondered if she’d spent the past half hour researching me. Or maybe she had some faster, Skill-based method of finding information.

Lia waved one hand, dismissing my reply. “Your full name.”

Right. Like I was going to give her that kind of power over me. My mother had been unSkilled, but well-informed, and she’d taught me well. With my full name, Julia could have me tracked. Or bound against my will. At least, she could try.

I shrugged and tried on a lighthearted smile. “I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours.”

Her forehead wrinkled in a frown. “Fine. Your full first name, at least. What is Sera short for?”

“Serenity.”

Lia’s brows rose in surprise. “I’d guessed Seraphine. And Cecily actually gave you my brother’s surname?”

My chest ached at the memory of my mother, and at Julia’s acknowledgment that they’d once known each other. The truth was that they’d been friends back in high school, before Lia’s brother had come between them. My mother hadn’t gone into detail beyond that, but I’d gathered that the end of their friendship was neither swift nor painless. At least, not for my mom.

If Julia’d suffered from the loss, I saw no sign of it twenty-three years after the fact. However, I could see one small truth behind her eyes, but only because my mother had warned me of it. Lia had said my mother’s name on purpose, hoping to draw more information out of me than she’d actually asked for. More than I should be willing to give.

She wanted to know how much my mother had told me about her. About Jake. About the family and their business.

But I was desperate, not stupid.

“Yes,” I said, holding her gaze. “It’s not on my birth certificate or anything, but I’m officially a Tower.”

What many people—mostly the unSkilled—didn’t know was that it doesn’t matter what’s written on some stupid form a new mother fills out, while she’s still high on painkillers. It’s what she names the baby in her heart and head that counts. And for some reason, the day I was born my mother was thinking of me as Jake Tower’s daughter.

“Why would she do that?” Lia looked privately puzzled for a second, then she directed her confusion toward me.

“My guess is because I’m a Tower.”

“And you’re willing to submit to a blood test?”

“Hell, no.” She could do more damage with my blood than she could with my full name. “But I’ll take the cheek-swab DNA test. From a disinterested third party.”

Her brows rose again. “It’s adorable that you think there’s any such thing.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

Lia folded her arms on her desk. “Needless to say, I won’t be doing anything for you until I have proof of our alleged genetic connection.” She set her drink on her desk blotter again, then leaned back in her chair, arms now crossed over her chest. “But for the sake of expediency, what is this favor you want?”

I glanced at each of the guards, one of whom stood behind Lia and to her left, while the other was posted at the closed door behind me. Their short sleeves covered their upper arms, hiding their binding marks so that I couldn’t tell whether or not they were Skilled, and if so, what those Skills were. But they obviously had ears and mouths. “Will you ask the gentlemen to step outside?”

Lia shook her head slowly. “I can’t do that. What if you’re an assassin sent here to kill me?”

“Why would an assassin walk through the front door?”

“That would be a very good question for the man who killed my brother,” she said. “He did that very thing.”

Right. But he wasn’t an assassin, at least, not according to the newspapers. The official story was that Jake Tower and several of his men had been killed by an angry, mentally unstable employee, who’d also died in the tragic shooting.

“Why would I want to assassinate you?” I asked, but she only watched me, waiting for me to draw my own conclusions. “I don’t want to hurt anyone here. I just need a favor. A private favor. Can’t you hear the truth in my words?”

Something fierce flickered behind her eyes, and I realized the game had changed. I’d changed it, by admitting I knew her Skill.

“Out,” she said, and at first I thought she was kicking me out of the office, or maybe off the property. But then her bodyguards silently filed into the foyer, and I realized the order wasn’t aimed at me.

When the door closed behind them she studied me again through narrowed eyes. “What is your Skill, Serenity Tower?” She said my name with a special emphasis, as if it was the punch line of some joke I would never understand.

“I don’t have one.” I’d been saying that for so long I almost believed it myself, and it didn’t occur to me until the words were already hanging in the air between us that a Reader would be able to hear the truth, even in such a tiny lie.

Her brows rose again, and she seemed to be tasting my words on the air, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe, certain she’d caught me in a fib I’d been living for so long it felt like a part of me.

But my lie was practically true, which must have made it taste true, because when she met my gaze again, hers was much less guarded. She was no longer threatened by me. “You’re a long way from home for a little girl with no Skill.”

“And you’re hiding out in your home behind your Skill,” I shot back, bolstered by my small, secret victory. I enjoyed the anger that settled into the thin lines of her forehead. What was she hiding from?

“I’m not hiding. I’m in mourning,” she insisted, but I didn’t have to be a Reader to see that there wasn’t a single note of truth in those words. “So, why I should do this favor for you?”

I hesitated, momentarily stumped. I’d expected a yes or a no, but I hadn’t expected a why. “Out of respect for your dead brother?”

Julia’s frown deepened. “I fail to see the connection between his death and your brazen, opportunistic grasp at a branch of the family tree you’ve never even acknowledged before.”

Right. Like my “acknowledgment” of their blood in my veins would have been welcomed in the house Jake Tower had shared with his wife and two legitimate children.

Take two. “Because we’re family, and I need your help.”

“And what will you do for me in return?”

“If I have to pay for it, it isn’t a favor,” I pointed out, and that time she laughed out loud, looking genuinely amused for the first time since we’d met. “You should help me because we’re family. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

Julia sipped from her glass, looking at me in some odd combination of pity and delight. “The big city is going to swallow you whole, country mouse.”

I wouldn’t be around long enough for that. “Are you going to help me or not?”

“Assuming your DNA test comes back as you say it will? Yes. We’re going to help each other. Tell me what you want, so I can determine what this favor is worth, Serenity Tower.” She set her glass on the desk blotter, then gave me a humorless little smile. “That sounds like the name of a building. A sweet, pretty little building where flowers grow in the front yard. So what is it you want from me, Serenity?”

“I want you to kill someone.”

The slight narrowing of her eyes was the only sign that she’d heard me, and after that, she only watched me, waiting for more. Making me uncomfortable with every second of the silence that stretched between us, until I had to speak, or risk losing my mind.

“It doesn’t have to be you personally.” I was just prattling by then, but I couldn’t help it. I’d never ordered a hit before, and suddenly I wondered if I was doing it all wrong. Was I supposed to use some kind of special code to avoid incriminating us both? Too late now … “I just need you to … coordinate. And pay.” No sense hedging about that part. If I’d had the money, I might have tried another … contractor. One who didn’t share my DNA.

Julia didn’t even blink. If she’d ever been flustered in her entire life, I couldn’t tell. “And what makes you think I would be able to help you with something like that?”

My pulse whooshed in my ears, but I was in too deep to turn back now. So I sucked in another breath, then forged ahead, full steam.

“I know who you are. Who you really are.” Which is why I’d never been closer than eight hours from the Tower estate in my life. Until now. “I know what kind of people you employ, and I know how you keep them loyal.” They were bound in service, their oaths sealed in blood-laced tattoos that would not fade until the day the bindings expired. If they expired. “And you’re not surprised that I know, because everyone knows. Your business comes from word of mouth. It has to come from word of mouth, because … well it’s not like you can advertise.”

“Is that so?” Julia was a statue. A living, breathing statue, her expression frozen in an almost convincing mask of disinterest.

My temper flared. “Help me or don’t help me. Either way, stop wasting my time.”

Julia exhaled slowly and this time when she met my gaze, hers was stripped of all pretense. “You get that impatient streak from your father,” she said, and I almost sagged with relief. “I assume the prospective target is the human-refuse pile who slaughtered your mother and the rest of your surrogate family?”

I blinked at her in surprise. “How did you …”

Her gaze flicked toward the laptop open on the desk between us, then returned to me. “Sera, there’s nothing about you that I don’t know or can’t find out.”

“Good.” I shrugged, refusing to be intimidated. I may not have grown up in a Skilled cartel family, but I’d faced scarier things than a woman with high-speed internet and cold eyes. “Then you shouldn’t have any trouble figuring out who that ‘human-refuse pile’ is. I have a description, and the police may have some of his DNA from the crime scene.” Easily the most difficult sentence I’d ever had to say aloud. “But that’s all I know.”

A short moment of silence followed, but I sensed that was less respect for my slain family than an opportunity for Lia to gather her thoughts.

“First of all, I’m very sorry for your loss.” Yet she sounded distinctly disinterested. “However, it sounds like what you really want is more complicated than simple closure on a family tragedy. You’re asking me to identify this killer, track him down and deal with him in some permanent manner. Right?”

I couldn’t help noticing that she hadn’t once said anything incriminating. Which made me wonder if we were being recorded. Or if she thought we were being recorded.

“Yeah, I guess. Some painful permanent manner.” No sense in playing coy when I’d already said what I wanted, in front of whatever cameras may have been recording.

“Well, those complications raise the price.”

“I don’t have any money.” Not enough to pay what she was likely to charge, anyway. What little life insurance there’d been had barely paid for the funerals. Three of them.

“I would never charge my own niece for such a service,” Lia said, and I couldn’t tell whether or not the irony was intentional. “However, I do require something from you in return.”

“And that would be …” I shifted in my chair. It took every bit of willpower I possessed to keep from promising her whatever she wanted, right then and there. The price didn’t matter. I just wanted the bastard dead, my family’s deaths avenged with blood and pain, so that I could mourn them, then start to let them go. So I could gather the shattered remains of my life and try to piece them back together.

So that they would be avenged.

But the price did matter, the voice in my head insisted, sounding just like my mother. She’ll demand service, that voice insisted. She’ll make you sign on the line, and you’ll work for her forever to pay off this debt. His life for yours, Sera. It’s not worth it.

But I wouldn’t be dead, and he would be. That bastard’s death was worth a few years stuck in a less than ideal job. Worth whatever they made me do. And it wouldn’t be forever. It would just be for a few years, right? Service terms had limits, didn’t they?

