Oath Bound (Unbound)

Twenty



Sera

The ringing of a cell phone woke me up, and it took me a second to realize I wasn’t hearing my own ringtone. And one more second to remember I no longer had a cell phone. After that, everything else came crashing in, and for a moment, my loss—that fresh remembrance of it—was too thick to breathe through. As it was most mornings.

When I’d pushed it all back again, back into memory, where the pain was manageable, I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp, but Kris’s phone stopped ringing before I could answer it. The screen showed one missed call, from Anne.

Kris. He’d been in my bed. Or rather, I was in his.

I twisted, but I knew from the lack of warmth on my left side that he was gone before my gaze ever fell on the empty half of the bed. Still, the memory of the night before surged through me—shared grief, comfort through touch, and a mutual pleasure so perfect that in that instant, nothing else had existed. No pain. No fear. No memories. There’d been nothing but the two of us, and in that moment, I’d been sure we could actually be together. That maybe we were supposed to be together.

But now he was gone, and the bed was cold.

I glanced at the alarm clock and groaned over the numbers—it was barely five in the morning—then stretched to turn the lamp off again, when what I really wanted to do was pull on a bare minimum of clothing and tiptoe downstairs to curl up on the couch with Kris. But if he’d gone downstairs, he’d gone downstairs for a reason.

So I burrowed farther into the covers and closed my eyes. But sleep didn’t return.

Kris’s phone rang again, less than two minutes after the first missed call. I picked it up and scowled when I read Anne’s name on the screen again. Why was she calling him in the middle of the night?

What if this was some kind of emergency?

I pressed the accept call button, before I could overthink it and lose my nerve. “Hello? Anne?” I said, and for a moment, there was only silence on the other end. Then someone exhaled into my ear.

“The spider is dead,” a child’s voice said over the line, and I realized I was talking to Hadley. “The web is a trap.”

“What? Hadley? Is something wrong?”

“The spider is dead! The web is a trap!” she shouted, and her high-pitched scream skewered my brain, then bounced around the inside of my skull. “The spider is dead! The web is a trap!”

I held the phone away from my ear to save my hearing, and I had to half shout to be heard over her. “Hadley! Put your mom on the phone.” But she was still screaming those same two sentences. “Hadley!”

“Hadley!” Anne’s voice echoed mine from the other end of the line, and a plastic clattering followed as her phone hit the floor, but I could still hear the child screaming, and her mother trying to calm her down. “Hadley, what’s wrong? Who’s on the phone? Did you have a bad dream?”

“Anne!” I shouted, desperate to be heard over them both. I didn’t know what spider she was talking about, but I understood both “dead” and “trap.”

Something was horribly wrong. And the call had come on Kris’s phone.

I was still shouting at Anne, trying to get her attention, when my bedroom door flew open and crashed into the dresser against the wall. “Sera?” Kori had her gun drawn and aimed at the floor. “What happened?”

She stepped inside and Ian came in after her, similarly armed, and they automatically scanned separate halves of the room, looking for the threat. When they found none, their gazes returned to me, then slid down from my face. Which is when I remembered that I was naked. And holding Kris’s phone.

“It’s Hadley.” I held the phone out to Kori as I pulled the sheet up to my chest with my free hand. “She’s freaking out about a spider, or something.”

Kori set her gun on the end table, then took the phone and listened as Anne tried to calm Hadley. Ian turned around while I pulled my borrowed pajamas back on, and as I tugged the shirt into place, Kori handed the phone back to me. “They can’t hear us, and I can’t get to them until Anne turns off the infrared grid.”

Her house had state-of-the-art security, which—Kris had explained—Ruben Cavazos had paid for, in order to protect his love child. Noelle’s biological daughter.

“Is that Kris’s phone?” Van said from the doorway as Kori slipped past her into the hall, and I realized that my shouting into the phone had woken the entire household. “Where is he?”

“Downstairs, I guess.” I stood and held the phone a foot away from my ear, and could still hear Hadley screaming.

Kori stepped back into my room a minute later wearing jeans beneath the T-shirt she slept in, with her own phone in her hand.

