Oath Bound (Unbound)

Ten



Kris

On my way down from the upstairs bathroom, I glanced into the room that used to be mine and saw Sera staring at herself in the mirror. Just...staring.

“You okay?” I stopped in the doorway, hesitant to enter without permission, since a third strike would mean I was out. And whether or not I was ready to admit it, I very much wanted to be in.

She shrugged and met my gaze in the mirror. “I don’t know what one wears on a covert mission. Not that I have many options.” She held her arms out, inviting me to look. “Is this okay?”

“Waaay better than okay.” The black top and dark jeans were Kori’s, but Sera filled them out...better. So well, in fact, that I tried to forget they were my sister’s clothes. “Doesn’t matter, though. If this thing goes like we expect it to, it’ll be less about stealth than about speed and brute force.”

Still watching me in the mirror, she pulled her long brown hair into a high ponytail, and suddenly she looked eighteen years old. Young and vulnerable. Except for her eyes. The gaze that stared back at me in the mirror was ancient and war-wearied. Scarred. Which made a brutal kind of sense, now that I knew what had happened to her family.

She turned back to her own reflection. “So, what do you need me to do?”

“Just come with us.” I stepped into the room, and when she didn’t object, I took three more steps and half sat on the edge of the desk that had been mine a day and a half ago. “You don’t even have to pick up a gun.”

“In fact, we’re not gonna give you one.” My sister appeared in the doorway, and Sera turned to face us both. “Kris says you can’t shoot.”

“I said she can’t shoot yet. But I’ll teach her.”

Kori shrugged, arms crossed over her chest. “If you’re not planning to teach her in the next ten minutes, she’s not getting a gun.”

“Ten minutes?” Sera stepped into the boots she’d been wearing when I’d pulled her through the shadows in Tower’s supply closet, and I made a mental note to take her shopping. She deserved clothes of her own. And for my own comfort, I really needed to see her in something my sisters had never worn.

“Yeah. Kori says they have fewer employees on hand after 6:00 p.m.”

Sera’s eyes widened and she glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand. My nightstand. “How did it get so late? I think I forgot to eat lunch.” Before I could offer her a snack, she sat on the bed to zip her boots and looked up at me. “Employees of what? Where are we going?”

“Well...” I glanced behind me, expecting Kori to answer, since she’d actually been where we were headed, but she was gone. “It’s a pharmaceutical company. Of sorts. Only you don’t want the kind of drugs they make.”

* * *

“Why does a pharmaceutical company have a darkroom?” Sera whispered, still holding my hand in the dark. Kori and Ian stood less than a foot in front of us. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them breathing. Hell, I could practically feel their body heat in the cramped quarters.

“The drugs produced here are very...special,” I whispered, fighting the urge to squeeze her hand, to run my thumb over the back of hers. Sera made me hungry for something I couldn’t define—couldn’t even understand—and each moment I spent with her made that craving worse. Yet the moments spent away from her didn’t ease the urge.

I let go of Sera before I could embarrass myself, and for a second she let her hand hang between us, as if the release had caught her by surprise. Which is when I realized I hadn’t done a damn thing right since the moment I’d met her.

“Keep in mind that ‘special’ doesn’t imply legality or ethics,” Kori added just as softly as I’d spoken.

Sera shifted her feet next to me. “So, how do we get out of the darkroom without alerting security?” Secure darkrooms have no interior doorknobs, as a precaution. Under normal circumstances, someone in the control room would have to buzz us into the building, but in this particular case, they were more likely to gas us through specialized vents in the ceiling.

We could shoot our way out, as I’d done at the Tower estate, but that would kill any hope of a stealthy entry.

“Have I mentioned that I’m a Blinder?” Ian’s whisper was somehow even deeper than his normal voice.

Sera chuckled. “Yeah.”

“Have we mentioned that he’s the best in the country?” Kori added.

“Okay, we’re all ready,” Ian said before Sera could answer. A second later, he and my sister were gone, though in the absence of light, I felt, rather than saw them leave.

“What happened?” Sera’s whisper held an edge of fear. In answer, I fumbled for her hand again—and got her hip instead. I thought she’d yell at me, but she just took my hand and held on tight, and I realized she’d figured out the plan. I tugged her forward, through the darkness Ian had produced, and two steps later, the echo of our soft footsteps changed when our boots hit the floor in the hall, which was just as dark as the adjacent darkroom had been.

That time, before I released her hand, I squeezed it in the intimate semi-privacy of near-total darkness.