People survive working for the syndicates. It happens all the time. Right?

I was already resigning myself to life under Julia Tower’s thumb when she leaned back in her chair again, watching me for a moment before she spoke. “I want you to disappear.”

“Excuse me?” Surprise made my voice squeak, but Lia only waited for my answer like she might if she’d asked for the last fry from my plate. But I didn’t know how to answer.

“If I do this favor for you, Sera, I want you to disappear. Forever. My brother’s wife and children are devastated with grief,” she said, and I frowned, picturing the children who’d nearly bowled me over in the foyer. Were they laughing and chasing butterflies over their father’s no doubt overpriced grave? No. But they weren’t crying and ripping their hair out, either.

“They don’t deserve this,” Lia continued. “I won’t put them through the additional pain and humiliation of finding out he sired a bastard with some slut he knew in high school.”

She said it with no visible emotion, her words just as cold now as her condolences had been minutes earlier.

My cheeks flamed. I shouldn’t have cared what she thought of me. Jake Tower may have been my father, but he was never my dad—that title would always go to the man my mother married, who’d loved me and my sister more than he’d loved his own life. And who would never have called me a bastard or insulted my mother.

But Lia’s insult hit its mark, and I knew that if I wanted to avenge my mother’s death, I would have to let the insult against her stand. And I would have to leave the Tower estate, so the Towers could continue to live in blissful ignorance of my existence, and the messy circumstances of my conception and birth.

No problem. After fewer than ten minutes spent with Julia, I never wanted to see her again.

“So, if I promise to go away after it’s done, you’ll … take care of this for me?”

“I’ll need more than a simple promise, but yes.”

“What does that mean?” But I was pretty sure I already knew.

“I need your word in writing. Sealed in blood.” She wanted to bind me to my oath, which would physically prevent me from ever going back on it.

My heart dropped into my stomach. I had no intention of going back on my word, but the thought of letting someone bind me to anything made me sick to my stomach. My mom had preached against that the way most mothers warn their kids not to talk to strangers, or run in the house.

Or jump off a cliff.

“Why? You have my word that I don’t want anything else from you, but someday I might want to get to know my … half siblings.” Just saying that felt strange. My real sister was dead, and she was the only sister I would ever have. Surely the only one I’d ever want. But … I’d just lost the only family I’d ever known. I wasn’t about to give up the right to ever get to know what few relatives I had left, even if they couldn’t replace what I’d lost. Even if they were rich, and spoiled, and quite possibly as vicious as our father and aunt.

My mother was an only child and her parents were dead. Jake Tower’s children were the last blood-based connection I would ever have to another human being. There was always the chance that one of those kids—probably not Kevin—would grow up to be a decent human being and parent to the only nieces and nephews I’d ever have.

I shrugged. “Or they might want to know me.”

“Sera, it’s those children I’m thinking about.” Lia pushed her laptop aside and folded her arms on her massive desk, meeting my gaze with an intense one of her own, like we’d suddenly become confidantes. “Lynn, their mother, is a sweet, beautiful woman, but between the two of us, she’s never been the brightest bulb in the chandelier, and right now she’s too blinded by grief to think clearly. But someone has to look out for the children. I’m not going to help you unless you’re willing to give up any claim to their inheritance.”

“Money?” I gaped at her. “You think I want your brother’s money?”

“I don’t know what you really want, Sera. I know your net worth, your college GPA and how much you paid for the heap of metal parked in front of my house, but I don’t know anything about you as a person, because you evidently felt no desire to connect with this side of your family until you needed something from us.” Her accusation was as sharp as her gaze, and I couldn’t really argue, though I felt my cheeks flame again. “But I will do whatever needs to be done to protect those children. If you really aren’t trying to steal their inheritance, you should have no problem swearing to that.”

“I don’t,” I snapped, struggling to think through the anger swelling rapidly to fill both my head and heart. The bitch was appealing to my morals on behalf of two half-orphaned children. I didn’t for a second believe that was her only interest in the matter, but I didn’t want anything from the dead father I’d never met, and I certainly didn’t want anything from her. Except this one favor. “Write it. I’ll sign it, and you’ll never see me again. I don’t want anything but the slow, painful death of the bastard who killed my family.”

“Wonderful.” Lia shifted in her chair and folded her hands in her lap. “And, of course, you’ll be willing to give up the Tower name.”

“My name?”

“My brother’s name,” she corrected. “His children’s name. My name. You’ve never even used it, have you?” I shook my head, and she shrugged as if what she was asking was no big deal. “Then why would you mind giving it up?”

Why would I mind?

I started speaking before my thoughts had fully formed, fueled by anger, unburdened by forethought. “Because it’s my name. It belongs to me every bit as much as it belongs to you. Because for whatever reason, my mother wanted me to have it. Because whether you like it or not—hell, whether I like it or not—that name is part of who I am, and I don’t even know what that means yet, other than the fact that the aunt I share it with is a real bitch.”

Julia blinked, and I relished the glimpse of surprise that flickered across her expression, the first I’d seen so far. “You’re not thinking this through. There’s nothing that can be done about the fact that it belongs to you, so in that sense, it can never be taken from you. But you’d be safer using another name. Your stepfather’s? Or even your mother’s. You’ll be infinitely harder to Track if no one knows your real surname, Sera.”

Yet we both knew she wasn’t thinking of my well-being.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was that whichever last name I used was my decision. Mine. And no snotty rich bitch with a chip on her shoulder and blood on her hands was going to tell me what I could or couldn’t call myself.

But Julia Tower had yet to come to that conclusion. So I helped her along. “No.”

She stood and leaned forward, both palms flat on the surface of her desk. “I am the only person in the world who will do what you want done without asking for a dime in return. My price is simple. You will sign over your right to anything Kevin and Aria stand to inherit. Including their surname. Or I will have you removed from this property immediately, and you can hunt down this killer yourself, then spend the balance of your life behind bars, paying your debt to society. You have three minutes to make a decision.”

But there was no decision to be made. And Lia damn well knew it.

While I sat glaring up at her, resisting the urge to stand and start yelling, the office door opened behind me and Lia gestured for someone to come in.

I twisted in my chair to see a woman in her thirties carrying a manila folder. My aunt held out her hand and the woman marched past me to give her the folder. “That’s the best I could do, on short notice, but if you have another hour …”

Julia waved dismissively, and the woman’s sentence faded into a tense silence while my aunt read whatever the folder held. After several seconds, she lifted the top sheet of paper and scanned the next one. Then she flipped the pages back into order and closed the folder. “Sometimes simpler is better. Unnecessary language leaves room for loopholes. This will do. Send in the Binder.” She motioned toward the door, and the woman in brown headed for the foyer as though she was being physically pulled in that direction. As though she couldn’t wait to leave.

I knew exactly how she felt.

Julia sat, then slid the folder across the desk toward me. “Sign.”

“Now?” I could practically feel the blood drain from my face as I stared at the newly drafted binding document—the real reason she’d kept me waiting so long. She expected me to sign it right then and there, and the Binder she’d called for would seal my promise in blood—either his or mine. Or both.

I hesitated, my hand flat on the closed folder.

“Sign, or get out,” Julia said, and there wasn’t a hint of doubt in her voice. She’d already figured out that I wasn’t going to leave without getting what I came for. No matter what it cost.

I opened the folder, my hand shaking with rage. It doesn’t matter, I told myself, as I picked up the pen she slid toward me. You don’t need them. You’ve never needed them.

But what if those kids needed me someday? What if Kevin or Aria needed help from a relative who didn’t have a chunk of ice in place of her heart or wasn’t the dim bulb in the proverbial chandelier? Was there anyone in this cesspool of corrupt power they could count on? Could money buy friendship or trust?

The only thing I knew for sure was that if I didn’t sign, the man who killed my entire family would never see justice. The police can’t catch a Skilled criminal, much less convict him.

I scanned the first page, only half reading my own promise to forfeit any and all birthrights, including the Tower surname. I’d scribbled the first three letters of my name on the line at the bottom of the second page when the door flew open behind me and slammed into the wall.

“Sera?”

Startled, I turned so fast the pen left a long black line across the bottom of the page. Gwendolyn Tower stood in the doorway, as perfectly put together as any picture of her I’d ever seen, except for the puffy, pink flesh around her eyes.

She blinked at me and I wondered what she was seeing. Did I look like her husband? Why didn’t she look surprised? Lia had implied that Lynn and her children knew nothing about me.

Then Gwendolyn’s gaze slid past me. “Julia, what the hell are you doing? Did you tell her?”

My pulse spiked. Tell me what?

Lia stepped around the corner of her desk, ready to intercept her sister-in-law. “This is business. It’s none of your concern.”

“Tell her!” Lynn Tower shouted, and the guard standing behind her flinched, then looked to my aunt for some instruction.

“Go back to your room.” Julia took Lynn’s arm while I watched in stunned silence. “I’ll explain everything when we’re finished here.”

Lynn turned to me then, her eyes damp, her gaze strong. “It’s yours, Sera. All of it. Jake’s personal property and assets went to me, but his business holdings go to his oldest child. Don’t let her cut you out.”

“Gwendolyn, out!” Julia shouted as I fell backward into my chair, my legs numb from shock. The guards guided Lynn, gently but firmly, toward the door at about the same moment I realized I still held the pen Lia had given me.

Business holdings? What did that even mean? Properties? Companies? Buildings? Cash?

It’s yours, Sera. All of it.

Lynn’s words played over in my head as I watched the guards escort her forcibly out of the office.

The truth hit me in that moment, like a burst of light in front of my eyes—painful, disorienting and nearly blinding.

I’d just inherited Jake Tower’s criminal empire.




