Oath Bound (Unbound)

Thirteen



Sera

The next day, my third day in the House of Crazy, I avoided Kris as much out of humiliation as out of anger. I stayed in my room until I could actually smell and hear breakfast being served. I ate in the kitchen, while he ate on the couch with his sister. I dodged his glances and stayed out of his physical reach, excusing myself to the restroom twice when I didn’t have to go, just to avoid being left alone in a room with him.

I couldn’t face him, after making such a fool of myself the night before, and the worst part was that I’d been totally blindsided by his reaction. He’d kissed me. He’d flirted. We’d shared innuendo, and heated glances, and...hot chocolate. He’d seemed more than interested.

I knew we couldn’t have anything serious—I had to be gone before he found out about my connection to the Towers, and eventually he would find out—but I’d thought maybe I could have him for a little while. A few nights with more than a pillow for company and warmth that didn’t come from an overhead vent. The touch of hands that didn’t want to kill me and lips that hadn’t given the order to fire.

But I’d misread something, somewhere, and in the end, that was probably for the best. I couldn’t afford to get attached, and the last thing I needed was another short-term fling, especially considering how the last one had ended.

I shook off that thought before it could reopen old wounds, determined to focus on my current problems. Unfortunately, Kris was prominent among them. I hadn’t asked to inherit a criminal enterprise from the father I’d never even met, but if he found out that killing me would break most of Julia’s bindings and free his sister from the burden, would he even hesitate to pull the trigger?

Hell, he’d probably decide he was meant to kill me—that that’s why his dead lover had told him to take me in the first place.

I couldn’t afford to trust Kris. I couldn’t afford to touch him. I certainly couldn’t afford to like him. I was on my own again. With any luck, he and his merry band of mafia rebels would help me find and kill my family’s murderer soon, and after that I would disappear, hidden by my own Skill, as I had been most of my life.

The hard part would be getting out of that screwed-shut house without a shadow-walking escort...

But in spite of my determination to distance myself, I couldn’t help watching Kris through the kitchen doorway during breakfast, while he laughed with his sister like I’d once laughed with mine. Ian and Vanessa were honorary siblings—that much was obvious in the way he made them smile in spite of gunshot wounds and missing loved ones.

And his grandmother...

I’d never seen a grown man so dedicated to his grandmother, even when she smacked him on the back of the head and talked to him like he was still sixteen years old, either because she actually thought that was the case, or because with those blue eyes and that pale hair, he looked like an overgrown teenager when he wasn’t scowling or plotting Julia Tower’s destruction.

A teenager with a gun, and a dangerous edge behind his easy smile.

Don’t look at his smile.

After breakfast—another family affair I existed on the edge of—Kris, Van and Ian sat at the kitchen table brainstorming their next move in the search for Kenley, while Kori disappeared through the hall closet.

I took advantage of their distractions for a chance to circumspectly look for what I’d come to think of as the escape hatch. There had to be one. I remained convinced that he would never leave his Gran—a woman with no Skill or obvious defensive abilities—alone in a house she couldn’t leave.

But the house wasn’t that big, and all the windows and exterior doors were screwed shut. Frustrated and desperate, I even searched the closet in Gran’s room for hidden panels covering a secret exit. Yes, that would be crazy. But screwing the exits shut wasn’t exactly sane.

Alas, the closet hid no secrets, so when I emerged, still trapped in the House of Crazy, I took a millionth look at Gran’s bedroom window. From the start, it had seemed like the obvious one to leave open, so Gran could escape if a fire started in the middle of the night. But a glance the day I’d arrived had shown me that it, too, was screwed shut.

However this time when I looked, I noticed something I hadn’t before. On the sill itself, along with bits of sawdust from where the screws were forced into the wood, I saw tiny curls of rubbery shavings. I pinched one between my fingers and realized it was dried paint.

Kris had said some of the windows were painted shut, but someone had scraped paint from the opening in Gran’s window. Why bother, if it was screwed closed?

Hopeful, I gave the window a tug, and it slid up with little effort and no noise, despite the countersunk screws. And that’s when I noticed these screws were different. They were shorter than the others, so they hadn’t penetrated the wood. They were just for show.

But why? Who was the show for, if Kris hadn’t gone to the Tower estate intending to kidnap and imprison someone?

Half an hour after she left, Kori returned with Olivia—the bloodhound—and a tall, well-built, dark-haired man who could only be Cam, her significant other.

His significance was obvious in the way they stood close together, and sat close together, and kept touching each other for no reason at all, as if any distance put between them caused actual pain.

To my surprise, they’d been in the House of Crazy less than five minutes when they took seats on the couch, facing the arm chair I’d claimed for myself when all the friendship and togetherness started to close in on me.

“Sera, this is Cameron Caballero,” Liv said, one hand on his thick left biceps. “Cam, this is Sera.”

We shook hands, and when Cam started talking, I realized they’d come to talk to me.

“So, I understand that you have some information for us to start with,” he said, and when I looked up, I found Kris watching us from the kitchen doorway. He’d obviously passed along part of what I’d told him, but I couldn’t tell how much.

“I can give you a description.” I forced the syllables from my throat with enough volume to suggest confidence. A lie floating on honest words.