The shadows around us faded completely in less than a second and a glance around revealed only a sterile white hallway, lined with doors. Sera turned and found the darkroom door behind us, marked and missing its exterior doorknob, as well, as only the most high-security rooms were.

“What the hell just happened?” she demanded, in spite of the finger I pressed against my lips, reminding her to keep it quiet. “I thought you were taking us into some other darkroom.”

“There aren’t any other darkrooms in the building. The whole place is fitted with an infrared grid.” I gave her a smile. “Good thing we have Ian, huh?”

She glanced at him and nodded, and Kori leaned closer to whisper. “He can throw darkness through walls. Comes in handy.”

Sera nodded, eyes wide.

Kori led the way, silently pointing out video cameras as we went. Even unspoken, her point was clear. If someone was watching those monitors, we were screwed. But unless their alarm was the silent kind, so far, the coast was clear. Yet that put me even more on edge, because it made no sense. We’d expected to have to fight our way to Kenley.

Halfway down the next hall, I stepped closer to Kori and whispered into her ear. “Where is everyone? This is weird.”

“I know. I expected the traffic to be light, but not nonexistent.”

“We’ve walked into either a trap or a truly abandoned building.”

She nodded solemnly. “We can either push forward or go home.”

We weren’t going home without Kenley. I gestured down the hall for her to lead on. “Just be prepared for anything.”

She nodded again and stood on her toes to whisper in my ear. “Ian and I will take point. You watch out for Sera. A damsel in distress is always the weakest link.”

Sera was far from helpless—the still-healing cuts on my arm were proof of that. But I would gladly watch out for her.

After several turns and an unlocked white door, then another Ian-assisted shadow-walk through a locked door, we came to a third door with a different, more complicated-looking finger-print pad/pass-code lock. “We’ll go first and disable whoever’s on duty, then open the door for you guys.” Kori’s shoulders were stiff with tension, her arms taut, her jaw clenched. My heart beat harder in response to her anxiety.

We were close.

In minutes, we could have Kenley, and she could be just fine, and maybe she would forgive me for losing her in the first place.

“I’m sure she’s okay,” Sera whispered, and I looked up to find her watching me with big, worried eyes, her beautiful mouth turned down in what I first mistook for sympathy. But it was more than that. Deeper. I was seeing empathy. Sera had already been where Kori and I were, and her sister hadn’t been okay.

I was so tense I could hardly breathe as Ian called up a small, precise cone of darkness. A second later, he, Kori and that darkness were all gone.

Sera and I waited, listening anxiously for the thud of impact or the thwup of a silenced gun. But the only sound was the click of the door lock as it disengaged. Kori pulled the door open with a scowl, then ushered us inside.

“What happened?”

In answer, she gestured toward the room they’d just broken into, which was empty except for a single long table scattered with loose sheets of paper. There were no employees. No other furniture. And no Kenley.

I was willing to bet that the papers they’d left behind held no useful information at all.

A glass panel in one wall overlooked another, much larger, even emptier space.

“This was the observation room.” Then Kori pointed through the window, and I peered into the empty space, wondering if our sister had ever been there. Or had we been barking up the wrong tree from the beginning? “That’s where they kept the vegetables.”

“Vegetables?” Sera stared through the window, gripping the edge of the table so tightly her knuckles had gone white. “Why do I get the feeling you don’t mean roots and tubers?”

“She’s talking about human vegetables.” The words hurt to say. They hurt even worse to think about as my gaze caught on a length of medical tubing abandoned on the floor in the next room. “Only Tower wasn’t growing them. He was bleeding them.”

“Bleeding?” Sera’s voice was brittle, as though it might actually break. “I’m not sure I want to know what that means.”

“Jake collected people whose Skills he wanted and kept them in medically induced comas so he could take blood from them as often as possible, without actually killing them.”

Sera blinked at me. “He collected...people?”

“And bled them.” Kori pulled a string next to the windowsill and blinds dropped to cover the window, as if that could actually erase the memory of what she’d once seen through it. What I’d imagined. “Then he sold their blood as transfusions, intended to give the receiver temporary Skills. At significant cost.”

I sank onto the edge of the table, struggling to breathe through my own disappointment. “Or for an equivalent investment of information.”

Sera trailed her fingers down the closed blinds. The metallic rattle was loud after the eerie silence of the deserted building. “Information?”

“Tower also collected names and blood samples from anyone he might one day want to manipulate. Or blackmail. Or profit from.”

Sera looked sick. Pale. Disgusted. And a little...guilty? Why would she feel guilty? I was the one who’d lost Kenley. “Is there any crime Jake Tower didn’t commit as a matter of course?”

Kori shrugged. “I never saw him jaywalk.”