Two


Kris

“So, how many is that, Kris?” My sister Korinne perched on the arm of the couch, one knee drawn up to her chest, thick hair tucked behind her ear. We’d both inherited our dad’s blond hair, but hers was several shades paler than my own. “How many poor, unfortunate souls have we freed from the corrupt clutches of the Tower machine?”

“As of today?” I did a quick tally of the names listed in the notepad on my lap. “Twelve. With three more strong possibilities.”

“Only twelve?” Kenley, my youngest sister, groaned from an armchair in the corner. If she were a couple of inches taller, she and Kori could have been twins. “It feels like a hundred.” Kenni looked exhausted, yet much younger than her twenty-six years, as if trauma had somehow left her more innocent than it had found her. More fragile.

Vanessa handed Kenni a cool rag, still damp from the kitchen faucet. “We knew breaking the bindings would be tough, but that last one was easier, right?”

“Yeah. If by easier, you mean just as hard as the eleven before.”

Van stood and wedged herself into the oversize chair behind Kenley, who scooted forward to make room for her. Kenni leaned back with her head against her girlfriend’s shoulder, and Van laid the cool rag over her forehead, offering wordless comfort in the face of the enormous task we’d all undertaken. A task that felt more impossible by the day.

A binding is like a metaphorical—and metaphysical—rope, tying one person to another. Or one person to his oath. Or one person into obedience or employment. My sister Kenley was one of the most powerful Binders in the world, but she would gladly have given up her Skill, if that meant escaping the notice of syndicate leaders who wanted to “hire” her for her ability.

The problem with syndicate employment is that it isn’t just a job, it’s an existence. Worse. It’s indentured servitude, wherein the employee is obligated to do whatever the employer requires, within the bounds of the contract they signed and sealed, usually in blood. For however long that contract lasts.

A five-year term is the standard. Five years in syndicate service feels like an eternity.

Kenley and Kori each served six and a half.

Before Jake Tower died, Kenley was the most important cog in the Tower syndicate machine—the gear that kept the engine running. Tower’d had administrators, accountants, clerical staff and laborers to do the day-to-day work. He’d had muscle—like Kori—to enforce the rules. He’d even had a pool of highly specialized lawyers on-staff to write iron-clad employment contracts.

And he’d had Kenley to seal those contracts, locking people into his service in bindings so strong that only she could break them.

Of course, the terms of her own contract had prevented her from freeing anyone she’d bound into service, but now that she was no longer a Tower employee, she was trying to do the right thing. To free all the people she’d enslaved by breaking the bindings she’d sealed for Jake Tower, which had transferred to his sister, Julia, upon his death.

We were all trying to help her, but the process was slow. And difficult. And dangerous, because Julia Tower didn’t want those bindings broken. Each one Kenley psychically severed robbed Julia of another employee, eroding the source of her inherited wealth and power.

“I know this sucks, Kenni, and I hate being stuck here as much as anyone.” Kori glanced around at the house where we’d spent almost every waking moment of the past three months, hiding from Julia Tower and her henchmen. I could practically see cabin fever raging behind her eyes. “But it could be worse, right? At least there’s no resistance pain.”

The binding enslaving Kenley to the Tower syndicate had been broken when I’d killed the Binder who’d sealed it. Okay, there may have been some doubt about whose bullet actually hit him first, but the point is that since the Binder was dead, breaking the bindings she’d sealed was no longer in violation of Kenni’s oath. Which is good, because when you resist a sealed oath, your body starts to shut down one organ at a time until you give in and keep your word.

Or you die.

But even without the resistance pain, breaking each binding one at a time was still long, mentally exhausting work for Kenley, even with the rest of us pitching in to identify and contact those who wanted out of their oaths to Tower and to coordinate the secure, clandestine meetings.

The project had taken over our lives, and it was as much a survival effort on our part as an effort to liberate those who wanted freedom. As long as Julia Tower had employees bound into her service, she’d have the resources and power to eventually hunt us down and eliminate the threat we represented.

“So, who’s next?” Ian Holt sank onto the couch next to Kori, and she leaned into him, a display of trust and affection I’d rarely seen from her. I don’t know how he got through her mile-thick outer shell, but I do know that I’ve never seen her happier. And I know that Ian helped free Kori, Kenni and Vanessa from that bastard Jake Tower, and that he’d stuck around to help us free everyone else Kenley had been forced to bind. As far as we were all concerned, Ian was part of the family, even if Kori never got around to putting a ring on his finger.

“Um …” I checked my list again. “Rick Wallace.” I glanced at Kori. “What do we know about him?”

She shrugged. “He’s a Silencer. Average strength. Mid-thirties. He’s also a world-class asshole who’s literally never heard ‘no’ from a woman, because he sucks the sound right out of the word every time one tries to say it. I’m not surprised he wants out from under Julia Tower, but I’m kind of surprised he’d contact us, considering how many times I’ve threatened to cut his tongue out and serve it to his latest ‘date’ on a toasted hot-dog bun.”

Ian made a face. “That’s disgusting,”

Kori nodded solemnly. “So is Rick Wallace.”

“Agreed. But no one deserves to be tied to Julia Tower,” Kenley insisted, and Kori kept her mouth shut, though she obviously wanted to argue. “When and where is the meeting?”

“Meghan’s parents’ house,” Ian said. His sister-in-law had offered to let us use the house when she and his twin brother left town.

“Olivia’s already securing the site,” Kori added. “We’re supposed to meet her there in half an hour. If you’re sure you feel like it.”

“I’m fine.” Kenley squared her shoulders and sat straighter. “Let’s just get it over with.”

“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.

Instead of giving Sera my pistol, I grabbed her hand and pulled her with me into the closet.

She screamed, and I threw the door shut.

“Kill him!” Julia shouted.

“No!” Lynn screeched.

I fired twice into the ceiling, killing both the visible and the infrared lights at once. Then, as the first bullets ripped through the closet door, I pulled Sera into the shadows with me.

I took the woman in the yellow scarf.




Three


Sera

His eyes were a pale bluish gray. They were the first things I noticed after Lynn Tower opened the office door over my aunt’s protest.

The next thing I noticed was his weapon, and the two men bleeding on the marble tile in the foyer. Bile rose to my throat at the sight of so much blood pooling on the floor, and brutal memories tried to surface, but I shook them off. None of the bystanders were hurt. He’d only shot people who’d aimed guns at him.

This man may have been a killer, but he was no murderer. The distinction was small, but important.

The man aiming his gun at me looked furious, pale brows furrowed, jaw clenched, aim unwavering. He was looking for someone—I’d missed the specifics, thanks to the alarm—and was obviously willing to do whatever it took to find … whomever. He looked desperate.

But not crazy.

Those blue-gray eyes seemed to see everything all at once—every guard aiming a gun at him, every witness watching, and every possible escape route. He was too calm to be crazy. And if he was sane, he could be reasoned with.

He had to be reasoned with, because if Julia had him shot and his finger twitched on his own trigger, he’d blow a hole right through me, and no one other than Gwendolyn Tower seemed particularly concerned by that possibility.

My heart thudding in my ears, I held my hand out for his weapon, demanding focus and calm from myself as I mentally counted the shots I’d heard. But I couldn’t be sure of the number, thanks to the alarm.

He glanced at my scarf, then at my hand, and for a moment I thought he was actually going to give me his gun.

Instead, he grabbed my hand and dragged me into a supply closet, nearly hauling me off my feet. Startled, I screamed when he kicked the door shut, but then he raised his gun and shot into the ceiling, once, twice.

The closet went dark and glass rained down on us from the broken fixtures. Too shocked to speak, I tried to jerk my hand from his grip, but he pulled me again, and I stumbled after him, one step, then two.

The last thing I heard was gunfire coming from the foyer. They shot at us. They knew I was with him, and they’d fired anyway! On Julia’s command!

That bitch!

Then there was silence, except for the sound of my own panicked breathing—too fast and too hard.

The darkness was absolute, and I couldn’t see a thing. I couldn’t feel a thing, except for his hand tight around mine, and the body heat that told me this room was smaller than the last, and that he was standing much too close.

I opened my mouth to scream again and he dropped my hand. A door opened and he stepped out of what I could now identify as an empty coat closet, his gun aimed at the floor.

That blue-gray gaze found mine again from a narrow hallway outside the closet. He was staring, as if something about my face made no sense.

“What the hell just happened?” I demanded, torn between the need to know exactly where I was and reluctance to venture beyond the closet into unknown territory.

“Traveling. Colloquially known as shadow-walking.”

“I know what it means. Where are we? Who are you?”

“I’m the man who just saved your life.” He holstered his gun. “You’re welcome.” Then he turned left and marched down the hall. “You want a drink? I’m having one.”

“Wait!” I wrapped one hand around the door frame and leaned into the hall as he turned to face me from a living room full of dated furniture. “Are you damaged? You didn’t save my life. You nearly got me killed!”

He crossed his arms over a well-defined chest put on display by a snug blue T-shirt. “I pulled you out of the line of fire.”

“I wouldn’t have been in the line of fire, if it weren’t for you. And if it weren’t for me, they would have killed you!”

“They tried. They shot at us both.” His wary focus narrowed on me until it felt invasive. “Sera, right?” he said, and I declined to answer. “Why were they willing to kill you, Sera?”

I blinked, scrambling for a response that wouldn’t actually tell him anything about me. “Where are we?” I demanded when I couldn’t come up with any answers of my own. “What am I doing here? Who are you?”

“Who am I?” Anger hardened his features and furrowed his brows. “Who the hell are you, and where’s Kenley?”

“Who’s Kenley?”

His anger visibly swelled in response to my question and he marched toward me, fists clenched at his sides, warning echoing in every step as his heavy boots clomped on the wood floor.

My heart lurched into my throat. I backed into the closet, peering through deep shadows for something to use as a weapon, but there was nothing. The closet was completely empty.

