Oath Bound (An Unbound Novel) (31 page)

“I’m so sorry.” His hand shifted to cradle my hip, and when his fingers left my stomach, his lips found it. “He will pay,” Kris murmured, his breath warm against my skin, the stubble on his chin rough, yet comforting in the way only something so tangibly masculine can be. “No one should touch you out of anything other than adoration, ever again.”

My breath caught in my throat, and my hands caught in his hair, and when Kris stood, he was all I could see. “I adore you, Sera. Will you let me touch you?”

“Yes. Please.”

The words carried almost no sound, but he heard them.

Kris blinked at me in surprise, but that was gone in an instant, replaced by desire burning bright in his eyes, tinged with something stronger. Something I desperately wanted to believe in.

I could have this. I could have Kris, and if what I saw in his eyes could be trusted, I wouldn’t be getting him just for the night. And I wouldn’t be getting him alone. Kris was a package deal. He came with sisters, and friends, and a grandmother. A ready-made family with tempers, and hugs, and dementia, and chili, and arguments, and laughter, even in the worst of times, and a shared mission I already believed in.

They couldn’t replace the family I’d lost. But they didn’t have to, and they wouldn’t
try
to. They would just
be there.

Kris
would be there. If I let him.

Kris kissed me, and I kissed him back. I let everything go, and it was easier than I’d expected, because he wanted the burden. He didn’t just want to touch me, he wanted to
know
me. He wanted to know what had made me who I was. So I showed him.

I poured all my grief into that kiss. All my hunger for vengeance. And I fed from the same in him, astonished by the translation of heat from remembered violence to carnal appetite. We kissed until I forgot about the house around us and the people in it. Until I no longer felt the door at my back or the floor beneath my feet. I couldn’t feel anything but him, and I couldn’t touch enough of him to satisfy hands that had gone empty for too long. A mouth that had tasted only bitterness and pain for months on end.

But I could sure as hell try.

When kissing was no longer enough, I tugged on the end of his shirt, wordlessly commanding its removal as my mouth demanded even more from his lips. His tongue. Kris pulled away just long enough to tug his shirt over his head, and suddenly I could touch him unhindered by useless cotton.

I tasted him then, clean from a recent shower. His earlobes felt good between my teeth and his hair smelled like guy-shampoo. His neck was rough with stubble, and just a little salty. His chin was strong, and the back of his jawbone fit in the gap between my lips like I was always meant to kiss him there.

My hands found smooth skin over taut muscle. Hard planes and all the right masculine bumps and ridges. He let me play, tasting, testing, learning his body as thoroughly as I could, because I wouldn’t get another chance. His hands stayed anchored at my waist, fingers splayed around the curve of my ribs. He was more patient than I.

Until he wasn’t.

His eager tug at my shirt demanded reciprocation, so I lifted my arms and let him take it off. I didn’t see where it fell, and I didn’t give a damn, because then he was touching me, and his touch felt hungry, yet restrained. He took his time, as if every inch of me deserved to be explored with equal attention, and when he dropped to his knees in front of me again, his lips trailing from my navel toward the low waist of my borrowed pj shorts, my head fell back against the door and my hands tangled in his pale hair.

Kris blazed hotter than anything I’d ever felt. His lips were like sparks against my skin, his hands practically on fire, and I burned everywhere he touched me. When his mouth found my scar again, those flames almost overwhelmed me, and I felt my body go still on its own. But then I pushed the memories away. I let him burn them back until I could hardly see them anymore, and when he hesitated at the waist of my shorts, I pulled him up to eye level.

“Is this what you want?” I was suddenly sure I’d misread some signal, or read more into what he was saying than he’d actually meant. Was that why he’d stopped?

“So much,” he said, his voice scratchy with desire, and I almost melted with relief. “But if you don’t, we don’t have to...”

“I do.” I wanted to touch all of him. I wanted him to touch all of me. I wanted to forget everything in the world that wasn’t relevant to him, and to me, and to the two of us together, for as long as I could have him.

It’s sheer luck that we made it to the bed, when the floor was so much closer, but when I felt the mattress touch the backs of my thighs, I sat. Kris joined me seconds later, nude and unspeakably beautiful, and I closed my eyes, afraid to look too long at the miracle I’d found, for fear that it would disappear.

I exhaled at his next touch, then held my breath altogether when his mouth followed a moment later, working its way down from my neck. I kept my eyes squeezed shut and let my hands see for me, sliding over his arms and chest, feeling the curve of his biceps, then traveling over the planes of his back. His mouth trailed down from my breast, over my stomach, and I arched into his touch, drawing another groan from him as he slid the borrowed shorts over my hips. Then came the soft exhalation of surprise when he realized I wore nothing beneath them—I don’t borrow underwear.

