Oath Bound (Unbound)

Three



Sera

His eyes were a pale bluish gray. They were the first things I noticed after Lynn Tower opened the office door over my aunt’s protest.

The next thing I noticed was his weapon, and the two men bleeding on the marble tile in the foyer. Bile rose to my throat at the sight of so much blood pooling on the floor, and brutal memories tried to surface, but I shook them off. None of the bystanders were hurt. He’d only shot people who’d aimed guns at him.

This man may have been a killer, but he was no murderer. The distinction was small, but important.

The man aiming his gun at me looked furious, pale brows furrowed, jaw clenched, aim unwavering. He was looking for someone—I’d missed the specifics, thanks to the alarm—and was obviously willing to do whatever it took to find...whomever. He looked desperate.

But not crazy.

Those blue-gray eyes seemed to see everything all at once—every guard aiming a gun at him, every witness watching, and every possible escape route. He was too calm to be crazy. And if he was sane, he could be reasoned with.

He had to be reasoned with, because if Julia had him shot and his finger twitched on his own trigger, he’d blow a hole right through me, and no one other than Gwendolyn Tower seemed particularly concerned by that possibility.

My heart thudding in my ears, I held my hand out for his weapon, demanding focus and calm from myself as I mentally counted the shots I’d heard. But I couldn’t be sure of the number, thanks to the alarm.

He glanced at my scarf, then at my hand, and for a moment I thought he was actually going to give me his gun.

Instead, he grabbed my hand and dragged me into a supply closet, nearly hauling me off my feet. Startled, I screamed when he kicked the door shut, but then he raised his gun and shot into the ceiling, once, twice.

The closet went dark and glass rained down on us from the broken fixtures. Too shocked to speak, I tried to jerk my hand from his grip, but he pulled me again, and I stumbled after him, one step, then two.

The last thing I heard was gunfire coming from the foyer. They shot at us. They knew I was with him, and they’d fired anyway! On Julia’s command!

That bitch!

Then there was silence, except for the sound of my own panicked breathing—too fast and too hard.

The darkness was absolute, and I couldn’t see a thing. I couldn’t feel a thing, except for his hand tight around mine, and the body heat that told me this room was smaller than the last, and that he was standing much too close.

I opened my mouth to scream again and he dropped my hand. A door opened and he stepped out of what I could now identify as an empty coat closet, his gun aimed at the floor.

That blue-gray gaze found mine again from a narrow hallway outside the closet. He was staring, as if something about my face made no sense.

“What the hell just happened?” I demanded, torn between the need to know exactly where I was and reluctance to venture beyond the closet into unknown territory.

“Traveling. Colloquially known as shadow-walking.”

“I know what it means. Where are we? Who are you?”

“I’m the man who just saved your life.” He holstered his gun. “You’re welcome.” Then he turned left and marched down the hall. “You want a drink? I’m having one.”

“Wait!” I wrapped one hand around the door frame and leaned into the hall as he turned to face me from a living room full of dated furniture. “Are you damaged? You didn’t save my life. You nearly got me killed!”

He crossed his arms over a well-defined chest put on display by a snug blue T-shirt. “I pulled you out of the line of fire.”

“I wouldn’t have been in the line of fire, if it weren’t for you. And if it weren’t for me, they would have killed you!”

“They tried. They shot at us both.” His wary focus narrowed on me until it felt invasive. “Sera, right?” he said, and I declined to answer. “Why were they willing to kill you, Sera?”

I blinked, scrambling for a response that wouldn’t actually tell him anything about me. “Where are we?” I demanded when I couldn’t come up with any answers of my own. “What am I doing here? Who are you?”

“Who am I?” Anger hardened his features and furrowed his brows. “Who the hell are you, and where’s Kenley?”

“Who’s Kenley?”

His anger visibly swelled in response to my question and he marched toward me, fists clenched at his sides, warning echoing in every step as his heavy boots clomped on the wood floor.

My heart lurched into my throat. I backed into the closet, peering through deep shadows for something to use as a weapon, but there was nothing. The closet was completely empty.

He was two steps away when I pulled the door shut, my pulse whooshing in my ears, then held the knob, using all of my weight to keep the door closed. What the hell was I thinking, jumping in the middle of syndicate business? I should have let Julia kill him....

