Oath Bound (An Unbound Novel) (32 page)

That time he laughed. “I promise that was an empty threat.” He poured another inch into my glass. “So. What’s up with you and Sera?”

“Everything. Up there, we just—”

He put one hand flat on the table between us, and the gesture felt very much like a stop sign. “I know what you did. No need to elaborate.”

“Not that. Well, there was that, too.” I frowned, wondering if I should start over. “But this isn’t about sex. Before that, she showed me something. She let me in.”

“Still sounds like we’re talking about sex...”

“Well, we’re not. I owe her, Ian.”

Ian frowned and crossed both arms over his chest. “Was she
that
much better than you in bed?”

“Ha, ha,” I said when his grin told me he was kidding. “She likes me, Ian. I think she likes me a lot, and I don’t want that to change.”

“What makes you think it will?”

How could it not, once she found out that I’d failed to stop what happened to her?

“I was supposed to do something, a while back.” I took another sip from my glass, then started over from the beginning. A beginning I hadn’t even realized our story—mine and Sera’s—had until that moment. “For years, I’ve been wondering about Noelle. About why she picked me. My bed. My ears. My pencil. I’ve always felt like there must have been a reason, but I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t make any of the lines make sense, and I couldn’t stop anything they warned me about. I couldn’t even understand the warnings.”

“And now?”

“Now...” I frowned and looked up from the table to meet his gaze. “I know this sounds crazy, but I think it was about Sera all along.”

His dark brows rose. “You think Noelle slept with you off and on for six years because of Sera?”

I shrugged. “Well, I hope she had a more personal motivation for the sex part of the equation, but I think she stayed and talked in her sleep with me because of Sera. Her name’s all through that journal, Ian. Noelle warned me over and over, and I couldn’t see it. I was supposed to stop him. I was supposed to protect her and her family. I was supposed to save her baby, and her body, and her future.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.” I nodded, just to underline my certainty. “Maybe Elle knew I’d wind up with Sera. Maybe she didn’t. But she knew I was supposed to be there three months ago when that bastard shoved a knife through her belly and through her baby.” I drained my glass while he stared at me. “The problem is that
I
didn’t know.”

“I take it Sera doesn’t know, either?”

“No. I’m going to tell her. I have to tell her. But first I need to give her something. I need to show her how sorry I am. I need to make her believe that I’ll never let something like that happen to her ever again. I want her to know that I can protect her, and that I’m so fucking sorry I wasn’t there when she needed me.”

“Kris, you didn’t even know her.”

“But I was
supposed
to know her. I was supposed to protect her.” I picked up my glass again, but it was empty. “Ian, I think I love her.”

He blinked. “Are you serious?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know how to tell.”

“Okay, so what do you know?”

“I know that she’s like a light in the dark, and I’m a bug drawn to her flame. She’s more sad, and beautiful, and determined than anyone I’ve ever met. She’s like...a human superlative. She’s the most...everything.”

Ian’s brows rose, and I knew what he was thinking. “I sound like a sap, don’t I? I’m not, though. I’m not blind, or deaf, or stupid. I know she’s not perfect. She yells at me, and hell, she tried to stab me. She kicked me out of my own room, and nearly made me break my nose on the closet door. And she lied to us all about being Jake Tower’s kid. Sometimes I’m not sure whether I should kill her or kiss her. Is that crazy?”

“You’re talking to the man who fell in love with your sister. If ‘crazy’ were a deal-breaker for me, I wouldn’t be here. This whole house is crazy.”

I nodded. “This place is crazy, and we’re gluttons for punishment, you and I. How we’ve survived Gran, and Kori, and Sera is beyond me. I wouldn’t want to face any one of them in a dark alley on a bad day, and we’ve got them all under one roof. Kinda makes you think Kenni and Van have the right idea, huh?”

“If you’re changing teams in the middle of the game, I’m gonna have to cheer you on from the stands, man. My compass points toward women. One woman in particular.”