And that was all the waiting I could take.

I kicked the shorts off and pulled him back up, opening for him, as he settled between my thighs. I slid the arches of my feet up his calves and he leaned closer to whisper into my ear.

“Look at me, Sera. Please,” he added.

So finally I opened my eyes, and when I met his gaze, he slid into me, slowly, smoothly, and I couldn’t breathe again until I had all of him. And I was terrified by how much I didn’t want to let him go.

He lingered there, my legs locked around him, staring into my eyes, and I discovered that now that I was looking, I couldn’t turn away from him. Not even when he began to move inside me, and my hips rose to meet him over and over. I couldn’t look away until he leaned close to whisper in my ear.

“I promise he will pay, Sera. He will pay with every drop of his blood, and with his very last breath.”

I clung to him, as fresh tears rolled down my cheeks and soaked into his pillow. Then I pushed it all away again—the despair, the anger—and lived in that moment with Kris. Our moment, in which nothing else existed. Nothing but him, and me, and the delicious friction building between us, burning hotter with each second, until I couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t think, and couldn’t hold back for another second.

I gasped as that heat spilled over in wave after wave of pleasure, and Kris groaned when his release caught up with mine. And for a moment afterward, neither of us moved. I didn’t want to let him go, and he seemed in no hurry to be freed.

Then he kissed the corner of my jaw and his weight and warmth disappeared. I sat up, suddenly sure I’d see him pulling on his clothes to leave the room, but instead he settled onto the mattress next to me. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.” Kris pulled the sheet up to cover us both, then slid his arm beneath my pillow, and we lay there listening to each other breathe, while the rest of the world carried on without us.

It was the most peaceful moment I could remember since the night my family died. And I never wanted it to end.

Nineteen

Kris

S
he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever touched, and the saddest person I’d ever met, and I didn’t want to let her go. I couldn’t.

Afterward, I lay on my side next to her, one hand splayed across her stomach, trying not to think about her scar and what it meant. What he’d taken from her. What no one would ever be able to give her again.

I hated how helpless—how
useless
—that scar made me feel. I was supposed to prevent that. I was meant to save Sera’s baby. Her future. I was meant to spare her the grief she was still mired in, and maybe, if I’d actually done that, we would have come together in a moment of triumph, instead of shared grief.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” I stared down at her profile, no more able to look away from her than I was able to stop touching her.

She turned to look at me, and her eyes were damp. “Only if I get to ask one in return.”

“You can ask, even if you don’t want to answer my question. And that’s okay, if you don’t want to. I don’t have any right to ask.”

“Just say it.” A hint of a smile rode the corners of her mouth, but it was forced. It didn’t match the sadness in her eyes. “You’re making it worse, with the buildup.”

I shouldn’t ask. It was none of my business. But I had to know, for purely selfish reasons.

“Who is he?” My thumb twitched over her scar on the last word, surely an unconscious, nervous movement.

Sera frowned, and I saw the moment her confusion cleared. She’d thought I was asking about the killer. Or maybe about the child he’d taken from her. “My baby’s father?” she whispered, and all hints of that earlier smile were gone.

“Yeah. But you don’t have to...”

“His name is Ben. But he doesn’t matter. Really,” she said when I started to object. Of course he mattered. He’d lost a child, too. “He didn’t want the baby. He didn’t want me. We weren’t involved, beyond that one time. I don’t even know how to get in touch with him anymore, so maybe this was meant to be.”

“No,” I said, and she looked so relieved I wanted to kiss her. “This wasn’t meant to be.” I was meant to stop it. I’d failed Sera before I’d even met her.

“My turn,” she said, and I let her change the subject because we both needed it. “What was it like, being with Noelle? With a Seer?”

“You really want to know?”

She nodded. “Okay. Um... Going out with Noelle was like going out with Cassandra.
The
Cassandra.”

“From Greek mythology?”

“Yeah. The one who could see the future, but couldn’t change it.” Only what Noelle and I did together couldn’t really be called dating. There were no true meals, no movies and no Valentines. We stole moments from the real world, and we stole them shamelessly. We tried to pause time and live in a single second forever. In a heartbeat. In a glance. In that quick breath between desperate kisses. And every single one of those stolen moments happened between one o’clock and three o’clock in the morning. In my bed.

“But it wasn’t all sex,” I said, and Sera almost looked relieved. “Kori thinks it was, but Elle and I also talked.” More accurately, we’d whispered. We’d laughed. We’d teased. And one time, Noelle had cried. “Then, eventually, inevitably, she fell asleep. And that’s when things got weird. Every single time.”

“She started talking in her sleep?”