The man growled, then the door was ripped from my grasp so fast I stumbled into the hall after it. He caught me before I could fall, but I shoved him off so quickly I almost missed the change in his expression.

“You’re not a Traveler.” He exhaled and the relief lining his features echoed within the sound. “I thought you’d disappeared through the shadows.”

If I could have, I would have, but even without having grown up in the Skilled subculture, I knew better than to confirm or deny my own abilities.

I backed away from him, past the open closet door, hands open and ready to grab the first potential weapon I came across. “Let’s try this again. Who are you?”

Anger resurfaced behind his eyes, but was quickly replaced with confusion. “You really don’t know?”

“Why should I?”

He shrugged, and his jacket rose to reveal his holstered gun. “Well, if you work for Julia Tower—”

“I don’t.”

“Then what were you doing in her office?”

“That’s none of your business.” Being related to Jake Tower was dangerous, and having that fact known could be deadly. My mother had made sure I understood that, and Julia had just reinforced that lesson with a lethal spray of bullets.

His gaze narrowed. “Why would she tell her men to drop their guns at your request?”

Shit. So much for revealing nothing about myself.

New plan: reveal as little as possible.

“Because she wants something from me.”

“What does she want?”

She wanted me to sign away my rights to the Tower legacy, not to protect her niece’s and nephew’s interests, but so that the wealth and power would remain under her fist, at least until they came of age. But... “Again, that’s none of your business. Who is—”

He reached for me, and before I realized he wanted to brush aside a strand of hair caught on my scarf, I knocked his hand away and took another step back. My fists rose automatically. He glanced at me in surprise. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“That’s a true statement.” I was ready to fight.

He blinked, startled, then looked kind of disappointed. “No, I mean, I don’t want to hurt you. You don’t need to defend yourself from me.”

“Right. You just shot several people and hauled a strange woman into a strange house against her will. Naturally I should assume you mean me no harm.”

“Okay, I know how that sounds.” He held both hands up, showing me he was unarmed, yet his gun still peeked out at me from its holster. “But I promise this is not that kind of abduction. If you don’t believe me, look behind you.” He gestured to something over my shoulder, and my need to know what was behind me warred with my need to keep him in sight.

I turned and pressed my back against the hallway wall so I could see both him and...the old woman asleep in a recliner in the room next to the closet I’d just stepped out of. Her ample chest rose and fell silently. Several melting ice cubes floated in a glass of watered-down tea on the small table next to her.

“Who’s that?”

“My grandmother. She’s a pretty deep sleeper, thanks to her medication, but she will wake up if you keep shouting, and I’d appreciate it if you’d let her sleep.”

“You’re serious?” What kind of armed killer kidnapped strange women and took them home to Grandma? What kind of family was this?

Although, considering the branch of my own family I’d just met, I didn’t really have room to criticize.

He shrugged again and shoved his hands into his pockets, trying to look harmless; but even with his grandmother asleep in the next room, that was impossible to believe. He’d taken down at least four of my aunt’s guards in just a couple of minutes, and his aim at me had never wavered, even with half a dozen guns pointed at him. The man had nerves of steel. He may have been many things—including a devoted grandson—but harmless was not one of them.

Yet he hadn’t laid a hand on me.

“Why am I here? Who are you?” Why would he shoot to wound men who would readily have killed him? Why would he kidnap me at gunpoint, then claim to have no violent motive? Why would he think I knew his name, then refuse to give it to me?

Normally I’d assume I understood the destructive, violent nature of a home invasion. I’d become an unwilling expert on the subject when I’d lost my entire family a few months before, and getting caught in the middle of this one should have sent me over the edge.

But the Tower estate was no ordinary home, and the man in front of me was no ordinary invader. He hadn’t broken in to kill someone, he’d broken in to find someone, and I was inexplicably fixated on the differences between his crime and the one that had shattered my entire reality.

Or maybe I just really needed those differences to exist. Maybe I needed him to have a good reason for what he’d done—what he was still doing—because I hadn’t seen one damn thing in the world worth living for since I’d become an orphan and an only child, well into adulthood.