“Anne still has a home phone,” she explained, pressing buttons on her cell.

I listened on Kris’s phone, and over the line, as Hadley’s screams quieted to a whimper, I heard the home phone ring. Something clattered against wood, and Anne said, “Hello?”

“It’s me,” Kori said from my room. “Turn off the grid. I’m coming over.”

“Just a second.” Anne’s voice was distant now, over Kris’s line. Kori hung up and shoved her phone into her pocket, then headed into the hall. A second later, her footsteps clomped down the stairs so fast I was surprised she didn’t trip over her own feet and plummet to her death. An instant after that, the closet door slammed, and I knew she was gone.

“Anne, can you hear me?” I said into Kris’s phone, and finally she picked it up.

“Who is this?” she said, and I could hear Hadley crying softly in the background, still mumbling about a spider.

“It’s Sera.”

“Where’s Kris?” she said. “Why are you on his phone?”

“He—” I said, but before I could admit to anything—which I wasn’t eager to do—I heard Kori’s voice over the line as she stepped into some shadow in Anne’s house. Almost at the same time, more footsteps raced up the stairs, and Vanessa stepped into my room again.

“Kris is gone.”

“What?” I said, but she could only shrug. That was the extent of her information. “Anne, I gotta go,” I said into the phone, then ended the call and slid Kris’s cell into the shallow pocket of my pj shorts. Ian, Van and I all headed for the stairs, and Gran was just trudging into the living room when we got there, her hair standing up in odd places, rubbing one tired, swollen eye.

“What’s all the ruckus?” She tried to smooth her hair, but it wouldn’t cooperate.

“Hadley’s hysterical and Kris is gone,” Vanessa said.

“Have you seen him?” I added, and Gran shook her head.

“He’ll be back.” She looked confused. “It must have been an emergency, or he wouldn’t have left in the middle of the night. He’s a good boy.”

“I know. Would you like some hot tea?” The offer was as much for me as for her. I couldn’t get Hadley’s screaming out of my head. It wasn’t a coincidence that she’d called Kris’s phone with what was obviously a prediction I couldn’t understand, and now he was missing. Kris and Hadley’s spiderweb trap were connected. And that could not be good.

“Screw hot tea. I’ll make coffee.” Gran brushed past me and I followed her into the kitchen, where Vanessa stood at the table, scrolling through something on her laptop.

“Ian, were you going through the police files I downloaded?” There was something ominous in her voice, as if she already knew the answer before she’d asked the question.

“No. Why?”

“This was on the screen when I opened my laptop. It’s one of the men from the police’s suspect list. In Sera’s case.”

I edged between them, trying to see the screen.

“Sera, wait,” Ian tried to hold me back, but he let go with one angry look from me.

“I was going to show them to you this morning,” Van said softly as I closed my eyes and exhaled, trying to prepare myself for what I might see. “But it looks like Kris did some research of his own.”

I opened my eyes, and the face on the screen came into focus. My throat closed and the air trapped in my lungs seemed to solidify. I sank into the chair to my left and pulled the laptop closer. My hands shook as I zoomed in, then scrolled to recenter the picture.

It was him. The smiling man. The man who’d killed my entire family and ended any chance I had of having children.

“His name is Chase Curtis,” Vanessa said, but I didn’t give a shit what his name was. I didn’t even have a chance to properly process the fact that we’d identified him, because my gaze was stuck not on his face, but on the back of his bare right shoulder, where the tattoo of a crawling tarantula stared back at me.

The spider.

“Oh, shit. Kris found the spider.” I could hardly hear myself because I hadn’t taken in enough air to give my words much volume, but they both heard.

“What spider?” Ian said, and Van tapped the tattoo on her screen.

“That’s what Hadley was trying to tell us.” I scrubbed my face with both hands, but couldn’t erase what I’d just seen. Nor could I make any sense of it. “She said, ‘The spider is dead. The web is a trap.’ And she said it on Kris’s phone.”

Vanessa exhaled heavily. “He went after Curtis.”

“And the web is a trap.” I wasn’t sure what that meant yet, but I was sure it was true. “Who would set a trap for Kris?”