I laughed. “Glad to hear it, for my sister’s sake. And no, I’m not changing teams. Far from it.” In fact, the heading on my own internal compass was steadier than I’d seen it in years. Instead of pointing to the entire female gender, it now seemed to be singling out Sera. Only Sera. And... “The thing is that for the first time since Noelle, I’m not scared to do this.”

“To do what?” Ian unscrewed the cap from the whiskey bottle and took a short gulp. Bonding with me had driven him to drink, after only a quarter of an hour.

“To be with her. In
every
sense, not just the biblical. Although that was—”

“Stop there...” Ian warned, tilting the bottle up again, but I hardly heard him.

“She’s like this living fire, jumping and sparking, and lighting me up even while she casts fierce shadow all around us, and when I’m with her I can totally see how fire could be the source of all life, because that’s what she is. She is life. She burns with it. And I want to
kill
everyone who’s ever laid a cruel hand on her.”

I hadn’t realized I was clenching my empty glass until Ian shrugged and pushed the bottle my way. “So do it.”

Glass clinked as I poured. “Do what?”

“Kill him. We both know who you’re talking about. Find him and kill him.”

“I can’t.” Well, I
could,
but... “She wants to
see
him die. And I don’t fucking blame her.”

Ian frowned, as if I’d started speaking gibberish. “I didn’t mean
now.
I’m just saying that if you want to prove you can protect her, give her what she came here for.”

“That’s the plan, but I can’t do much until I know who the bastard is.”

“Just give it a little more time. Before she went to bed, Van was making a list of possible suspects based on Sera’s description and details from the crime scene. She’s planning to show mug shots to Sera tomorrow. If they can identify him, Cam and Liv will be able to find him.” He shrugged. “Then you can do what you do best, which will be giving her what she wants most in the world.”

“You think killing is what I do best? Did you learn
nothing
from whatever you heard through the thin walls?”

“Ah. Humor as a defense mechanism. I know that tactic well.”

I didn’t bother denying it. Nor did I own up to what was really bothering me. I was supposed to stop Sera’s bad guy before he killed her family. Killing him as an afterthought wouldn’t give her back what she’d lost.

“No use stressing over it now.” Ian pushed his chair back from the table. “There’s nothing anyone can do until Sera’s had a chance to look at the mug shots.” He stood and pushed his chair in. “I don’t think you have anything to prove to her, though. She likes you. We can all see that. So just don’t kidnap her anymore and keep doing...whatever you did upstairs, and you should be golden.”

After Ian went to bed, I poured another inch of whiskey and pulled Vanessa’s laptop into position in front of me. Ian might not have understood computers, but I understood them well enough to find Van’s search history and the files she’d worked on most recently. After three minutes of clicking links and opening documents, I found what I was looking for, though probably only because she’d made no effort to hide it. A series of six mug shots taken from a police database she shouldn’t have had access to, compiled and labeled with both a number and a letter designation. Three files later, I found the code key, which provided each paroled—and one escaped—criminal with an arrest record, labeled with those same letter/number combinations.

I stared at the pictures, wondering which—if any—of these men had smiled at Sera as he drove his knife into her. Which of them had shot her parents, then stabbed and violated her little sister? Which man would I have to kill to see that rage in her eyes replaced with a sad peace that would grow a little less sad and a little more peaceful every day?

But their pictures told me nothing, except that all of them had light eyes, pale skin, and dark curls of various lengths.

Their arrest records didn’t say much more. All had been arrested for violent crimes within one hundred miles of her parents’ home, including multiple counts of rape, aggravated assault, murder and one other home invasion. Three had been convicted and served time—several years each—before being paroled. One escaped from a local jail, where he was being kept during his appeal. One was acquitted. One never went to trial, thanks to police error. Such was the state of the justice system—I knew men who’d done more time for drug charges and nonviolent robbery than any of the sick fucks the police had questioned in Sera’s case.

But none of that told me who to kill. Vanessa’s technical sleuthing was no more help than Noelle’s incomplete predictions had been. But maybe together...

I stood so fast my chair screeched across the kitchen floor, and for a second, I was afraid I’d woken Gran. But when no sound came from her room, I practically ran into the living room and hauled my duffel bag out from under the coffee table, where I’d been storing all the stuff I’d taken out of my room when Sera moved in.