“So, why did you think Kenley would be here?” Sera picked up a sheet of paper, glanced at it, then dropped it on the table.

“Because Julia would have to keep her nearby and under close watch. The blood farm seemed like the ideal place,” Kori said. “But it’s gone.” The devastation in her voice made my throat ache with every curse I held back. Every angry word I swallowed.

We’d thought we were close. We’d come determined to take out any- and everyone who stood between us and our baby sister, but there was no one to shoot.

Worse, there was no one to rescue.

“She moved the whole operation.” Kori stared at the covered window in shock, and I realized she wasn’t just stating the obvious. She was trying to process the obvious. Our failure. I’d been there over and over in the past six years, since Noelle died and my sisters were both conscripted into the Tower syndicate.

It never got any easier.

“We shouldn’t be surprised,” Ian said. “Julia’s no idiot.” He’d warned us from the beginning that Kenley might not be there. That the entire operation might have been moved, or she might have shut it down. But we’d had to try, and in my heart, I’d believed we’d find her.

I’d needed to find her.

“Okay, so let’s find out where she moved them. There has to be something....” Kori picked up a sheet of paper from the table, scanned it, then tossed it aside and picked up another. She went through page after page, but most were blank and none of them held anything of meaning for her. The documents they’d left behind would only be useful as paper airplanes. A whole squadron of them.

“Kori,” I said when she got to the end of the pages and started again, squatting to examine them on the floor. She didn’t even acknowledge me.

“Kori.” I knelt and put a hand on her shoulder, but she flinched and pulled away from me, and another crack widened in my heart. She didn’t seem to recognize me. She seemed...scared of me.

I’d never seen Kori scared of anything.

I stood and gave her some space, because I didn’t know what else to do, and Ian stepped into my place. He knelt in front of Kori and put one dark hand on the paper she was still clutching.

“Kori.” He didn’t try to touch her. He just waited for her to realize he was there. “Korinne. Look at me.”

Finally, she looked up. She blinked, and there were tears in her eyes, and my chest ached as though someone had ripped my heart out and left the wound gaping open. “I lost her,” Kori said. “I’m supposed to protect her, and I lost her.”

“No, Kor, I lost her.” I couldn’t stand to see her like this. She looked so...hopeless. “But we’re going to find her. And she’s going to be fine.”

“No, she won’t.” Kori turned on me, eyes blazing with anger, and Sera took a step back. “You have no idea what Julia will do to her if Kenley pisses her off. If we piss her off. She has to keep Kenni alive, but that doesn’t mean she won’t let them hurt her.”

Them?

Kori ran one hand through her hair, then gripped a handful of it. “I know where she is,” she whispered, and chill bumps popped up all over my arms. Ian shook his head, but she didn’t even notice. “You know where.”

“No.” He was still shaking his head. “She’s not in the basement, Kori. Julia’s not stupid. She knows that’s the first place we’d look.”

“But it wasn’t. This is the first place we looked. And we were wrong, because she’s in the basement.”

My hands curled into fists at my sides and my stomach started to churn. I felt helpless watching them. But I was so glad Ian could comfort my sister when I couldn’t.

“No, we were wrong because Julia moved the whole operation. Kenley’s not in the basement,” Ian insisted.

“We have to check.” Kori’s eyes were narrowed, her jaw set in a firm line. Ian nodded, Sera shot me a confused look, but I couldn’t explain, because I didn’t fully understand Kori’s mental shift, other than that it stemmed from whatever she’d suffered at Tower’s hands, whatever she thought they were now doing to Kenley.

“We will. We’ll look everywhere,” Ian promised. “But for now, let’s get out of here.” He wrapped one arm around Kori, and as grateful as I was that he was able to comfort her, I felt that his gain was my loss. I didn’t know how to be there for her anymore, and that realization resonated deep inside me, an ache I couldn’t ease.

“What basement?” Sera whispered in my direction.

Kori’s head snapped up and her sharp gaze found Sera. “Hell. The basement in hell. That’s where she put Kenley. I know it is.”

“Okay. Let’s go.” Ian held his hand out, then waited for her to take it. Finally she did, and there was a shift in her eyes. Behind her eyes. She blinked, then seemed to stand straighter, stronger, just from being close to him. Her focus returned, and she was with us again, back from whatever psychological detour had claimed her moments before.

I started to smile and welcome her back. Then something moved on my right. With a jolt of alarm, I turned just as two large hands aimed a silenced pistol through the doorway from the hall. I pulled my gun, but Sera was closer. And faster. She threw one arm up beneath his wrists, trying to raise his aim so he’d hit the ceiling.