“It’s not a trap for him, it’s a trap for you,” a familiar voice said, and I looked up to find Anne and Hadley standing in the middle of the living room, the child’s face still red and damp from tears. Kori was behind them closing the hall closet door. “And it was set by someone who wants you dead, and knows you’re going after the spider.”

“Julia,” I said, and everyone around me seemed to be nodding. “She set a trap for me, and got Kris instead.”

“This is my fault.” Ian met my gaze with a heavy one of his own. “I told him to give you what you want most.”

“What? Why?”

“Because he’s in love with you, and he wants to prove he can protect you.” There was more to it than that. I could almost see what he wasn’t saying. But before he could elaborate—assuming he would have—Kori turned on me.

“That means this is your fault!” Anger rolled off her voice like smoke from a fire. “And if he’s dead, you’re going to pay.”

I couldn’t process all that at once. Hell, I couldn’t process any of that. “He’s in...” I shook that off. I couldn’t deal with wondering whether or not she was right, and whether or not loving me had just gotten the best man I’d ever known killed. So I focused on Hadley, who was the only one in the room, other than me, who’d ever seen Chase Curtis.

She was staring at something behind me, as though she’d totally lost touch with reality, her mother’s hand still gripped loosely. “Hadley?” I wondered for a second if she’d understood what Kori had just said. Did she know that her biological mother was Kris’s other love? Did she know she was the baby Elle had had with someone else—a mafia king, just like my own biological father?

But when I turned to see what she was staring at, I realized her current state had nothing to do with what Kori had said. I doubted she’d even heard it.

She was staring through the kitchen doorway at the picture of Chase Alexander Curtis, still open on Vanessa’s laptop.

“The spider is dead,” she whispered as if she hadn’t already said it a dozen times. “The web is a trap.”

“Where?” I dropped onto my knees in front of her and took her free hand in mine. “Where is the spider? Where is the trap? Did you see it?”

Anne knelt next to me, and I thought she’d shove me away from her daughter, or tell me to leave her alone, but she only squeezed Hadley’s hand and waited for the answer with us. “Don’t hold it in, sweetie. You’ll feel better once you have it out of your system,” the mother whispered to her daughter. “Once you’ve told us everything you remember. Noelle always did.”

“House,” Hadley whispered. “The spider died in a house. By the wall. Kris was there.”

“Is he still there?” I asked, and Hadley made an obvious effort to focus on me. “Can you see anything else? Is he still there?”

She shook her head, then looked past me to where Gran stood in the doorway, silent as she took it all in, sipping from a steaming mug of fresh coffee tightly gripped in both hands. “Is it morning? Can I have some chocolate milk?”

“Of course.” Gran held one arm out and Hadley dropped her mother’s hand and let Gran fold her into a hug, careful not to slosh coffee on the child. Then she ushered her into the kitchen and pulled a carton of milk from the fridge.

I stood, my hands shaking again. “We have to find him. Olivia?” I glanced at Kori in question. “Cam? Can one of them find him?”

She nodded, already dialing. I put aside the fact that I’d only met her a few days earlier and broke my own rule about respecting other people’s personal space—especially those who sleep armed—and stood close enough to hear what was said when Olivia answered her phone.

“Liv? Sorry for the early call. I need you to track Kris.”

“He didn’t tell you he was coming, did he?” Olivia said, and I began to put it together in my head even before Liv spelled it out for Kori.

“Coming where?”

“Here,” Liv said. “He was here less than an hour ago, with a name for Cam to track.”

“Chance Curtis?” Kori said, and as I’d known she would, Liv mumbled something in the affirmative. “Can you track him for us? Both of them?”

“How ’bout I just give you the address?”

“I’ll certainly take that, but could you also track him for me, to see if he’s still there?”

“Sure.” Olivia said something I couldn’t understand to Cam, then she read Kori an address. Kori scribbled the information on her hand with the purple pen Van handed her, then Olivia was back on the line. “Cam says he’s not there anymore. Or else he’s being Jammed. Maybe Sera’s with him.”