He was two steps away when I pulled the door shut, my pulse whooshing in my ears, then held the knob, using all of my weight to keep the door closed. What the hell was I thinking, jumping in the middle of syndicate business? I should have let Julia kill him….

The man growled, then the door was ripped from my grasp so fast I stumbled into the hall after it. He caught me before I could fall, but I shoved him off so quickly I almost missed the change in his expression.

“You’re not a Traveler.” He exhaled and the relief lining his features echoed within the sound. “I thought you’d disappeared through the shadows.”

If I could have, I would have, but even without having grown up in the Skilled subculture, I knew better than to confirm or deny my own abilities.

I backed away from him, past the open closet door, hands open and ready to grab the first potential weapon I came across. “Let’s try this again. Who are you?”

Anger resurfaced behind his eyes, but was quickly replaced with confusion. “You really don’t know?”

“Why should I?”

He shrugged, and his jacket rose to reveal his holstered gun. “Well, if you work for Julia Tower—”

“I don’t.”

“Then what were you doing in her office?”

“That’s none of your business.” Being related to Jake Tower was dangerous, and having that fact known could be deadly. My mother had made sure I understood that, and Julia had just reinforced that lesson with a lethal spray of bullets.

His gaze narrowed. “Why would she tell her men to drop their guns at your request?”

Shit. So much for revealing nothing about myself.

New plan: reveal as little as possible.

“Because she wants something from me.”

“What does she want?”

She wanted me to sign away my rights to the Tower legacy, not to protect her niece’s and nephew’s interests, but so that the wealth and power would remain under her fist, at least until they came of age. But … “Again, that’s none of your business. Who is—”

He reached for me, and before I realized he wanted to brush aside a strand of hair caught on my scarf, I knocked his hand away and took another step back. My fists rose automatically. He glanced at me in surprise. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“That’s a true statement.” I was ready to fight.

He blinked, startled, then looked kind of disappointed. “No, I mean, I don’t want to hurt you. You don’t need to defend yourself from me.”

“Right. You just shot several people and hauled a strange woman into a strange house against her will. Naturally I should assume you mean me no harm.”

“Okay, I know how that sounds.” He held both hands up, showing me he was unarmed, yet his gun still peeked out at me from its holster. “But I promise this is not that kind of abduction. If you don’t believe me, look behind you.” He gestured to something over my shoulder, and my need to know what was behind me warred with my need to keep him in sight.

I turned and pressed my back against the hallway wall so I could see both him and … the old woman asleep in a recliner in the room next to the closet I’d just stepped out of. Her ample chest rose and fell silently. Several melting ice cubes floated in a glass of watered-down tea on the small table next to her.

“Who’s that?”

“My grandmother. She’s a pretty deep sleeper, thanks to her medication, but she will wake up if you keep shouting, and I’d appreciate it if you’d let her sleep.”

“You’re serious?” What kind of armed killer kidnapped strange women and took them home to Grandma? What kind of family was this?

Although, considering the branch of my own family I’d just met, I didn’t really have room to criticize.

He shrugged again and shoved his hands into his pockets, trying to look harmless; but even with his grandmother asleep in the next room, that was impossible to believe. He’d taken down at least four of my aunt’s guards in just a couple of minutes, and his aim at me had never wavered, even with half a dozen guns pointed at him. The man had nerves of steel. He may have been many things—including a devoted grandson—but harmless was not one of them.

Yet he hadn’t laid a hand on me.

“Why am I here? Who are you?” Why would he shoot to wound men who would readily have killed him? Why would he kidnap me at gunpoint, then claim to have no violent motive? Why would he think I knew his name, then refuse to give it to me?

Normally I’d assume I understood the destructive, violent nature of a home invasion. I’d become an unwilling expert on the subject when I’d lost my entire family a few months before, and getting caught in the middle of this one should have sent me over the edge.

But the Tower estate was no ordinary home, and the man in front of me was no ordinary invader. He hadn’t broken in to kill someone, he’d broken in to find someone, and I was inexplicably fixated on the differences between his crime and the one that had shattered my entire reality.

Or maybe I just really needed those differences to exist. Maybe I needed him to have a good reason for what he’d done—what he was still doing—because I hadn’t seen one damn thing in the world worth living for since I’d become an orphan and an only child, well into adulthood.

This man, whoever he was, had something worth living for. Something worth fighting for. Something worth dying for. And I really wanted to know what that was.

“Who were you looking for?” My voice was barely a whisper, but he heard me. In fact, he seemed to hear the need behind the question.

For several seconds he only watched me. Studying me, as if he was trying to decide whether or not he could trust me—an irony, considering that he’d just dragged me through the shadows. Finally he exhaled slowly and met my gaze with a heavy one of his own. “Julia Tower took my little sister, so I broke into the Tower residence to get her back.”

I closed my eyes and an ache radiated from the center of my chest as my own sister’s smile haunted my memory. My next inhalation hurt. I’d never seen his sister and I still didn’t even know his name, but I understood his pain. I would do anything to get Nadia back, if that were possible, but …

“You broke into the Tower estate.” It sounded just as crazy when I said it as when he’d said it. “There are easier ways to kill yourself, you know.” Yet hadn’t I done the same thing—minus all the gunfire?

Another shrug from the man with no name. “I figured that was the last thing they’d expect, thus the thing they’d be least prepared to defend against. Turns out I was right.”

“No, you were lucky.” As was I, but I’d known going in that they’d want to talk to me.

He scowled. “I make my own luck.”

“You nearly made yourself a used-bullet receptacle. When did your sister go missing?” Please, please don’t let his sister be an actual child. Surely he was too old for that. But then again, I’d just met two young siblings of my own …

“She didn’t just ‘go missing.’” He leaned with one shoulder against the wall, two feet from the end of the hallway. “Someone pulled her through the shadows a few minutes before I … met you.”

“Well, then it couldn’t have been Julia. She’s—” At the last second I realized she wouldn’t want me telling strangers what her Skill was. Not that I cared what she wanted, but pissing her off wouldn’t make her any easier to deal with. “She’s not a shadow-walker. Anyway, I was with her when your sister disappeared. It wasn’t Julia.”

“It wasn’t her personally,” he agreed. “She doesn’t do her own dirty work. But my sister was taken on her orders, and Julia knows where she is.”

There wasn’t a single glimmer of doubt in him. Not in his unflinching gaze, his steady voice or the confidence in every word he spoke. And when I considered the bullets flying through that storage closet and Julia’s apparent willingness to slaughter me in cold blood to keep me from inheriting her fortune, it wasn’t hard for me to believe my aunt capable of abduction.

But then, obviously so was the man who’d kidnapped me.

Anger flamed up my spine with the sudden realization of where I fit into his storm-the-castle routine. “So, what, when you couldn’t find your sister, you took me instead? What am I? A hostage?”

“No, I …” His cheeks flushed, and for the first time since he’d dragged me through the shadows, he seemed unsure of what to say. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“It’s complicated?” Unless he’d just discovered he’d inherited millions in ill-gotten gains from a crime-boss father he’d never met, making him the target of a crime-boss aunt he wished he’d never met, he couldn’t possibly understand the meaning of the word complicated. Not the way I understood it, anyway.

“Look, I’m the last person Julia Tower would be willing to trade your sister for.” Though she might strike a bargain for my corpse—not that I had any intention of admitting that to a man desperate to rescue his sibling. “So, I need you to take me back. But I swear if I hear anything about your sister, I’ll let you know what building you should break into next. So why don’t you just give me your name and number, and I’ll—”

“Sera, I can’t take you back there.” He held my gaze, and his statement had the grave finality of some indisputable truth. “They tried to kill you.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, reeling from the irony. “You can’t let someone else kill me, but you’re fine with the fact that you kidnapped me?” What kind of weird-ass moral code was he following?

“I didn’t really kidnap you.” He glanced over my shoulder into the bedroom where his grandmother was now snoring loudly in her recliner. “I just … removed you from a dangerous situation. You’re welcome.” He mustered up a grin, obviously trying to diffuse my mounting anger and frustration, but it didn’t work.

“For the last time, it wasn’t dangerous until you got there, and I didn’t ask to be removed.”

Still, he had a point. I didn’t want my father’s dirty money, but would Julia even listen long enough to let me say that, or would she shoot me on sight?

I exhaled through clenched teeth. “Fine. Take me somewhere else then. Drop me off downtown.” Where I could regroup and decide how best to proceed with my homicidally estranged aunt. And get my car back.

“I can’t.” He rubbed his forehead with one hand. “I’m sorry, but you have to stay here until I figure out what to do with you. So … make yourself comfortable.” He twisted to wave one hand at the living room, and indignation began to smolder deep in my gut. “I’m guessing you’re about ready for that drink now?”

“You can’t be serious.” I followed him into the tiny living room, where a couch and several armchairs surrounded a worn coffee table, all facing a small television.

“I am,” he called over one shoulder as he crossed the living room toward the kitchen. “And could you be quiet for a minute? I need to think …”

“No I can’t be quiet!” That smolder deep inside me burst into a blaze, and I felt as though I could breathe fire. “I’ll tell the whole damn neighborhood I’ve been kidnapped if you don’t take me someplace public, right now!”

“There’s no neighborhood.” He turned to face me from the kitchen doorway, infuriatingly calm, and gestured to the sidelights flanking the front door.

I glanced through the glass and groaned. No other houses. No other buildings. No traffic. Nothing but starlight and a narrow gravel road, illuminated by the porch light. Where the hell were we?

“And you’re not kidnapped,” he continued when I turned, ready to roast him alive with the power of my rage. “You’re just … borrowed. I’m gonna put you back.” He frowned and his gaze dropped to the floor for a second. “Well, probably not back where I found you, but … My point is that you won’t have to stay here forever.”

“I don’t have to stay here at all. You can’t just borrow people!”