It almost worked.

A flash of light came from the barrel an instant before the muted thwup echoed through the small room.

Ian crumpled to the ground. Kori and I fired at the same time—I hadn’t even seen her draw. I have no idea whose bullet actually did the job, but the shooter stumbled backward into the hallway, then slid down the opposite wall, leaving a single wide red smear on the white paint.

Out bullets had struck so close together—over his heart—that I could only see one hole.

In the shocked silence that followed, no one moved for at least a second. Sera gaped at me. Then at Kori. Then at the dead guy. Then she started breathing really, really fast.

“Sera? You okay?”

“F*ck her!” Kori holstered her gun and dropped to the ground at Ian’s side, where blood dribbled between the fingers of the hand he held to his own shoulder. “I need something to— Give me your shirt!”

But that was easier said than done. I handed Sera my gun, and she held it like it might explode and kill us all. I shrugged out of my jacket, ripped off my holster and pulled my T-shirt over my head, then tossed it to Kori.

While she wadded it up and pressed it to Ian’s wound, I stepped into the hall, glanced in either direction, then squatted next to the downed man and checked his neck for a pulse.

“Dead,” I announced, stepping back into the observation room.

“Of course he’s dead,” Kori snapped, still pressing my shirt against the hole in Ian’s shoulder. “Are there any more?”

“Not yet. He’s security. If the entire building’s empty, he may be the only one here, guarding the cemetery, so to speak. Or so he thought.”

Kori brushed hair from Ian’s forehead, and even in the dim light, I could see that his dark complexion looked strangely washed out. “I have to get him out of here, but I don’t have enough bleach to clean this up.”

“Go,” Sera said. Her eyes were still wide, but her focus was steady. She was still with me. “We’ll take care of it. They have to have a supply closet, or something.”

“You sure?” Kori flinched when Ian grimaced.

“Go!” I shrugged into my holster, which felt weird against my bare skin, and took my gun back from Sera. “The longer you stay, the more blood there is to destroy.”

Kori stood and fired her silenced pistol into the ceiling twice. Glass shattered, obliterating both sets of lights, and I pulled Sera close, tucking her head against my shoulder to shield it. When the glass settled, I glanced up to see Kori doing the same thing for Ian. He still looked pale. He was losing a lot of blood.

Kori helped him to his feet while he held my bloody shirt to his wound with his opposite hand. Then she pulled him through the darkest corner of the room.

The moment they were gone, I headed into the hallway, with another glance in both directions, just in case.

“Will he be okay?” Sera asked as I tried doorknob after doorknob. Most were unlocked, and all of the rooms were empty, which seemed to verify the fact that the building had been completely deserted.

“Ian?” I said, and she nodded, moving to the next door on her side of the hall. “Probably. Shoulder wound. Through-and-through, from the looks of the blood on the wall behind him. Gran will get him all patched up. But if we don’t destroy his blood, Julia will be able to use it against him, and Ian will wish he were dead.”

I threw open another door and found a break room with three card tables set up on the left, opposite a wall-length counter on the right, complete with two microwaves and a full-size fridge.

I headed straight for a package of napkins abandoned on the counter, and Sera started to follow me, probably to search the cabinets. But then she noticed an open door beyond the first table, which hadn’t been visible from the hall. It was a bathroom.

She veered into the restroom and knelt to open the cabinet beneath the sink as I started opening cabinets in the kitchenette.

“Don’t move.”

I froze, the package of napkins tucked under one arm. My pulse raced, and I hoped he was talking to me, not Sera.

“Turn around slowly and put your hands on the back of your head. You even look like you’re gonna go for your gun, and I’ll blow your f*cking head off.”

Bittersweet relief took the edge from the stress of knowing a gun was aimed at my back. He had to be talking to me. Sera was unarmed.

I turned slowly and considered letting the napkins fall, so I could go for my gun at the first opportunity. But if the shooter was jumpy, he’d open a hole in my chest before they even hit the ground.

A man in a security guard’s uniform—matching the dead man’s—stood in the middle of the break room, aiming his silenced pistol at me with his back to the bathroom. He hadn’t seen Sera yet.

He was one of Julia’s, just like the last guy. Ordinary security guards don’t carry suppressors.

At his back, Sera slowly, silently set a bottle of bleach on the floor, then stood without a sound. I couldn’t look directly at her without exposing her, and my peripheral vision wasn’t good enough to tell what she was up to. Which made me nervous. She had a history of confronting gunmen—she’d demanded my gun and foiled the aim of the dead man in the hall—and if she got herself killed trying to help me, I would never forgive myself.