“No, she’s here with us. I’m going after him.”

“Come get us. We’ll help,” Olivia said.

“No time,” Kori said. “But thanks.” She hung up and glanced at Ian. “Ready?”

“And willing.” Ian shrugged into a jacket, covering a shoulder holster I hadn’t even seen him put on.

“I’m coming.” I followed them toward the hall. “But I need a holster.”

Kori stopped and turned to look at me, and I could feel her assessment like a visual pat-down, only she wasn’t looking for weapons. She was looking for competence. “I’ve never been hit by friendly fire,” she said, her voice deeper than usual, and deadly serious. “And I have no plans to start now.”

“I’m not going to shoot you,” I promised as Van shoved a pair of jeans into my hands. I changed from pj shorts into the jeans in Gran’s room in record time, while Kori rummaged in the hall closet for an extra holster. She showed me how to wear it, then slid two full clips into a pocket beneath my right arm and adjusted the straps quickly as I got accustomed to the feel.

I checked my clip, then chambered a round, double-checked the safety and slid the gun into my holster.

“Draw,” Kori said, her hand already on the closet door. She was eager to go. We both were.

I drew, but the movement was slow and awkward.

“Again.”

I holstered the gun and drew with my right hand, again. And again, the movement felt...strange. Kori made a couple of adjustments in the straps, then handed me a jacket and told me to try it again. I put the jacket on, then drew again. My draw was better that time. Smoother, even with the extra material. However, I still wasn’t quite confident that I wouldn’t accidentally shoot a hole in the borrowed jacket.

But I didn’t let her see that. Lots of people learn through on-the-job training, right? Trial by fire. If they could do it, so could I.

Kori nodded her approval, then waved me into the closet. She and Ian followed, and she closed the door. There was only darkness and silence for a moment, when I assumed she was making a mental search of the address Olivia had given her—fortunately, she was familiar with the building.

“The whole apartment is dark. At least, dark enough to travel into. Get ready.”

Her right hand bumped my left, and I took it, my right hovering near the gun, a conspicuous weight at my side. Then she tugged us forward.

Two steps later, the air around us changed as we stepped out of the closet and into Curtis’s brother’s apartment. Carpet muffled our steps.

The smell hit me with my next breath. Feces. And beneath that, the milder yet more alarming scent of blood.

Kori let go of my hand the instant her first foot landed on carpet. For a moment, she and Ian stood absolutely still, letting their eyes adjust to the slightly lighter room, so I did the same. Fortunately, the only light source was what bled through the blinds from the streetlight outside. We adjusted quickly.

On my left, Kori’s head turned as she scanned the room, and I knew Ian was doing the same. So I glanced around, too, and discovered that she’d walked us into the living room—the outline of a couch was a dead giveaway—less than a foot from the closed front door. Where we were least likely to bump into furniture. Where no one could sneak up on us without opening the door at our backs, which would serve as a warning.

Kori thought of everything.

I needed to think of everything, too.

Ian’s tall, dark silhouette took several steps toward the wall near the window. “Light?” he asked, and Kori’s profile nodded. Something clicked, and soft light flooded the room from a lamp in the corner.

The first thing I noticed was a pile of broken glass next to the end table holding the lamp. Something had been knocked off and shattered on the floor. The second thing I noticed were the bodies. Two of them. Even in the deep shadows cast by the table lamp, I recognized the one on the left. His light eyes were still open, now staring at nothing. But now he had two mouths, one gaping open below his chin, above the blood soaking his clothes.

Curtis wasn’t smiling now.

“Sera?” Ian said while Kori headed into the short hallway, gun drawn. She was checking for bad guys, though we all knew the place was deserted. Kris was gone.

“I’m okay,” I whispered, though I was anything but. Curtis was dead, but I didn’t see it happen. I didn’t get to see his life spilled along with his blood. I didn’t see recognition of me in his eyes as they lost focus.

He was dead, but he hadn’t died paying for his crimes against my family. I knew because Kris hadn’t killed him. The spiderweb was a trap. And now Kris was missing.

Somehow, that was worse than how Curtis had died. Without me.