This man, whoever he was, had something worth living for. Something worth fighting for. Something worth dying for. And I really wanted to know what that was.

“Who were you looking for?” My voice was barely a whisper, but he heard me. In fact, he seemed to hear the need behind the question.

For several seconds he only watched me. Studying me, as if he was trying to decide whether or not he could trust me—an irony, considering that he’d just dragged me through the shadows. Finally he exhaled slowly and met my gaze with a heavy one of his own. “Julia Tower took my little sister, so I broke into the Tower residence to get her back.”

I closed my eyes and an ache radiated from the center of my chest as my own sister’s smile haunted my memory. My next inhalation hurt. I’d never seen his sister and I still didn’t even know his name, but I understood his pain. I would do anything to get Nadia back, if that were possible, but...

“You broke into the Tower estate.” It sounded just as crazy when I said it as when he’d said it. “There are easier ways to kill yourself, you know.” Yet hadn’t I done the same thing—minus all the gunfire?

Another shrug from the man with no name. “I figured that was the last thing they’d expect, thus the thing they’d be least prepared to defend against. Turns out I was right.”

“No, you were lucky.” As was I, but I’d known going in that they’d want to talk to me.

He scowled. “I make my own luck.”

“You nearly made yourself a used-bullet receptacle. When did your sister go missing?” Please, please don’t let his sister be an actual child. Surely he was too old for that. But then again, I’d just met two young siblings of my own...

“She didn’t just ‘go missing.’” He leaned with one shoulder against the wall, two feet from the end of the hallway. “Someone pulled her through the shadows a few minutes before I...met you.”

“Well, then it couldn’t have been Julia. She’s—” At the last second I realized she wouldn’t want me telling strangers what her Skill was. Not that I cared what she wanted, but pissing her off wouldn’t make her any easier to deal with. “She’s not a shadow-walker. Anyway, I was with her when your sister disappeared. It wasn’t Julia.”

“It wasn’t her personally,” he agreed. “She doesn’t do her own dirty work. But my sister was taken on her orders, and Julia knows where she is.”

There wasn’t a single glimmer of doubt in him. Not in his unflinching gaze, his steady voice or the confidence in every word he spoke. And when I considered the bullets flying through that storage closet and Julia’s apparent willingness to slaughter me in cold blood to keep me from inheriting her fortune, it wasn’t hard for me to believe my aunt capable of abduction.

But then, obviously so was the man who’d kidnapped me.

Anger flamed up my spine with the sudden realization of where I fit into his storm-the-castle routine. “So, what, when you couldn’t find your sister, you took me instead? What am I? A hostage?”

“No, I...” His cheeks flushed, and for the first time since he’d dragged me through the shadows, he seemed unsure of what to say. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“It’s complicated?” Unless he’d just discovered he’d inherited millions in ill-gotten gains from a crime-boss father he’d never met, making him the target of a crime-boss aunt he wished he’d never met, he couldn’t possibly understand the meaning of the word complicated. Not the way I understood it, anyway.

“Look, I’m the last person Julia Tower would be willing to trade your sister for.” Though she might strike a bargain for my corpse—not that I had any intention of admitting that to a man desperate to rescue his sibling. “So, I need you to take me back. But I swear if I hear anything about your sister, I’ll let you know what building you should break into next. So why don’t you just give me your name and number, and I’ll—”

“Sera, I can’t take you back there.” He held my gaze, and his statement had the grave finality of some indisputable truth. “They tried to kill you.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, reeling from the irony. “You can’t let someone else kill me, but you’re fine with the fact that you kidnapped me?” What kind of weird-ass moral code was he following?

“I didn’t really kidnap you.” He glanced over my shoulder into the bedroom where his grandmother was now snoring loudly in her recliner. “I just...removed you from a dangerous situation. You’re welcome.” He mustered up a grin, obviously trying to diffuse my mounting anger and frustration, but it didn’t work.

“For the last time, it wasn’t dangerous until you got there, and I didn’t ask to be removed.”

Still, he had a point. I didn’t want my father’s dirty money, but would Julia even listen long enough to let me say that, or would she shoot me on sight?