“Unsnap the gun pocket from your holster and set it down, then kick it across the floor to me.” The guard’s aim held steady at my chest. Behind him, Sera glanced around the bathroom, and I had a horrible hunch that she was looking for a weapon.

I lifted both brows at the gunman as Sera knelt to pick up a bottle of spray cleaner, and I hoped she’d understand that my response was actually aimed at her. “This is a little ridiculous,” I said. “I don’t need a gun to kill you.” That last part, obviously, was for the bad guy.

“Humor me,” he said. “Hand over the gun.”

Sera silently turned the end of the nozzle, opening the spray bottle, and my heart began to beat too hard. What the hell was she planning to do, shine his bald spot?

When she picked up a toilet plunger and hefted it, testing the weight, I nearly groaned. The handle was too light to pack a punch, and the rubber part on the end would do about as much damage as the proverbial wet noodle.

Her boots were silent on the tile, as the guard watched me unsnap my gun pocket. Her last step squeaked on the floor, and my heart nearly burst through my chest when he heard her and turned, his aim shifting with the movement.

Sera swung the plunger at his arms, driving his aim down as she sprayed the cleaner in his face.

The guard screamed.

I fumbled, trying to pull my pistol from the partly detached pocket.

The guard’s gun went off with a thwack. A chunk of linoleum tile exploded to my left, and my heart leaped into my throat as I lurched out of the fire zone. The gunman abandoned his two-handed grip to rub his eyes, still screaming, and Sera shoved the stick end of the plunger into his stomach with a wild grunt of effort.

The guard oofed and swung the gun toward her. She ducked below his blind aim just before the thwack, and the bullet slammed into the wall at my back.

I let go of the gun pocket, and it dangled from my holster by one snap as I launched myself at the blinded guard, trying to pull his gun away before he could fire again. Sera circled us, struggling to stay out of the line of fire as we fought over the weapon.

The gun went off twice more, and my heart stopped with each muffled shot, certain I’d just met my own death. Shooting the guard would have been easier than wrestling his gun from him, but he had to live long enough to be interrogated.

Still trying to avoid the kill zone, Sera bumped into the countertop next to the fridge, then turned to pull it open. It was empty, as was every drawer she tried. The only thing that wasn’t nailed down, other than the furniture and the microwaves, was...

She grabbed the cheap four-slice toaster and jerked so hard the cord pulled free from its plug. Stay back, I thought, as she circled us, avoiding the gun we still fought over, looking for her chance.

When I understood that she wasn’t going to stop trying to help until I’d gotten the guard’s gun, I realized I’d have to work with her, instead of silently cursing her dangerous involvement. I jerked hard on the guard’s wrists, avoiding his trigger finger, and swung him around in a half circle.

Sera pulled the toaster over her head. The cord dangled against her back. When the moment was right, she swung the toaster down with another grunt of effort, straight into the guard’s shiny, bald head.

The guard grunted, then crumpled to the floor. I ripped the gun from his grip and clicked the safety switch. I exhaled slowly and took a moment to celebrate the fact that we were both still alive. And whole. Then I turned to Sera, latent anger and intense relief coursing through me in a complicated storm of emotion.

“What the hell were you thinking? You could have been killed.”

Her eyes widened and her triumphant smile faded. “I just saved your ass!”

“I didn’t ask you to!” I couldn’t make sense of the tight feeling in the pit of my stomach, as if I’d just survived some massive free fall that should have killed me, but my organs hadn’t yet adjusted to the landing. “You could have been killed.”

Sera frowned. “You already said that.”

“Because it keeps bothering me.” The words hurt coming out; the truth was still too raw. “Don’t ever do that again.” And suddenly I understood what was wrong with me. Why my heart was beating so hard I could almost hear it, even after the fight was over.

I wasn’t scared of Sera dying because it would have meant I’d failed to protect someone else. I was scared of her dying because I didn’t want her to die. Or leave. Or spill even a drop of blood. The thought of her getting hurt left me furious and terrified, just like the thought of Kenley in Julia Tower’s cruel hands. Except Sera wasn’t my sister, a fact I grew more grateful for with each passing second.

But her eyes still blazed with fury.

“Fine. Next time I’ll let the bad guy shoot you! Don’t cry to me when you’re bleeding out on the floor!” She started to turn away, already bending for the spray cleaner she’d dropped in favor of the toaster.

“Sera,” I said, and she stood slowly, mad at me again, for about the billionth time since we’d met. “Thank you for not letting the bad guy shoot me.”

Then I kissed her. Because I couldn’t f*cking resist.