They didn’t need to know the parts I’d left out.

Cam smiled. “There isn’t much Liv and I can do with a description, but if that’ll help Van find his name...well, then we’ll be in business.”

Oh, yeah. Cam was the name Tracker.

“We want anything you can tell us about him,” Olivia said, and I hated how soft her voice was, as if any real volume might startle me. As if she was a counselor in a fancy office.

They definitely knew I’d been there. That I’d seen what happened to my family.

I spared a moment for thanks that Kris had had no other information to give them.

“Dark hair,” I said, and Liv started scribbling in her notebook with the stubby remains of a pencil. “Kind of long, and very curly. Light eyes. Pale skin. Freckles.” I swallowed and closed my eyes, then opened them almost immediately. With my eyes closed, I could still see him. When the room got too quiet, I could still hear him. The sounds he’d made between my sister’s screams...

“Anything else?” Cam asked when I’d been silent for at least a minute.

“He’s lean, but strong. Tall. Six feet, or more. He doesn’t look like...” A killer. I didn’t know how to finish that without saying the words. “He looks like a college kid. Clean clothes. Hiking boots. And he smiles a lot. Like he’s having fun.”

Olivia blinked, and something unpleasant flashed behind her eyes.

I knew what they were thinking. My description was too detailed. I’d gotten a good, long look at the monster who’d slaughtered my entire family. I hadn’t just glanced at him as I’d fled the house.

They wanted to know how I’d survived, when everyone I’d ever loved had died.

“Okay. That’s good,” Liv said, but there was nothing good about what I was telling them. “Did you notice anything else? Tattoos or birthmarks? Scars?”

I shook my head, trying to mentally detach myself. To rise above what I’d seen and heard. “His height and hair are his most distinguishing features.” My voice sounded cold. Clinical. As if I’d actually been able to divorce myself from the memories long enough to describe him. But that was another lie.

“Did you hear him speak? Did he have an accent?” Cam asked, and I realized that all discussion from the kitchen had ended. Kris stood in the doorway, quiet rage blooming in red splotches on his cheeks and forehead. Vanessa sat in a recliner, clicking away at her laptop, while Kori perched on the arm of her chair, alternately looking at me and at Van’s screen.

“No accent. He sounded normal. Educated, but not pretentious. His voice is deeper than you’d expect from such a thin build, but it’s soft. Quiet and controlled.” Even in the middle of...bad things.

I’d never spoken about him in such detail, but I’d relived that night so many times that I couldn’t forget any of it. Ever. No matter how hard I tried.

“Okay. I’ve got all that down.” Olivia met my gaze with a steady one of her own. “But, Sera, it would really help us out if you could tell us where this happened. My range is pretty good, but I still have limits, and we’ll need a starting point.”

This is it. The moment when I had to decide how much to trust them. I could give them the location, which would lead them to the crime itself and then they’d know who I’d been, before my family died. They’d see the shattered remains of my life laid out across their computer screens in illicitly gained police reports.

Then they would look at me differently. Pity would outweigh any respect I’d gained. But that wouldn’t bring them any closer to discovering the secret of my birth.

“Andersen,” I said at last. “About an hour north of the state line.”

Andersen wasn’t my hometown; it was just the latest in a series of relocations meant to keep us from being found, in spite of my mother’s insistence that my biological father had no idea I existed. We’d been in Andersen for six years, since my junior year in high school. That was the longest we’d ever lived anywhere, and my family had only stayed there because when I’d gone off to college, I took the target on my back with me.

In retrospect, the town made sense, as had all the ones before. Anderson had just over one hundred thousand residents. It was a big enough place that no one noticed or really cared when someone new moved into the neighborhood, but too small to hold any real interest for any of the major Skilled syndicates. The perfect place to hide in plain sight.

Until a random act of violence—a home invasion with no clear motive—had taken away everyone I’d ever wanted to protect.

The click of computer keys drew me back into the present, where several sets of eyes stared at me. Vanessa was still searching, and if she hadn’t found the news articles yet, she would soon. In a town the size of Andersen, the unsolved murder of almost an entire family was still big news.

“Is there anything else you think we should know?” Olivia asked, and I answered on my way up the stairs.

“Only that I want him dead. But first, I want him to suffer.”


Kris

When I stepped out of the upstairs bathroom, Van was waiting for me in the doorway to the room she and Kenley had shared. She tossed her head toward the door, silently asking me to come in. Which meant she didn’t want someone to know whatever she had to say.

I followed her into her room and pushed the door closed at my back, then sank onto Kenley’s side of the unmade bed, where Van’s laptop was open on the rumpled comforter. “What’s up?”

“I found her.”

“Kenley?” My heart thumped almost painfully.

“No. Sera and her family,” Van whispered, glancing at the closed door. “I found all of it, and it’s not pretty.”

“It’s the scene of a triple homicide.” Quadruple, if you counted the unborn baby, which Sera obviously did. “I wouldn’t expect it to be pretty.”

Vanessa tucked her feet beneath her on the rumpled comforter and pulled the computer onto her lap. She ran a finger over the mouse pad and the screen glowed to life, zoomed in on a news site I’d never heard of. “I just sent the link to Olivia so she and Cam could get started. But are you sure you want to read this?”

