Oath Bound (An Unbound Novel) (8 page)

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

T
he 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.”