He glanced around the empty room, as if expecting someone to agree with me. “Kinda looks like I can. You want some coffee? Or are you thinking something stronger? I’m thinking something stronger.”

“What is wrong with you?” I demanded when anger defeated my attempt at something more articulate.

“My sister’s missing, my grandmother has Alzheimer’s, Julia Tower wants me dead and you’re turning out to be kind of a pain in the ass.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have kidnapped me!”

He rubbed his forehead, then raked one hand through his blond waves. “Well, hindsight is worthless, so could you just shut up so I can figure a few things out?”

“What things?” I demanded, but then I figured that out for myself. He’d broken into Julia’s house, guns ablaze—surely an unforgivable insult to the head of a Skilled crime syndicate—but she had yet to return the favor. Which surely meant she didn’t know where he was. “If you’re worried that I’ll tell Julia where you are, or something like that, you can relax. I don’t know who you are, or where we are, and she hasn’t exactly inspired my loyalty today.”

“Loyalty is compulsory when you’re bound.” He hesitated, but just for a second. “Are you bound to her?”

“No. I’m not bound to anyone.”

“And I’m just supposed to take your word for it?” His frown deepened and he glanced at my left arm, covered by my long-sleeved shirt. “I … um … need to see your arm.”

But even if I’d felt obligated to show him my unmarked arm—and I didn’t—I couldn’t have complied without taking my shirt off. And that wasn’t gonna happen.

“No.” Was this what my mother’s obsessive caution had spared me? A lifetime of suspicion, and dangerous loyalties, and lives defined by the color of the marks on my skin? By the constant need to prove I had no syndicate marks and served no one but myself?

“I’m asking nicely,” he said, but there was a warning threaded through his voice.

“And if I refuse nicely?” I backed up several steps, blindly aiming for the front door while my heart pounded in my throat. “Are you going to get less nice?”

Was I going to have to get less nice? He was bigger and stronger, but I had no problem fighting dirty, and I had nothing left to lose.

“No.” He exhaled in frustration. “Look, you don’t have to take anything off. We can cut your sleeve, or you can change into something of my sister’s. I just need to know that when I let you—” He stopped, then started over. “That when you leave, you won’t be obligated to go back and tell Julia everything you saw and heard here today.”

My heart thumped painfully. “Can’t you just take my word for it?”

He looked kind of sad. “I wish we lived in the kind of world where I could, but we don’t. Can’t you just show me? If you don’t have a mark, why is this such a big deal?”

That question cut straight to the heart of the matter, and suddenly everything seemed really clear. “Because I don’t have to. Because you don’t get to see anything I don’t want to show you. Because you don’t have the right to keep me here and make demands. Because the fact that I don’t have a mark means I don’t have to take orders from anyone. Including you!”

He blinked at me in surprise. Then he nodded. “All valid points. And in a perfect world, they’d matter, but here, they don’t. I can’t take you anywhere until I know you pose no threat to me and mine.” With that, he turned and stepped into the kitchen while I fumed from the middle of the living room floor.

“Fine.” My jaw already ached from grinding my teeth. “I’m guessing your range is no more than a few miles, so we can’t have gone too far.” I had some cash, my only credit card and my phone. No reason I couldn’t walk back to civilization on my own.

“Why do women always err on the side of underestimation?” he mumbled, pulling a bottle from an overhead cabinet as I headed for the front door. “My Skill could be huge, for all you know.” He had his back to me. He wasn’t even watching.

A second later, as I twisted and pulled on the front doorknob to no avail, I saw why.

“The door’s nailed shut!” Furious, I bent to examine the nails and my teeth ground together when I noticed the tiny crosshairs. “Those aren’t nails, they’re screws!”

And half of them had been countersunk. No one was getting through that door without an electric drill, a Phillips head bit and a spare half hour.

“Did that myself,” my kidnapper called from the kitchen. “Of course, we can probably kiss the security deposit goodbye. Ironic, isn’t it, considering that I actually made the house more secure.”

I stood to glare at him through the kitchen doorway, fingering my phone in my pocket. If I didn’t dread explaining the circumstances of my abduction, I’d have already dialed 911. “Look, I don’t recognize your particular psychosis, but trust me when I say this is a very special kind of crazy. Why the hell would you screw the front door shut?”

He shrugged, leaning with one hip against the counter, a half-empty bottle of whiskey in one hand. “We don’t use that exit.”

My focus found the door behind him, which presumably led to the backyard, and before I could decide whether or not to make a break for it—which would involve running right past him—he shook his head. “We don’t use that one, either.”

Both exits were screwed shut because he and his grandmother had no use for them? Bullshit.

He was prepared to house a prisoner, which meant this was premeditated. How could I have misread him so drastically? The fact that he cared about his sister didn’t make him less dangerous; it made him more dangerous. If his rash invasion of the Tower estate was any indication, he’d do anything to get her back. He’d gone in planning to take a hostage. The bastard wasn’t going to let me go until he got his sister back!

But … that didn’t make any sense. Why trade me, if he didn’t want me to go back to Julia? Was that just an act? Or had he planned to kidnap someone she valued—someone she would bargain for—but got stuck with me instead? If so, what was the new plan? What good was a hostage who couldn’t be traded?

No good at all.

Panic raced through me like fire in my veins. This was real. The psycho with nice eyes had taken me, but had no use for me. Even if he truly had no plans for violence—and his grandmother’s presence seemed to confirm that—he had no intentions of letting me go, either.

Knowing the doors didn’t function made my skin crawl, as if I were trapped not just by this house, but by my own body. My own mind.

I needed fresh air. Space. Now.

Logically, I knew that was the panic talking. There was plenty of air, and the house wasn’t that small—the foot of the staircase in one corner of the living room meant there was an entire second story I had yet to see. And the hum of the air conditioner told me the ventilation was fine. Being locked up wasn’t going to kill me.

But being stupid might.

Think.

Assuming he truly loved his grandmother—and I’d seen no reason to doubt that—he wouldn’t leave her alone if she couldn’t get out of the house. What if there was a fire?

There had to be a functioning exit.

I took a deep breath and swallowed my panic. “Fine. If you don’t use the doors, how do you get out of here?”

He didn’t even look up from the soda he was pouring into a short glass, over an inch of whiskey. “The same way I brought you in.”

Damn it. “You’re both shadow-walkers?”

“Not all of us. But enough.”

All of us? How many were there? “And I assume the windows are …”

“Screwed shut. Which is overkill in some cases, because about half of them were already painted shut. This place is pretty old.”

Great. No one could get in or out of whatever weird-ass house he’d dragged me into without the ability to travel. Or something to throw through a window, and a good head start.

I’d call that Plan B.

Plan A needed to be smarter, and a little more tech-savvy. While my kidnapper rattled pots and pans in the kitchen, I dug my cell from my pocket and sank onto the couch. I opened the GPS function on my phone and waited while the map loaded, slowly, slowly, slowly narrowing down my location.

Cell phone reception in his stupid, screwed-shut house sucked.

“You still alive in there?” he called from the kitchen, after about a minute of silence from me.

I considered not answering, but then he’d come looking for me.

“Alive and pissed off!” I called back.

“I’m sorry about that. I didn’t plan this, but now we’re kind of stuck with each other for a bit.”

Yeah, right. And finally, the GPS centered on my location.

I didn’t recognize any of the street names, but that was no surprise, considering I’d never been to the city before and I’d let my car’s GPS navigate the whole way to the Tower estate.

I zoomed out on the map, searching for familiar landmarks, and when I couldn’t find any, I zoomed in again, hoping to narrow my location down to a street address. Or at least a close cross-street. Then I’d call the police and have this grandma’s-boy, kidnapping son of a bitch arrested.

I didn’t have to press charges, or even explain how I’d wound up in the House of Crazy. I just needed the cops to come open a door.

But there didn’t seem to be any cross-streets. We were truly in the middle of nowhere.

The loading icon spun and spun as the map tried to refresh, and I stared at it in mounting frustration and anger. My hand clenched around the phone so hard the plastic case groaned and my knuckles turned white, but finally the new map loaded, and—

My cell was ripped from my grasp.

“Hey!” I stood and reached for my phone, but he stepped back and my nails clawed his forearm instead, drawing four white lines, but no blood.

“Sorry. Can’t let you do that.” Then the bastard dropped my phone and stomped on it, grinding with the heel of his hiking boot until shards of metal and plastic were hopelessly embedded into the worn carpet.

Fury sparked the length of my spine and my right hand curled into a fist. I swung before I even realized what I’d intended, and my fist slammed into his jaw. “You owe me a phone!”

He stumbled back in surprise, rubbing his face, and I ignored the ache in my hand as I knelt to scrape up the remains of my cell, just in case. But it was trashed.

“This isn’t funny!” I shouted.

“Agreed.” He stomped into the kitchen and a second later I heard ice rattle.

“You can’t keep me here. If you think I’m going to twiddle my thumbs as your hostage, you kidnapped the wrong damn woman.”

“Would you please calm down?” He appeared in the living room again, this time holding an ice-filled plastic sandwich bag to his jaw. “I’m the one with everything to lose here, and you’re the one throwing punches. You’re not a hostage, and you’re not in any danger. In fact, you’re safer here than you were with Julia Tower, so please sit down and shut up!”

I heard his words, but I couldn’t process them. I wasn’t a hostage? I was in no danger? The facts didn’t support those statements—he’d dragged me through the shadows and locked me up in a strange house. My entire family died in a locked house. Their own locked house.

No exits, no neighbors and no phone. I was screwed. Unless …

Maybe there was a landline. Some people still had those.

When a glance around the living room revealed no phone, I stomped into the kitchen, and he only watched me, still icing his jaw. “What are you doing?”

There was a phone on the wall by the fridge. A really old phone, connected to the handset by a long, curly, yellow cord. I picked up the handset and started to dial—until I noticed there was no dial tone.