I scooted back to lean against the headboard next to her, angled so that my feet hung over the edge of the mattress. Kenley hated shoes on the bed. “I’m sure I don’t want to read it.” But I had to know. Whatever Sera was—whoever she was—this was the event that would shape the rest of her life, and I couldn’t know her without knowing what she’d been through. And I wanted to know Sera. Even if she no longer wanted to know me.

“Why don’t you just sum it up for me?” I let my head fall back against the padded headboard. “If you don’t mind.”

Vanessa shrugged and scrolled on her mouse pad, and I avoided looking at the screen. “It’s your basic home invasion, made more horrifying because we actually know one of the victims. Middle of the night break-in. One perpetrator, according to the police report. The only description they got out of Sera was ‘tall.’ Her dad was the only one still awake when it started, playing guitar in the family room. He must have heard something, because he was shot in the kitchen, through his own guitar. The ballistics report says the gunman used a silencer and facts support that. The neighbors didn’t hear anything and the mother never woke up. She was shot in her own bed.”

Chill bumps popped up on my arms. How much of that had Sera seen? How much had she heard?

“He took his time with her sister. Nadia. Poor thing was only eighteen. The police report says he slapped a strip of duct tape over her mouth while she was still in bed asleep, then dragged her into the living room and...well...took his time.”

Vanessa’s jaw clenched, and for a second she looked like she’d be sick.

I felt the same way. “Sick bastard. Eighteen and pregnant, and he—”

Van frowned at me. “Nadia wasn’t pregnant.”

“Sera said she was. Maybe the police didn’t know, if she wasn’t very far along.”

Vanessa blinked at me, and suddenly there was caution in her expression. Wariness. There was something she didn’t want to tell me.

“Just say it, Van.” Though I wasn’t sure I really meant that.

“Kris, Nadia wasn’t pregnant. She survived the initial attack, but died in the hospital the next day of a stab wound to the abdomen, without regaining consciousness.”

As I struggled to think around a thick fog of confusion—the truth was there, but it wasn’t sinking in—Van turned her laptop around so I could see it.

The headline ripped me wide open, and horror leaked into my soul.





Pregnant Woman Survives Home Invasion;

Loses Baby





I got through the first three sentences of the article before my eyes closed on their own, as if they’d seen all they could take. I couldn’t breathe. That horror had clawed its way up my throat and was blocking my air passage.

Sera had been four and a half months pregnant when she was stabbed in the stomach and left for dead.

Sera. Not Nadia.

The police report said she came out of hiding to defend her sister, fought with the intruder, then crawled to the telephone to call for help after their attacker fled the scene.

That’s why she hid.

She wasn’t protecting herself. She was protecting her baby.

I shoved the laptop away so suddenly it was teetering on the edge of the mattress when Van grabbed it.

Sera had been pregnant. She saw her parents murdered. She saw her sister brutalized, and when she tried to help Nadia, she’d lost her own unborn child. And nearly died along with her sister.

But even as I thought that over, trying to digest the horror and depth of her loss, the totality of the rage and isolation she must be suffering with every beat of her heart, some small detail nagged at the back of my brain, clamoring for attention.

I opened my eyes and pulled Van’s laptop closer to read the first line again. And there it was, in black and white. I hadn’t really noticed it my first time through because the crime itself was shocking enough.

She’d kept her last name secret, but it turns out I hadn’t known her first name either.

Sera was Sera Brandt. S-E-R-A. Short for Serenity.

Holy shit.

It couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible.

I shoved the laptop at Van again, then stood and crossed the floor in three steps. I pulled the door open so hard and fast the hinges groaned with the pressure, then I raced into the hall and down the stairs, leaving Vanessa staring after me in surprise. In the living room, I grabbed my bag from the end of the couch and pulled out Noelle’s notebook, then started flipping through it frantically, still standing.

I was four pages in when I found the first mention.

Find serenity.

Noelle had said it in her sleep, twelve years ago. Then again, five months after that.

Save serenity.

And twice more, over the next two years.

Serenity waits. and Family, serenity.

I hadn’t once capitalized her name, because I hadn’t realized it was a name.

Noelle had been trying to tell me all along, though she probably didn’t understand the message at all. Sera hadn’t appeared in the notebook to help me—she’d appeared so I could help her.

Stunned, I closed the notebook and dropped it into my bag, disgusted with my own ignorance. Horrified by my own failure. What good did it do for me to have glimpses of the future at my fingertips when I couldn’t make sense of a damn one of them?

I was supposed to save Sera and her family. I was supposed to find her and stop the bastard who broke into her house and slaughtered her entire family. Including her unborn child. Hunting down their killer was a secondary goal, only necessary if I failed to keep him from committing the prophesied atrocities in the first place.

Which was exactly what I’d done.

I’d given up. I’d put the notebook away and turned my back on every preventable accident and atrocity predicted within it, because I wasn’t smart enough to figure out the puzzles.

Because of me, Sera had lost everyone she’d ever loved.

How the hell was I supposed to tell her that?