I exhaled through clenched teeth. “Fine. Take me somewhere else then. Drop me off downtown.” Where I could regroup and decide how best to proceed with my homicidally estranged aunt. And get my car back.

“I can’t.” He rubbed his forehead with one hand. “I’m sorry, but you have to stay here until I figure out what to do with you. So...make yourself comfortable.” He twisted to wave one hand at the living room, and indignation began to smolder deep in my gut. “I’m guessing you’re about ready for that drink now?”

“You can’t be serious.” I followed him into the tiny living room, where a couch and several armchairs surrounded a worn coffee table, all facing a small television.

“I am,” he called over one shoulder as he crossed the living room toward the kitchen. “And could you be quiet for a minute? I need to think...”

“No I can’t be quiet!” That smolder deep inside me burst into a blaze, and I felt as though I could breathe fire. “I’ll tell the whole damn neighborhood I’ve been kidnapped if you don’t take me someplace public, right now!”

“There’s no neighborhood.” He turned to face me from the kitchen doorway, infuriatingly calm, and gestured to the sidelights flanking the front door.

I glanced through the glass and groaned. No other houses. No other buildings. No traffic. Nothing but starlight and a narrow gravel road, illuminated by the porch light. Where the hell were we?

“And you’re not kidnapped,” he continued when I turned, ready to roast him alive with the power of my rage. “You’re just...borrowed. I’m gonna put you back.” He frowned and his gaze dropped to the floor for a second. “Well, probably not back where I found you, but...My point is that you won’t have to stay here forever.”

“I don’t have to stay here at all. You can’t just borrow people!”

He glanced around the empty room, as if expecting someone to agree with me. “Kinda looks like I can. You want some coffee? Or are you thinking something stronger? I’m thinking something stronger.”

“What is wrong with you?” I demanded when anger defeated my attempt at something more articulate.

“My sister’s missing, my grandmother has Alzheimer’s, Julia Tower wants me dead and you’re turning out to be kind of a pain in the ass.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have kidnapped me!”

He rubbed his forehead, then raked one hand through his blond waves. “Well, hindsight is worthless, so could you just shut up so I can figure a few things out?”

“What things?” I demanded, but then I figured that out for myself. He’d broken into Julia’s house, guns ablaze—surely an unforgivable insult to the head of a Skilled crime syndicate—but she had yet to return the favor. Which surely meant she didn’t know where he was. “If you’re worried that I’ll tell Julia where you are, or something like that, you can relax. I don’t know who you are, or where we are, and she hasn’t exactly inspired my loyalty today.”

“Loyalty is compulsory when you’re bound.” He hesitated, but just for a second. “Are you bound to her?”

“No. I’m not bound to anyone.”

“And I’m just supposed to take your word for it?” His frown deepened and he glanced at my left arm, covered by my long-sleeved shirt. “I...um...need to see your arm.”

But even if I’d felt obligated to show him my unmarked arm—and I didn’t—I couldn’t have complied without taking my shirt off. And that wasn’t gonna happen.

“No.” Was this what my mother’s obsessive caution had spared me? A lifetime of suspicion, and dangerous loyalties, and lives defined by the color of the marks on my skin? By the constant need to prove I had no syndicate marks and served no one but myself?

“I’m asking nicely,” he said, but there was a warning threaded through his voice.

“And if I refuse nicely?” I backed up several steps, blindly aiming for the front door while my heart pounded in my throat. “Are you going to get less nice?”

Was I going to have to get less nice? He was bigger and stronger, but I had no problem fighting dirty, and I had nothing left to lose.

“No.” He exhaled in frustration. “Look, you don’t have to take anything off. We can cut your sleeve, or you can change into something of my sister’s. I just need to know that when I let you—” He stopped, then started over. “That when you leave, you won’t be obligated to go back and tell Julia everything you saw and heard here today.”

My heart thumped painfully. “Can’t you just take my word for it?”

He looked kind of sad. “I wish we lived in the kind of world where I could, but we don’t. Can’t you just show me? If you don’t have a mark, why is this such a big deal?”

That question cut straight to the heart of the matter, and suddenly everything seemed really clear. “Because I don’t have to. Because you don’t get to see anything I don’t want to show you. Because you don’t have the right to keep me here and make demands. Because the fact that I don’t have a mark means I don’t have to take orders from anyone. Including you!”