“We never hooked it up.” He picked up his drink, drained it, then set the empty glass on the counter next to an open box of macaroni and cheese. “No need, with cell phones, right?”

Speaking of which … I could see the outline of his in his back pocket. Maybe I could hit him with something, then take his phone and lock myself in another room long enough to call for help …

“It’s passcode protected,” he said when he turned and caught me staring at the seat of his jeans. “More useful as a paperweight than as a phone, if you don’t have the code. Or were you just staring at my butt?”

“I wasn’t …” I stopped, angered anew by how flustered I was. “Unless your phone is ancient, it’ll still make emergency calls.”

“True.” My kidnapper pulled the phone from his pocket and held it up. “Do I need to smash mine, too?” He looked reluctant, but willing. I shook my head because I couldn’t steal it later if he busted it now.

He pulled a clean rag from a drawer and wrapped his ice pack in it, then pressed it to his jaw again. “You throw one hell of a punch.”

“You smashed my phone.”

“Sorry. I couldn’t let you call Julia.”

“Julia?” I scowled and backed slowly toward a microwave cart on the other side of the room, where several steak knives were spread out on a folded towel, evidently set out to dry. “I told you I don’t work for her. I was calling the police.”

He shrugged. “Well, that’s almost as bad. I’m sorry about your phone, though.”

“What kind of kidnapper apologizes? And lives with his grandmother? And forgets to take away the victim’s phone?” My spine hit the cart and I slid one hand behind my back, feeling for the handle of a knife. “You’re the worst kidnapper ever.”

He watched me closely, but stayed back. “I’m not a kidnapper.”

“My unwilling presence in your home says otherwise.”

“Okay, yes.” He acknowledged my point with another shrug. “But there are extenuating circumstances. Why don’t we sit and discuss this over a drink? Or are you hungry? I’m not much of a cook, but I can handle boxed mac and cheese, if you’re interested.”

I wouldn’t eat or drink a damn thing he gave me, but …

“What happened to the stove?” I glanced pointedly at the front of the ancient appliance, where all four of the burner-control knobs were missing. Was nothing normal in his house?

“Oh. Gran nearly burned the house down yesterday, so we had to take the knobs off the stove, and now I can’t remember where Ian hid them …” He turned and took a cookie jar from the top of the fridge, and when he peered inside, I let my fingers skim the cart at my back, searching for the knives.

My kidnapper huffed in frustration and put the jar back. “They were in here yesterday, but now they’re gone …”

My fingers closed around the handle of a knife and my stomach roiled when I brandished it at him, trying not to think about the damage a different blade had done behind my parents’ locked doors. Could I do to my kidnapper what was done to my entire family? Even though he hadn’t laid a hand on me?

Yet.

He hadn’t laid a hand on me yet. And he claimed not to want me to return to Julia Tower, but hadn’t he already proved he’d do anything to get his sister back? Why wouldn’t he trade me for her? I’d do it in a heartbeat, if our situations were reversed.

“Give me your phone, or I swear I will gut you.” By some miracle, my hand was steady. The same could not be said for my stomach. I hate knives.

His pale brows rose and he crossed his arms over his shirt. “Then how will you get out of here? You don’t know where you are, and it’ll take the police forever to trace a cell phone. My grandmother doesn’t have one. And she’s not a Traveler.”

I frowned and glanced at the kitchen window, mentally working on a Plan C.

“You could break the glass and shout for help,” he suggested. “But I can’t let you go, and even if you tried, you’d cut yourself trying to climb out.” Only an idiot would leave her blood lying around for anyone with the requisite Skill to use against her. “And there’s no one around to hear you scream for help. The nearest neighbor is more than a mile away.”

More than a mile between houses? Either he was lying—though the lack of traffic noise said he wasn’t—or his range was much better than I’d guessed.

Either way, I had to get out, and I had to do it before his friends came back and my odds got even worse.

“Why don’t you calm down and have a seat?” He glanced at the kitchen table and the four chairs around it. “If I put my gun down, will you put your knife down?”

“Hell, no! I’m not going to put the knife down, I’m not going to sit, and I don’t want to talk to you. So you can either let me out of here, or you can get ready to bleed.”

I scanned the kitchen, looking for something light enough to lift, but heavy enough to break glass.

“Sera …” His tone resonated with warning as he set the ice pack on the counter, tense now, as if he might pounce if I made one wrong move. “Whatever you’re thinking … don’t.”

My gaze landed on a ceramic napkin holder shaped like two halves of a pineapple, sitting on top of the microwave. The kidnapper took one step toward me, arms out at his sides, as if I might rush him at any moment.

Instead, I grabbed the napkin holder and hurled it at the nearest window.

Glass shattered and a jagged hole appeared in the pane. Both halves of the pineapple landed on the dark grass outside, about a foot apart.

“Damn it,” he swore.

“Kris?” a woman’s shaky voice called from the other end of the house, and recliner springs groaned as his grandmother sat up in her chair.

“It’s okay, Gran. Go back to sleep,” Kris—finally the kidnapper had a name!—said without taking his gaze from me. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he whispered, and anger flickered across his expression.

“I probably shouldn’t do this either, then, right?” I grabbed a wooden rolling pin from a stainless steel canister of large utensils and swung it at what was left of the window. Glass exploded outward, onto the grass.

“What the hell are you doing in there?” his grandmother demanded, and the chair groaned again. “If one of you hellions put another pool cue through my—”

“It’s fine, Gran,” he called back. “Stay in your room.”

I kept swinging and glass kept breaking. I knocked as much of it out as I could, to make the window safe to crawl through, and he only watched me, his eyes narrowed in irritation, a red blotch growing on his chin where I’d punched him.

When the glass was gone, I met his gaze, trying to decide whether to relinquish the bludgeoning weapon or the stabbing weapon—I’d need at least one free hand to climb through the window.

“Please don’t do this,” he said, and the earnest note in his voice actually made me hesitate. For about a second.

Then I threw the rolling pin at him and lunged for the window while he ducked.

I was halfway out when he wrapped one arm around my waist and tried to drag me back in. My heart beat so hard my chest almost hurt. I clutched the window frame and swung the knife behind me. The serrated blade caught on material and when I jerked it free from the snag, he swore again. But he didn’t let go or stop pulling, and I wasn’t strong enough to keep him from hauling me back into the house. At least, not without the use of both hands.

In the kitchen once again, he pinned my left arm to my side with his other arm wrapped around my waist. I shoved the knife in my right hand backward, hoping to catch a vital organ, but he caught my wrist before the blade made contact.

“Please drop the knife, Sera. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Sorry I can’t say the same.” I tried to twist my arm free, but his grip was relentless and I couldn’t reach anything with the blade.

“Kristopher, what the hell is going on?”

My shoes brushed the floor when he spun with me still in his grip, evidently as startled as I was to find his grandmother standing in the kitchen doorway, her stern frown aimed at us both.

“Call the police,” I demanded, tossing hair out of my face. He grunted when my skull smashed into his … something. “I’m a hostage being held against my will.”

Her frown bled into a sympathetic smile. “Oh, hon, you’re not being held, you’re being moved. We’re the good guys. But I need you to hold it down, so you don’t wake up the rest of the kids.”

“The rest …” Fresh panic made my pulse trip faster. “How many other hostages do you have?”

“None.” Kris groaned in frustration. “She’s not a kid, Gran. We don’t have any kids right now, remember?” He shifted, and his next words were softer, spoken near my ear. “You’re not a hostage. She’s confused.”

The old woman propped wrinkled fists on ample hips. “Kristopher, let her go. That’s no way to earn her trust.”

“I can’t let her go. She has a knife.”

“Good. I hope she skewers you with it.” His grandmother marched past us both, glanced in obvious irritation at the stove with no knobs, then pulled a mug from the cabinet above the coffeemaker. “You can’t keep bringing them in with no notice, Kris. We don’t have a bed for her right now. One of the boys will have to sleep on the couch until we find someplace safe to send her.”

Boys?

Kris groaned again. “She’s not a kid, Gran. She’s fully grown.” His declaration carried equal parts appreciation and frustration over that fact, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. “And we’re not sending her anywhere.”

“What the hell are you people talking about? I haven’t been rescued, I’ve been kidnapped.”

Kris’s grandmother shot him a questioning look over her mug, as if I were the one who made no sense.

“I didn’t kidnap her. Exactly,” he said. “But if I let her go now, she’ll stab me. Again.”

Again? Was he already bleeding?

The grandmother pulled the full carafe from the coffee machine. “Is this decaf? You know I hate decaf.”

“It’s fully leaded,” he said, his mouth inches from my ear, his grip on me unrelenting.

“What is wrong with this family?” I demanded when the hard kick I landed on his shin did no good, and she made no move to help me.

Gran gave me a stern frown and poured coffee into her mug. “We have a strict no-weapons policy for the residents. He’ll let you go as soon as you put the knife down, but not a moment sooner.”

My grip on the knife tightened. “Who are you people?”

“Don’t tell her anything,” Kris said, hauling me backward when I tried to kick the nearest cabinet. “I think she works for the Towers.”

Gran’s eyes widened. Then she blinked and gave her head a little shake, as if she’d just woken up and needed to clear the cobwebs.

I kicked backward again, and again I caught Kris’s leg. He grunted, but didn’t let go. “I don’t work for anyone,” I insisted, but no one was listening.

His grandmother looked up from her mug, scowling fiercely, and everything about her was suddenly different, from the harder edge to her voice to the stiffness of her posture. “Kristopher Daniels, tell me you did not bring a Tower employee into this house.”

Kris groaned into my ear. “Gran, my name is top on the list of things you weren’t supposed to tell her!”