“Kris didn’t do this.” I stood far enough away from the bodies that I could see what had happened to them, but didn’t have to see. Kris was right. Death is a horrible thing to see, even on those who deserve it. “He’s more of a gun man, right?”

“From what I’ve seen, yes.” Ian stood at my side, his weapon still drawn, but aimed at the floor. “Kori’s slit a few throats, but she doesn’t enjoy it, and I’d bet money this was done by a man who enjoys his work. Notice the details.”

But I didn’t want to notice the details.

I wanted to find Kris.

“The apartment’s empty,” Kori said, stepping back into the living room from the hall. But we all already knew that.

“Why didn’t they stay?” I holstered my gun, relieved more by its absence from my hand than by its comforting weight at my side. “If this trap was for me, and Kris showed up instead, they had to know we’d come after him, right? So why are they all gone?”

“Julia’s already lost half a dozen perfectly good gunmen to our ragtag little band of outlaws,” Ian said. “I doubt she was eager to lose any more. Especially if she’s actually lost other employees, thanks to the viral campaign.”

That made sense. “So where’s Kris? She didn’t kill him, right? If so, she would have left him here with the Curtis brothers...” My words sounded like a guess, but felt more like fact. “Maybe Cam can track him again. Or Liv, if we have a sample of his blood.” I glanced at Kori with both brows raised. “Do we have a sample of his blood?”

She shook her head. “He’s careful to destroy every drop he loses. I think you’re right, though. He’s alive, but Cam won’t be able to track him if Julia still has him, and neither would Liv, even if we had a blood sample. Julia will be Jamming his psychic signature.”

“Why does she want him?” I couldn’t figure that out. She needed Kenley, but Kris should have held no value to her.

“She doesn’t.” Ian pulled a piece of paper off the fridge, and the watermelon-shaped magnet that had been holding it in place clattered to the floor. “She wants you.” He handed me the note. “Careful. It’s still wet.”

An inarticulate sound of disgust bubbled up from my throat as I realized that the note I now held had been written in blood. Literally. Chase Curtis’s blood, if I had to guess—there was plenty of it available.

But my disgust melted in the face of both fear and rage when I read the still-dripping words.

Let’s trade. Sera for Kris. I’ll be in touch.

“Is that irony?” I stared at the note, reading it for the third or fourth time. “I think that’s irony.” I’d thought Kris wanted to trade me for Kenley, but now Julia wanted to trade me for him.

“Okay. So...I’ll go. I mean, I was going to go in anyway.”

Kori shook her head, her jaw clenched in fury. “Doesn’t matter. She’s not going to trade him. She’ll kill him as soon as she has you.”

“No, she won’t. I won’t let her. She can’t hurt me and she has to do whatever I tell her to, right?” Surely the infamous bindings were going to work in our favor, for once....

Ian shook his head that time. “There are too many loopholes. She’s bound to you by the same contract that kept her bound to Jake—the same contract she worked around to have him killed. She could do the same to you.”

“And that could be as easy as not being there in person when we go for the trade,” Kori added. “If she’s not there, you can’t give her orders. And if her people have orders to kill whoever shows up, she’s not specifying that they kill you—thus she’s not violating her contract—but you’ll still be dead.”

Which was exactly how and why she’d had my family killed—hoping to catch me in the crossfire without actually putting a hit out on me.

“Shit.” How was it possible that the contracts and system of loyalties were so complicated, but the ways around them were so frustratingly simple?

“Okay. So, if she’s not going to give him back, we’ll have to take him back. Along with Kenley.”

“My thoughts exactly.” Kori knelt for a better look at Curtis, and my stomach churned. “Sorry you didn’t get your revenge killing. I know how bad that sucks. But you’re welcome to share mine. Julia Tower’s as responsible for what happened to your family as Curtis was, which means we both have a claim on her life.” She stood and met my gaze in the dull light from the table lamp. “Help us get Kris and Kenley back, and I’m willing to share the kill.”

“You couldn’t stop me from either one if you tried. How do you think she’ll be in touch? And when?”