He blinked at me in surprise. Then he nodded. “All valid points. And in a perfect world, they’d matter, but here, they don’t. I can’t take you anywhere until I know you pose no threat to me and mine.” With that, he turned and stepped into the kitchen while I fumed from the middle of the living room floor.

“Fine.” My jaw already ached from grinding my teeth. “I’m guessing your range is no more than a few miles, so we can’t have gone too far.” I had some cash, my only credit card and my phone. No reason I couldn’t walk back to civilization on my own.

“Why do women always err on the side of underestimation?” he mumbled, pulling a bottle from an overhead cabinet as I headed for the front door. “My Skill could be huge, for all you know.” He had his back to me. He wasn’t even watching.

A second later, as I twisted and pulled on the front doorknob to no avail, I saw why.

“The door’s nailed shut!” Furious, I bent to examine the nails and my teeth ground together when I noticed the tiny crosshairs. “Those aren’t nails, they’re screws!”

And half of them had been countersunk. No one was getting through that door without an electric drill, a Phillips head bit and a spare half hour.

“Did that myself,” my kidnapper called from the kitchen. “Of course, we can probably kiss the security deposit goodbye. Ironic, isn’t it, considering that I actually made the house more secure.”

I stood to glare at him through the kitchen doorway, fingering my phone in my pocket. If I didn’t dread explaining the circumstances of my abduction, I’d have already dialed 911. “Look, I don’t recognize your particular psychosis, but trust me when I say this is a very special kind of crazy. Why the hell would you screw the front door shut?”

He shrugged, leaning with one hip against the counter, a half-empty bottle of whiskey in one hand. “We don’t use that exit.”

My focus found the door behind him, which presumably led to the backyard, and before I could decide whether or not to make a break for it—which would involve running right past him—he shook his head. “We don’t use that one, either.”

Both exits were screwed shut because he and his grandmother had no use for them? Bullshit.

He was prepared to house a prisoner, which meant this was premeditated. How could I have misread him so drastically? The fact that he cared about his sister didn’t make him less dangerous; it made him more dangerous. If his rash invasion of the Tower estate was any indication, he’d do anything to get her back. He’d gone in planning to take a hostage. The bastard wasn’t going to let me go until he got his sister back!

But...that didn’t make any sense. Why trade me, if he didn’t want me to go back to Julia? Was that just an act? Or had he planned to kidnap someone she valued—someone she would bargain for—but got stuck with me instead? If so, what was the new plan? What good was a hostage who couldn’t be traded?

No good at all.

Panic raced through me like fire in my veins. This was real. The psycho with nice eyes had taken me, but had no use for me. Even if he truly had no plans for violence—and his grandmother’s presence seemed to confirm that—he had no intentions of letting me go, either.

Knowing the doors didn’t function made my skin crawl, as if I were trapped not just by this house, but by my own body. My own mind.

I needed fresh air. Space. Now.

Logically, I knew that was the panic talking. There was plenty of air, and the house wasn’t that small—the foot of the staircase in one corner of the living room meant there was an entire second story I had yet to see. And the hum of the air conditioner told me the ventilation was fine. Being locked up wasn’t going to kill me.

But being stupid might.

Think.

Assuming he truly loved his grandmother—and I’d seen no reason to doubt that—he wouldn’t leave her alone if she couldn’t get out of the house. What if there was a fire?

There had to be a functioning exit.

I took a deep breath and swallowed my panic. “Fine. If you don’t use the doors, how do you get out of here?”

He didn’t even look up from the soda he was pouring into a short glass, over an inch of whiskey. “The same way I brought you in.”

Damn it. “You’re both shadow-walkers?”

“Not all of us. But enough.”

All of us? How many were there? “And I assume the windows are...”

“Screwed shut. Which is overkill in some cases, because about half of them were already painted shut. This place is pretty old.”

Great. No one could get in or out of whatever weird-ass house he’d dragged me into without the ability to travel. Or something to throw through a window, and a good head start.

I’d call that Plan B.