“Take her back.” Gran blew calmly over the surface of her coffee as I kicked her grandson over and over again, growing angrier each time he only grunted and squeezed me tighter. “If she works for the Towers, she’s dangerous.”

“Taking her back won’t make her any less dangerous. And anyway, I can’t take her back.” Kris oofed when I threw my head back and my skull caught his … chin? But his grip around my waist never loosened. “They tried to shoot her. Right now, I can’t really blame them.”

“Why would they shoot their own employee?” Gran asked.

“I don’t work for them! And they weren’t shooting at me, they were shooting at him.” Though they were clearly willing to count me as collateral damage. “Let me go!” I shouted when my anger crested, and I shoved the knife back with all the strength I had.

The blade snagged on material again, and Kris gasped, then grunted in frustration. “Damn it, Sera!” He let go of my waist, but before I could do anything with my freed left arm, he spun me around and slammed me against the front of the refrigerator.

Air burst from my lungs, then his forearm pressed into my collarbone through my sister’s yellow scarf, pinning my shoulders to the fridge. Panic tightened every muscle in my body. I fought blindly as memory obscured reality and it became hard to focus on his face.

His free hand curled around my right one, which still gripped the blade. His angry blue-gray gaze bored into me, his legs pinning mine so that I couldn’t kick. “Please drop the knife, Sera! You got me. I’m bleeding. You win.”

“Open the door and let me out,” I growled through clenched teeth.

He exhaled heavily. “I can’t. I’m sorry you can’t see that, but I can’t let you leave yet, for your safety and for ours. I have to ask you some questions, and you have to answer them. But it doesn’t have to be this hard. Please, please, please let’s do this the easy way.”

“Fuck you.” I glared into his eyes from inches away. “I don’t owe you anything.”

His expression hardened. “Fine. We’ll do it the hard way. Just keep in mind that that was your choice.” He squeezed my left wrist, but I gripped the knife in spite of the growing pressure and pain until I actually lost control of my own fingers.

The knife slipped from my failed grip and clattered on the floor. He kicked it across the linoleum and it thunked into something I couldn’t see. In the second my left leg was free, I tried to knee him in the groin, but he deflected the blow with the outside of one very solid thigh.

He was just plain too big to fight, unless I was willing to fight dirty—and I was—or I could catch him by surprise. Which became the new Plan D.

His eyes narrowed, his gaze cautious. “If I let go, are you going to play nice and show me your arm?”

I stared back at him. “Are you going to hand over your phone and power tools?”

His grandmother laughed from the kitchen table, and I realized she’d been watching us the whole time. Sipping her coffee.

Kris groaned. “Are you this much of a pain in the ass every time someone asks to see your marks?”

“No one’s ever asked to see my marks. And again, I don’t have any.”

“How have you never been asked to prove that? What, are you from Mars?”

“Worse,” his grandmother said, and I saw her watching us over his shoulder, a shrewd gleam in her eye. “Suburbia. There isn’t much syndicate activity in the outskirts, Kris. You know that better than most.”

He did? What did that mean?

“Yeah, I do.” His grip on me loosened and his gaze softened, but he didn’t let me go. “Okay, I get that you’re out of your element, and you’re obviously clueless about the way this city operates. So let me give you some survival advice. Stay out of the east side unless you want to deal with Cavazos. Stay out of the west side unless you want to deal with Tower—which you evidently do.” His disgusted expression told me exactly how dumb he thought that decision was, and I bristled beneath his judgment. “And when someone asks to see your arm, you show them your damn arm, so they know whether or not they’re allowed to fuck with you. They won’t all be as nice about it as I’ve been.”

“You call this nice?” I snapped.

He stared at me for a second, apparently gauging the sincerity of my question, while his grandmother shook her head slowly at the table. My naïveté was evidently confounding.

“This is the kid-glove treatment,” Kris said. “There are people out there who would have cut your clothes off the first time you refused.”

“My shirt,” I corrected, and he shook his head.

“The left arm is the most common place people are marked, but it’s not the only place.”

Chills raced up my spine, then down into my hands, which began to shake. I glanced at his grandmother for confirmation, and she nodded solemnly.

Kris’s gaze narrowed on me again, and he seemed to be studying me from a new perspective. “What the hell are you doing here, Sera? Girls like you don’t belong in the city.”

“No one belongs here,” Gran said, and I let her answer stand for me.

“Now, I’m going to let you go, and you’re going to turn around and pull your left arm out of your shirt and show it to me. You can keep everything else covered, but your left arm is non-negotiable. Got it?”

“How am I supposed to prove I’m not marked anywhere else? I’m not taking anything off.”

“No need.” Gran chuckled into her coffee, and I couldn’t believe the change in her from a few minutes earlier. “A whore would never be so hard to undress.”

“Whore?” I blinked at Kris in incomprehension.

“Cavazos marks his prostitutes with a red ring on the inner thigh.” He chuckled a little at my shocked expression. “Don’t worry. I’ve never met anyone less likely to bear a red mark in my life.”

I wasn’t sure whether or not that was a compliment.

“I’m going to let go and back up, and you’re going to show me your arm. Ready?”

“If I do, you’ll open the front door?”

He frowned. “No, but showing me your arm will put you one step closer to that. Here goes …”

He let go of my right hand and removed his left arm from my shoulders. Then he backed up several steps, still watching me.

My heart thumped in my ears as I turned slowly, reluctant to put him at my back, even with his grandmother in the room. My focus raked the counter next to the fridge in search of a weapon. But there was nothing within easy reach.

I would have shown him my arm, if that would have gotten me released. But since it wouldn’t, I couldn’t see the point in capitulating. In letting him think I could be pushed around.

Instead of pulling my arm free from my sleeve, I spun and launched myself at Kris. I rammed him in the chest with my shoulder, just like my dad had taught me when I was twelve.

Air burst from his lungs and he stumbled backward into the table, which slid across the floor and into the far wall without even spilling his grandmother’s coffee.

Gran cackled as he tried to stand, holding his spine where it had hit the table, and I ran for freedom. I had both hands wrapped around the window frame when he grabbed my arms from behind.

I lost my balance when he jerked my arms behind me and would have fallen headfirst out the window if he hadn’t hauled me back in, pinning my wrists in one of his hands.

“Let go!” I twisted and kicked backward, but a second later something cold and hard wrapped around my wrists. A soft zipping sound froze me in place, and the plastic around my wrists got tighter. “Are you serious? A zip tie?” Why would he even have those if he wasn’t planning to take a hostage?

He spun me around to face him again, anger drawn in every line of his face, and when I tried to pull free, his grip on my arm tightened. “Just FYI, this is not the easy way.”

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.”

Kori continued with the part I didn’t want to verbalize. “If you know anything that could help us get her back, you have to tell us. And if you’re obligated to do or say anything to Julia Tower that would put Kenni in greater danger than she’s already in, I’ll have to kill you to stop that from happening. I’m not going to bullshit you about that. But I promise it won’t hurt, because the difference between us and Julia Tower is that if we kill you, it’ll be a mercy.”

But that wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t sure how I could justify letting her live if she was a threat, but I was determined to do it.

“This is so fucked up,” Sera mumbled, staring at the floor in shock, and I couldn’t help but believe her. She was horrified by what she was hearing and what Kori had shown her. If she was bound to Julia, she was so newly bound that she hadn’t yet discovered the horrors of syndicate service for herself.

Surely she wasn’t a good enough actress to make us believe such a convincing display of naïveté. Surely no one was that good….

Kori huffed. “You have no idea. You gonna show us your arm?”

Sera tossed her head, throwing long, brown hair back from her face. “Let me up and I’ll show you. I’m not one of them. I’ll never be one of them.” There was something new behind her eyes. Something strong and resolute. “But I’m not convinced you’re much better than they are, so let’s let your Reader friend do her thing, so I can get the hell out of here.”

“We’re not like them,” I insisted as I unbuckled the belt securing her to the chair. “I know you have no reason to believe me, but we’re nothing like them.”

“Right. You kidnapped me and tied me up, and now you’re ready to kill me. From my perspective, the distinction between you psychos and the Tower psychos isn’t exactly glaringly clear.”

“We’re not ready to kill you,” Kori said. “We’re willing to kill you. There’s a big difference.”

Sera sat straighter when I pulled the belt loose and laid it on the bed behind me. “And that difference would be?”

I slid my pocketknife between her wrists and the zip tie, and she stiffened the moment the metal touched her skin. I used my free hand to brace hers, so she wouldn’t get cut.

Her skin was soft and warm. I hesitated for just a second, so I’d have a reason to keep touching her. Then I severed the plastic with my blade and let the cut zip tie fall to the floor. I closed my knife and slid it into my pocket, and when I spun the chair around so that she faced me, she was rubbing the red marks on her wrists. And waiting for my answer.

I gripped the chair seat on either side of her legs and rolled her closer. My gaze met hers from inches away and she gasped at whatever she saw in mine, then bit her lip. “The difference is that if the Towers think you’re a threat, they will have you beaten, raped and tortured in front of an audience—they’ll call it an object lesson—before they finally give you conflicting orders and watch your body tear itself apart trying to follow both commands at once.”

She’d stopped breathing, but her gaze had only intensified. Sharpened. “You’re trying to scare me.”

“Yes. But I’m scaring you with the truth.” I tried not to think about how close she was and how badly I wanted to touch her. And how much she would hate that.

I hated knowing she’d recoil from my touch.

“They are bad people who do bad things for sport and for profit. We are good people who do bad things to protect people who can’t protect themselves from the Julia Towers of the world.” I should have let her go. I should have pushed her chair back so she could stand, but I didn’t want to let her go, and I didn’t feel particularly guilty about that.

“You’ll do bad things, too, eventually,” I said, and when she shifted in the chair, her jeans brushed my thumb. “In our world, there’s no way around that, and the fact that I met you in Julia Tower’s office tells me that you’re in that world now, for better or worse. The only thing you have left to decide is which side you want to fight for. Because you will fight, or you will die.”