“I don’t know, but we’re not going to wait—” Before she could even finish her sentence, Kori’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She frowned and pulled it out, then turned the cell around so Ian and I could see the screen. The text was from Kenley’s phone, but we both knew the Binder hadn’t sent the message.

Bring Sera to the warehouse at the corner of Bonner and Lexington. I will trade her for your brother.

“It can’t be that easy, right?” I said as Kori pocketed her phone without even considering a reply. “I know she’s not really going to trade, so what are the chances he’s really in that warehouse?”

“Slim to none.” Ian scrubbed one hand over his short-cropped hair. “We can try tracking him, but I’d bet my life she has a Jammer sitting right next to Kris. If he’s even still alive.” The words looked almost as painful for him to say as they were for me to hear, but he didn’t shy away from them.

“He’s alive,” Kori said. “She’ll know we’ll want proof of that before we agree to anything. And she won’t offer Kenley as part of the trade because she knows we’ll recognize that as a lie.”

“So, we find her and we take them both back.” I leaned against the fridge, careful not to touch anything for fear of leaving fingerprints at the scene of a crime. “We know where she’s not.” The warehouse on the corner of Bonner and Lexington. “That only leaves...the entire rest of the city for us to search.” I hoped I didn’t look as frustrated as I sounded.

Ian turned to Kori. “I assume she’s not at Tower’s house. For one thing, that’s too obvious. For another, if the viral campaign worked, they may have run her off. We have to assume she still has some loyal employees, otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to take Kris. But it’s entirely possible that she doesn’t have Kenley anymore.”

“Then who does?” Kori stepped over the pool of blood surrounding the Curtis brothers and sank onto the arm of their couch. “If she lost enough employees to lose control over Kenley, how long do you think it’ll be before whoever’s running the blood farm figures out that killing Kenni will free them all permanently? What if that’s already happened? Can it happen?” She stared at the shadowed carpet, lost in thought. “I can’t remember whether or not my oath to Jake prohibited me from killing his Binder— I wouldn’t have hurt her anyway.”

“I think it’s time we make some calls and find out exactly what our viral campaign has done to the Tower infrastructure,” I said, and Kori looked up at me, drawn from her thoughts by the possibility. “Worst-case scenario—we’ll find out it failed entirely. Which means Kenley’s still alive and Julia has her. And if it hasn’t failed, I can get information from anyone whose binding was transferred to me.”

Kori nodded, already pulling her phone from her pocket.

“I think I can save you a lot of trouble on that front.”

Ian whirled toward the new voice as Kori stood, and they were both already aiming guns at the man-shaped shadow in the short hallway before it even occurred to me to draw my weapon.

“Relax. I’m here to help.” Mitch stepped into the dimly lit living room, but no one relaxed. No guns were holstered.

Kori made a show of flipping the safety switch on her gun. “Go out the way you came in, or I will blow your brains out the back of your head.”

Mitch shrugged, still looking at me as he answered her. “That would make it hard for me to tell you what I know.”

“Wait. Let’s hear him out.” If he really had information, we needed it. Badly.

“He’s not bound to you anymore, Sera.” Ian glanced at me briefly, but his aim at Mitch never wavered. “He could be lying. He could be here to kill you.”

“I could,” Mitch confirmed with another shrug. “But that’s more work than I’m willing to do without a direct order or the promise of a paycheck, and since I’m a free man now...I’m actually on my way out of town. Which was your suggestion.”

“Then why are you here? How’d you know we’d be here?” I moved to stand between Kori and Ian, one hand on my own holstered gun, but the added threat wasn’t necessary. Either of them could blow him into several pieces before I could draw, much less aim.

“I’m here because I made a mistake after we parted ways, and I want to fix it. And I didn’t know for sure that you’d be here. It was an educated guess.”

“Educated?” Ian said.

“Yeah. That mistake I mentioned? After I left you guys on the east side yesterday, I went back to Julia.”

“Why?” I couldn’t make sense of it. Why would a free man go back to the woman who’d held his chains? And why would that woman let him live when she’d killed everyone else I’d freed?