“Yeah. And now that I can look back on it with a little perspective—I’m wiser now, in case you didn’t know—I think that may have been the point for her all along.”

“But it wasn’t for you?”

I shook my head. The prophesies weren’t the point for me. Not then. Not until after Elle died, and I started wondering why I’d felt compelled to write down everything she said. “For me,
she
was the point. Being with her. I know she didn’t love me, but when she came home, she would let me pretend.”

“Home from where?”

I shrugged. “Wherever. She always left. But then she always came back, eventually.” I’d never talked to anyone else about Elle. Not like this. Not even Kori. Sera was the last person I’d expected to confide in—telling one girlfriend about a previous girlfriend rarely goes well. Not that either of them had officially accepted the title.

But that was the thing about talking to Sera—I always wound up saying more than I’d meant to. She charmed it out of me, as if I was a snake in her basket.

Which sounded kind of dirty, in retrospect.

“Did she ever say what it was like?” Sera still watched me, from inches away. “Seeing the future?”

“I only asked her once. She said it was like sitting in this old tire swing in Gran’s backyard. Did you ever swing in one?” I asked, and she nodded. “Remember how you could twist, and twist, and twist, then grab on tight and let the rope unwind? The world would spin around you, and you could only catch glimpses of things flying by? Elle said seeing the future was like that. Scary, and breathless, and never quite enough, but more than anyone could ever truly make sense of.”

Sera tried to hide a yawn. “Sounds...disorienting.”

“I’m sure it was.”

We were quiet after that, and I was starting to think she’d fallen asleep, until she snuggled closer. “Tell me a secret, Kris. You know all of mine.”

“What do you want to know?” I would tell her anything.

“I want to know about Micah.”

I exhaled slowly, breathing through an ache I could never really ease. “Who told you?”

“Kori told me about the kids. Why didn’t you? Don’t you trust me?”

“Now? With my life.” I squeezed her hand, trying to demonstrate the truth through touch. “But I couldn’t afford to trust you at first, and since then, there just hasn’t been time, between stealing back your pictures, and looking for Kenley, and getting shot at, and hiding from Julia Tower.”

“There’s time now,” she whispered. “Tell me about Micah.”

Another slow breath. Then I launched into a retelling of my biggest shame. “I was nineteen. Gran was getting too old to work, and I thought I was doing the right thing. Helping pay the bills. I took whatever jobs I could find, and I didn’t ask questions. It was easier to pocket an envelope full of cash if I didn’t ask why the jobs were off the record.

“Micah was the last of those jobs. A thirteen-year-old caught in the middle of a divorce battle. His mother had custody. His dad wanted him back. They told me the mother was abusive. That he’d be better off with his dad, but that Micah couldn’t see that yet, so I had to take him while he was sleeping.

“I did.” I swallowed a lump the size of a baseball in my throat. “Three days later, I heard Gran cussing at the television. Micah’s picture was on the screen. There was a picture of his parents, too. They weren’t divorced. The dad wasn’t the man who’d hired me.

“The coroner said Micah died of massive hemorrhaging. He was left on the side of the street. Gran said that was bullshit. She said it was a syndicate object lesson. She said that’s what they did to kids—to
anyone
—who refused to fall in line. They gave the poor kid conflicting orders and let his body tear itself apart in front of an audience.”

“Oh...” Sera’s voice carried little sound, but infinite pain.

“It was my fault. I took him from his bed in the middle of the night and gave him to the mafia.”

“And now you’re trying to make up for it.” She didn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. She didn’t absolve me of the blame, or belittle my responsibility with platitudes.

I shook my head. “I can never make up for it. All I can do is try to stop it from happening to someone else. To
anyone
else.”

“That’s what you were doing when Kori and Kenley joined the syndicate?”

My exhalation tasted as bitter as it sounded. “Ironic, huh? In trying to save strangers, I let my own sisters fall.” I closed my eyes. “I believed Kori when she told me she had it under control. She joined the syndicate to protect Kenley, who was coerced into joining a few days before. Kori made me promise not to tell my grandmother that they’d joined, and she made me promise to stay away from them. She said she could handle it. That they’d serve their five years, then get out, but that if Tower knew she and Kenni were close to me and Gran, he’d use us against her. And vice versa.”

“So you stayed away?”

I nodded. “I stayed away. I thought I’d be making things worse by getting involved. Worse for them, and worse for the kids I was working with. And in the beginning, that was probably true. If I’d known what was going on, I would have joined the syndicate instead of Kori, but she didn’t even tell me until it was too late, and then there was no one else left to take care of Gran. But if I’d... I don’t know. If I’d done things differently, maybe I could have kept Kori out of the basement.”

Maybe I could have prevented whatever put that haunted look in her eyes and made her scream at night.