Kori shrugged. “Or maybe you’ll fight, then you’ll die. That happens here, too.”

Neither of us acknowledged her. Sera’s gaze was locked in mine. At least, that’s what I thought until I tried to look away and discovered I was as trapped by the look in her eyes as she was by the doors I’d screwed shut.

The difference was that I didn’t want to escape.

I should have moved my hand, but Sera hadn’t moved her leg, so I left my hand where it was and let the heat bleeding through her denim warm one side of my thumb. “Take off your scarf,” I said, and my voice was lower than I’d meant for it to be. Deeper. I didn’t think she’d comply, but her gaze held mine while she unwound the thin material from her neck and shoulders. She handed it to me and I held it for a second, stunned by the realization that the yellow scarf from my notebook weighed nothing.

And that it smelled just like her. Clean, and vaguely sweet and enticing, in a way I could never have put into words, but would never, ever forget.

Kori cleared her throat and I blinked in surprise, then realized I was still staring at Sera from less than a foot away, and now I was fingering her silk scarf like some kind of pervert with an accessories fetish.

I rocked back onto my heels and draped her scarf over the foot of my grandmother’s bed, hoping my face wasn’t as red as it felt.

“We still need to see your arm.” I stood and Sera stared up at me, and I wished I knew her well enough to understand the intense blend of strength, fear and anger warring behind her eyes. “You want me to step outside?”

Her fingers found the hem of her shirt and her gaze hardened. “I don’t care what you do.”

But that was a lie. Women who don’t care what you do have no reason to tell you that.

I started to turn, to give her some privacy, but she turned faster. She pulled her left arm out of its long sleeve, then lifted that side of her shirt to her shoulder, revealing half of a slim, almost delicate waist above the denim clinging to the swell of her hip.

My throat felt tight. I tried not to stare. When that didn’t work, I tried not to look like I was staring. If Kori noticed, I couldn’t tell. She was fixated on Sera’s arm, as I should have been.

With the front of her shirt clutched to her chest, Sera twisted to show us her left arm, and I exhaled in relief before I realized she would hear that, and that she might understand how badly I’d wanted her to be unaffiliated with the Towers, and not just for her own sake. Not just for Kenley’s sake.

For my sake.

Her arm was smooth and pale, and completely unmarked. She was free from obligation not just to the Towers, but to any of the other syndicates who routinely marked their employees in the same spot. And that was most of them.

Sera was unbound.

Based on the lack of dead marks, she’d never been bound, which would explain her incomprehension of just how vile the syndicates really were. But if that was the case—if she didn’t work for Julia Tower—why had my notebook told me to take her? How was she supposed to help us get Kenley back?

Maybe she wasn’t. My head spun with that possibility. Maybe Sera wasn’t supposed to help me. Maybe I was supposed to help her.

Kori shrugged, arms folded over her chest, while Sera slid her arm back into its sleeve. “Well, assuming the rest of her is as spotless as her arm, I’m good with letting her walk around unfettered until Anne gets here.”

“Me, too.” I hadn’t planned to tie her up at all until she tried to climb out the window.

“The rest of me is fine, but I’m not showing you anything else.” When Sera turned to face us, I saw that her resolution was just as firmly back in place as her shirt. “I’m not a prostitute.”

“We know,” I assured her.

Kori shrugged again. “I believe you, but what I believe doesn’t matter. You have to make Anne believe.” She turned to me, already reaching for the doorknob. “I’ll go get her.” Then she stepped into the hall and left the door open behind her back.

“She’s … interesting.” Sera glanced at the bed, as if she was considering sitting, then she sat in the chair instead. “Kinda scary.”

“Yeah. I’d like to say that’s Tower’s fault, but the truth is that Kori’s always been a little scary. I think that’s why he liked her.” Until suddenly he didn’t like her.

“She really worked for him?”

“Yup.” I knew better than to give her any new information, but I could verify what Kori had already said. “And she hated every minute of it.”

“She seemed legitimately surprised to see me.”

I sat on the edge of my grandmother’s desk, trying to look casual, as if I weren’t dying to interrogate her, to figure out how and why she fit into my notebook. And by extension, into my life. “As opposed to what?” Then I understood. “You still think I planned this.”

She shrugged and glanced at the nails I’d driven into the window frame. “You sealed all the exits. It’s kind of hard to believe you didn’t go to the Tower estate intending to take a prisoner.”

“Okay, I know that looks bad, but the doors and windows have been nailed shut for weeks,” I insisted, shoving my hands in my pockets. “I did that to keep everyone else out, not to keep you in.”

She looked like she wanted to believe me, but …

“If you can’t take my word for it, ask Kori when she gets back.” Or any of the others. I’d tell her to ask Gran, but I could never be sure what decade Gran was currently living in.

“If that’s the truth, why do you have such easy access to restraints?” She bent to pick up the severed zip tie.

“Those are for my job.”

“Are you a cop?” She studied me closer, as if that thought made her rethink her original assessment.

I actually laughed. “No. I … um … retrieve things.” That was half the truth. I couldn’t trust her with the other half. Not yet. Although if Gran kept slipping into the past, Sera would figure it out for herself.

“Things?” Sera may have been young, but she was a born skeptic. Not that I’d given her any reason to trust me.

“People, usually,” I admitted, and she opened her mouth to start shouting something that probably included a lot of I-told-you-so’s, so I spoke before she could interrupt. “I know how that sounds, but it’s legit.” Mostly. “I work part-time for a bail bondsman, doing the jobs his unSkilled employees can’t handle.”

Olivia had hooked me up with Adam Rawlinson, the man she’d worked for before Ruben Cavazos—the Towers’ biggest rival for control of the city—had snared her exclusive services via extortion and blood binding. Rawlinson served neither syndicate, and his clientele was mostly those who also wanted to avoid syndicate tangles. And could afford to pay.

“Bail bondsman?” Sera seemed to think about that. “So, you find runaway criminals?”

“No. His Trackers find them. I go get them and turn them in. Thus the zip ties.” I glanced at the one she still held. “But I also do odd jobs for private collectors.” Very odd jobs. For very private collectors.

Her gaze narrowed. “What kind of collectors?”

“Not people collectors, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Not anymore. Not since Micah, and the realization of just what I’d been aiding and abetting. “Just stuff the rich are willing to pay for, but can’t get their hands on through other means.”

“And that’s legal?”

I shrugged. “Not always. But it pays, and it doesn’t hurt anyone, and someone has to keep the lights on and the water flowing around here.”

“What, no one else here works?”

“Everyone here works. But most of that work goes toward accomplishing our higher purpose, rather than actually paying the bills.”

Ian helped me out when he could—the man could make darkness appear in broad daylight—and Kori had taken a couple of Rawlinson’s jobs, but they were both more useful to Kenley’s efforts than I was, so it was my mostly steady, mostly legit income that paid to rent and heat our hideout house while we slowly chipped away at the foundation of Julia Tower’s inherited power.

Sera looked as though she wanted to say something, and as if whatever she wanted to say might not be an insult to my moral fiber; but before she could do more than open her mouth, Ian called out from the hall as the floorboard in front of the empty closet creaked.

“Kori?”

“She went to get Anne,” I said, and a moment later Vanessa appeared in the bedroom doorway, with Ian at her back.

“Kenley?” Van’s forehead was lined in worry. She hardly even glanced at Sera.

“We haven’t found her yet,” I said, and I could see from Van’s wince that she hated hearing the words as badly as I hated saying them. “But we will. They won’t kill her.”

“I’m not worried about them killing her.” Vanessa frowned at our guest. “Who’s this?”

“This is Sera … um …” I shrugged with a glance at her. “That’s all I know so far, except that she almost certainly doesn’t work for the Towers.”

“I don’t,” Sera said.

“And that she may be able to help us find Kenley.”

Sera sighed and slouched in her chair as Van sank onto the bed next to her. “I would if I could, but I honestly know nothing about your sister.”

“What happened?” Ian said with a pointed glance at my arm.

I removed the towel and Vanessa gasped. “Those are going to need stitches. Or a Healer.”

I glanced at the neat line of horizontal scars on her right forearm and I remembered that she spoke from experience.

Sera scowled at my cuts, but she looked more guilty than angry. “I’m sorry, but you brought it on yourself.”

Ian blinked. “You did that?”

She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “He kidnapped me.”

Ian and Vanessa turned to me with matching arched brows.

I glared at Sera. “It’s not like it sounds.”

She snorted. “It’s exactly like it sounds.”

“It’s complicated,” I insisted.

She shrugged. “He may be right about that.”

“I’m sorry, who are you?” Van eyed the severed zip tie on the floor, then the blood finally seeping through the towel on my arm. “Did I miss that part?”

“She blocked my aim at Julia Tower when I went looking for Kenni.”

“But I don’t work for Julia,” Sera repeated. “Or for anyone else.”

Ian lifted the towel for another look at my cuts, then dropped it into place again and turned to Sera. “Then why would you stand between her and a well-deserved bullet?”

She blinked, evidently surprised by the question. “He wasn’t really going to shoot her.” Sera turned to me with a frown. “You weren’t, were you?”

“Not before she told me where Kenni is. But you didn’t know that. Why would you shield her from a bullet, if you’re not bound to her?” Nearly everyone who’d worked for Jake Tower had been contractually obligated to take a bullet for him, but I couldn’t think of anyone who would have done that voluntarily.

“Because I’m a decent person,” Sera said, and I believed that. But I also believed there was more to it. “Beyond that, it’s really none of your business.”

I folded the rag and set it on the desk next to me, then met her gaze again. “You’re actually wrong about that, but you’re welcome to wait for Anne before you start answering questions, unless you want to repeat everything.”




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