Elle’s notebook was at the bottom. I pulled it out carefully, aware, as always, that the cardboard cover and flimsy paper pages wouldn’t last forever.

In the kitchen, I rooted through the junk drawer until I found a pen and a half-used pad of sticky notes, then I sat in front of Van’s laptop again, ready—no,
desperate
—to make sense of passages whose meaning had been eluding me for years.

There was no guarantee I’d have any more success this time, but I couldn’t help thinking that I was more prepared than ever to unravel Elle’s knot of prophesies, considering that this time I already knew not only what and where the crime was, but who the victims were.

All I needed was the perpetrator’s identity.

While everyone else slept, I spent the next two and a half hours reading that notebook all over again, from start to finish, flagging all of the promising passages with a sticky note. There weren’t many. Then I reread the suspects’ criminal records, wishing that, like Cam, I had a degree in criminal justice. Even an unused one.

But all I had was several years’ experience breaking and entering, Traveler-style.

Well, I had that, and I had Google. So I started doing image searches for the criminals Van had listed, as well as all of their aliases, hoping someone, somewhere had posted a picture of one of them with an identifying mark Sera had missed, or in a location or clothing that fit a passage in Elle’s notebook.

And finally, somewhere around four in the morning, I found a picture on a social networking site labeled with the second known alias of the fifth man on the list—the one who’d been arrested, but never went to trial. The man in the picture was shirtless, with most of his back turned toward the camera, and on the back of his left shoulder was a small tattoo of a tarantula, crawling up his body.

My heart beat a little faster and I flipped through the notebook, passing up all the passages I’d marked, in search of one I’d had no idea was connected to Sera and her family.

I still wasn’t sure they were connected. It could be a coincidence. But one night, about three years after Noelle and I first...got together, she’d started mumbling at about 1:40 in the morning, and I’d written what I could understand.

Spider, caught in the web of lies.

Was the man with the tattoos Noelle’s spider? If so, was Noelle’s spider also Sera’s smiling man? What was the web of lies—could it be Sera’s statement to the police?

It took ten more minutes of searching that same alias to find an image showing both the tattoo and the man’s face, in profile. But that was enough. It was him. One of the police department’s suspects in Sera’s case had a tattoo of a spider, and one of Noelle’s prophesies was about a spider. If that
was
a coincidence, it was coincidental enough to deserve investigation.

The suspect’s legal name was Chance Alexander Curtis. He sounded more like an Ivy League undergrad than a brutal murderer. But then, that fit Sera’s description, too.

I closed Van’s laptop and stowed Noelle’s notebook in the bottom of my duffel again. Then I borrowed the cell phone Ian had left in the kitchen to send a text to Cam.

It’s Kris. I need a favor.

His reply came two minutes later, while I was shrugging into my shoulder holster, over a mostly clean T-shirt dug from my bag.

Hell no. It’s 4 am & I still owe you a rt hook.

Oh, yeah. I’d punched Cam once, years ago, when I thought he was threatening Olivia. I was wrong, and he’d never let me forget it.

Turn off the light, or I’ll wake up Liv.

With my .40 loaded and holstered, I shrugged into a light jacket, then killed the bulb in the hall closet—we still kept it on at night, so no one could sneak in—then stepped into the darkness and out into the living room of Cam and Olivia’s apartment.

The second I appeared, something clicked, and light flooded the room from a lamp in the corner. I squinted and found Cam with his fingers still on the switch. Before my eyes had even adjusted to the light, he reached to his left and flipped the switch on another lamp, this one without a shade.

Nothing happened. That lamp held an infrared bulb, to keep the room inaccessible to Travelers—like me—without keeping the house lit up all night. There was one in every room of our hideout house.

“You shouldn’t be here.” Cam crossed into the tiny galley-style kitchen.

“I know it’s late, and—”

“Actually, it’s early.” He pulled open the fridge and tossed me a soda from inside, then took one for himself.

“—and Liv’s asleep—”

“Not anymore,” Olivia said, and I turned to find her standing in the hallway in a tank top and short pj shorts.