“Because I’ve been bound to the Towers since I was nineteen years old. I wasn’t highly valued or promoted very quickly, but syndicate life is all I know, and my talents hold no value in any other line of work. When you let me go, I didn’t understand what you were giving me. I felt as if I’d been thrown out on my ass with nowhere to go. So I went back to what I knew.”

“Why didn’t she kill you?” Kori demanded, gaze narrowed in suspicion we all seemed to share.

“Because I didn’t tell her what you did. Fortunately, she never actually asked me if my binding was converted. She only asked if I’d gotten a text from any of you, and my answer to that was an honest ‘no.’”

“So she thinks you’re still bound to her?” Ian didn’t lower his aim, but he no longer looked likely to shoot in the next few seconds.

“Yeah. I figured that was the safest bet.”

“So you knew we’d be here because you knew how Julia got Kris?”

“I was here when she took him. I knew you’d follow him eventually and my plan was to wait for you here—half an hour would have been my limit, since I’m on my way out of town—and as fortune would have it, here you are. No waiting necessary.”

“He’s lying,” Kori said. “We should kill him.”

“Let’s hear what he has to say first,” I said. “We can always kill him afterward.”

Ian glanced at me in surprise, but Kori just looked mollified. “Fine.” She gestured at his torso with her free hand. “But first, strip.”

Mitch frowned. “Strip?”

“Down to your shorts,” Ian added. “The TSA has X-rays. We only have our eyes.”

Grumbling beneath his breath about how ungrateful we were, Mitch pulled his shirt over his head, then dropped it on the floor. Next he took off his shoes and tossed them into the corner, on Ian’s orders. His pants were the last to go, and when he stood in only a pair of green boxer briefs, Kori made him turn a full circle, so we could see that he was unarmed. And had chicken legs.

“Okay.” Ian lowered his aim, but kept his gun at the ready. “Talk fast.”

Mitch scowled at Kori, who refused to lower her gun. “You just got a text from Julia, right? From your sister’s phone?”

I started to nod, but one glance from Kori stopped me, and I realized that the flow of information would only go one way.

“Fine. Don’t answer.” Mitch shrugged. “I know you got a text, because I saw her send it. But the information she sent is false. Kris isn’t at that warehouse, and neither is she. It’s a trap.”

“We know,” I said, and Kori frowned at me, which is when I realized I’d confirmed that we had received that text.

“How do you know?”

“Julia would never give away her position.”

“Well, fortunately for you, I would. She’s at the Eight Street warehouse. Your brother and sister are both with her.”

My pulse leaped at the thought—could we really get them both back in one shot?—but Kori only frowned. “Why would she keep both her eggs in one basket?”

“Because it’s the only basket she has. Your mass texting initiative worked. She only has a handful of employees left. You’ve practically won already. Why do you think I’m leaving?”

“You’re deserting the sinking ship...” Kori’s frown became a sneer of contempt. “Like any rat would do.”

“F*ck you.” But Mitch’s profanity just sounded silly, with him still in his underwear. “I’ve paid my debt.” He bent to pick up his clothes, then met my gaze boldly. “Do what you want with the information—I don’t give a shit anymore. I’m out of here.”

“Don’t move.” Ian aimed at Mitch’s head, and Mitch froze. “Ladies? Verdict?”

Kori glanced at me, and I hid the jolt of glee surging through me over the fact that she was consulting me about a strategic decision. “He did pay his debt.” With information that may or may not prove valid.

“Fine.” Kori turned back to Mitch and lowered her aim to his feet. “Let the rat scurry into his corner.”

Mitch glared at her, but wasted no time retrieving his shoes. Then he backed into the dark hall, and a second later I felt his absence, though I hadn’t actually seen him disappear.

“So, now what?” I asked as Ian and Kori holstered their guns.

“Now we rally the troops.” Kori pulled her phone from her pocket, ready to dial. “If Julia really is at the Eighth Street warehouse, she’s about to wish she’d preceded her brothers into the afterlife.”

I stared at the Curtis brothers while she made her first call, recruiting friends and allies to our purpose, thinking about Julia, and how her death was so long overdue.

Better late than never...