“You couldn’t have stopped it.” Sera was hardly awake, yet she sounded certain. “You can’t stop stuff like that from the outside. Sometimes you can’t even stop it from the inside...”

As she fell asleep on my arm, I realized she was talking about herself. She’d tried to save her sister. She’d tried to stop it from the inside, and instead, she’d lost everything.

I wanted to give her something.

I waited nearly an hour until she rolled over on her own because I didn’t want to wake her up. But as soon as she was on the other side of the mattress—all but one small foot, resting against my shin—I snuck out of bed and turned off the lamp, then stepped into my jeans and crept downstairs, this new need still only half-formed.

On the bottom step, I groaned when I saw the light shining in the kitchen.
Shit.
I’d hoped to keep this new detail of my relationship with Sera private, at least until I knew how much she wanted everyone else to know.

Also, I’d wanted privacy for my new errand. But that wasn’t gonna happen.

Gran never woke up in the middle of the night, unless she was...confused—or someone turned on the TV—and I really didn’t feel like pretending I was still a twenty-year-old college dropout. Not with Sera still sleeping without me in the bed that could hopefully now be described as “ours.”

“Gran?” The living room floorboards creaked beneath my bare feet.

“It’s just me,” Ian said, and I was relieved for a second. Until I realized that unlike Gran, he probably wouldn’t forget me sneaking out of Sera’s room in the middle of the night.

Ian sat alone at the table, tapping on Vanessa’s laptop keys with two fingers. I crossed to the cabinet over the sink and took out a bottle of whiskey—the only alcohol in the house—and a short glass, then sat down next to him.

“Kori will skin you alive if you drink the last of her whiskey.”

“I’ll blame it on you.” I unscrewed the lid, and his brows rose. “Fine. I’ll pick up more tomorrow. I need to take Sera shopping anyway.”

Ian eyed me over the open laptop with a quiet smile. “So...you and Sera?”

I swallowed a groan as I poured two inches into my glass. “Please tell me no one else heard...”

“The walls are thin.” Which I knew all too well. “But Van only went up to bed ten minutes ago, and Kori sleeps more soundly than I do—until the nightmares.”

“Are they getting any better?” Kori’s nightmares made me feel useless, because I couldn’t fix her any easier than I could fix Sera.

Ian nodded. “Slowly.”

“What’s with the computer? You finally joining the twenty-first century?”

“Kicking and screaming.” He sighed. “I’d much rather read a newspaper, but they’re in short supply around here, so I’m stuck using this thing. Van showed me how to use a search engine, but all I’m getting are pop-up ads and the same ten results, every time I click ‘go.’” He turned the computer around and demonstrated.

I laughed. “Click on ‘next page’ for the rest of the results. There are more than ten thousand of them, but you just keep refreshing that first page full.”

Ian took the laptop back and frowned. “Oh. Thanks.”

“Shopping for an apartment? Are you leaving us?”

“It’s for me and Kori. For after we get Kenley back and things settle down.”

“You think she’ll want to stay in the city once all this is over?”

“I think she’d be bored in the Outback, and I’m not leaving here without her.” He glanced at my show of skepticism and exhaled slowly. “We’re going to end it, Kris,” he confessed at last. “Not just Julia and the Tower syndicate. Cavazos, too. Kori can’t go on with her life knowing that other people are still suffering the same things she went through. This won’t be over for her until they all fall down. And if they don’t...well, she’ll die trying to make it happen. We both will.”

“And after we take down Cavazos?” Because they weren’t doing it without me.

“Then we’ll head to the West Coast and fight the good fight with a view of the ocean.” Ian shrugged. “At least that’ll keep us busy.”

That it would. And they wouldn’t be alone.

“So, what’s with the nightcap?” Ian closed the laptop with a soft click. “Post-coital regret?”

“Not even kinda.” I would never regret a single moment I’d spent with Sera. Except for kidnapping her. “I just need to think.”

“Do you find that easier, staring at the bottom of a bottle?”

“Not always.” I sipped from my glass, relishing the mild burn.

He pushed the computer toward the middle of the table. “You’re more like Kori than you know.”

“I’m older,” I insisted. “Which means she’s more like me.”

“You both have big hearts. The only difference is that she hides hers behind guns and a foul mouth, and you hide yours behind guns and a smile. So...where’s the smile?”

“I must have left it in bed.”

“Sera’s?”

I took another sip. “You all seem to be forgetting that it’s actually
my
bed.”

“Not when she’s in it,” he said, and I had to concede the point.

I drained my glass, then set it down and studied him critically for a moment. “I need to talk about what just happened with Sera. You game?”

Ian chuckled. “Of course. Should I reciprocate, to cement our friendship?”

I flinched. “Please don’t do that.”