Plan A needed to be smarter, and a little more tech-savvy. While my kidnapper rattled pots and pans in the kitchen, I dug my cell from my pocket and sank onto the couch. I opened the GPS function on my phone and waited while the map loaded, slowly, slowly, slowly narrowing down my location.

Cell phone reception in his stupid, screwed-shut house sucked.

“You still alive in there?” he called from the kitchen, after about a minute of silence from me.

I considered not answering, but then he’d come looking for me.

“Alive and pissed off!” I called back.

“I’m sorry about that. I didn’t plan this, but now we’re kind of stuck with each other for a bit.”

Yeah, right. And finally, the GPS centered on my location.

I didn’t recognize any of the street names, but that was no surprise, considering I’d never been to the city before and I’d let my car’s GPS navigate the whole way to the Tower estate.

I zoomed out on the map, searching for familiar landmarks, and when I couldn’t find any, I zoomed in again, hoping to narrow my location down to a street address. Or at least a close cross-street. Then I’d call the police and have this grandma’s-boy, kidnapping son of a bitch arrested.

I didn’t have to press charges, or even explain how I’d wound up in the House of Crazy. I just needed the cops to come open a door.

But there didn’t seem to be any cross-streets. We were truly in the middle of nowhere.

The loading icon spun and spun as the map tried to refresh, and I stared at it in mounting frustration and anger. My hand clenched around the phone so hard the plastic case groaned and my knuckles turned white, but finally the new map loaded, and—

My cell was ripped from my grasp.

“Hey!” I stood and reached for my phone, but he stepped back and my nails clawed his forearm instead, drawing four white lines, but no blood.

“Sorry. Can’t let you do that.” Then the bastard dropped my phone and stomped on it, grinding with the heel of his hiking boot until shards of metal and plastic were hopelessly embedded into the worn carpet.

Fury sparked the length of my spine and my right hand curled into a fist. I swung before I even realized what I’d intended, and my fist slammed into his jaw. “You owe me a phone!”

He stumbled back in surprise, rubbing his face, and I ignored the ache in my hand as I knelt to scrape up the remains of my cell, just in case. But it was trashed.

“This isn’t funny!” I shouted.

“Agreed.” He stomped into the kitchen and a second later I heard ice rattle.

“You can’t keep me here. If you think I’m going to twiddle my thumbs as your hostage, you kidnapped the wrong damn woman.”

“Would you please calm down?” He appeared in the living room again, this time holding an ice-filled plastic sandwich bag to his jaw. “I’m the one with everything to lose here, and you’re the one throwing punches. You’re not a hostage, and you’re not in any danger. In fact, you’re safer here than you were with Julia Tower, so please sit down and shut up!”

I heard his words, but I couldn’t process them. I wasn’t a hostage? I was in no danger? The facts didn’t support those statements—he’d dragged me through the shadows and locked me up in a strange house. My entire family died in a locked house. Their own locked house.

No exits, no neighbors and no phone. I was screwed. Unless...

Maybe there was a landline. Some people still had those.

When a glance around the living room revealed no phone, I stomped into the kitchen, and he only watched me, still icing his jaw. “What are you doing?”

There was a phone on the wall by the fridge. A really old phone, connected to the handset by a long, curly, yellow cord. I picked up the handset and started to dial—until I noticed there was no dial tone.

“We never hooked it up.” He picked up his drink, drained it, then set the empty glass on the counter next to an open box of macaroni and cheese. “No need, with cell phones, right?”

Speaking of which...I could see the outline of his in his back pocket. Maybe I could hit him with something, then take his phone and lock myself in another room long enough to call for help...

“It’s passcode protected,” he said when he turned and caught me staring at the seat of his jeans. “More useful as a paperweight than as a phone, if you don’t have the code. Or were you just staring at my butt?”

“I wasn’t...” I stopped, angered anew by how flustered I was. “Unless your phone is ancient, it’ll still make emergency calls.”

“True.” My kidnapper pulled the phone from his pocket and held it up. “Do I need to smash mine, too?” He looked reluctant, but willing. I shook my head because I couldn’t steal it later if he busted it now.

He pulled a clean rag from a drawer and wrapped his ice pack in it, then pressed it to his jaw again. “You throw one hell of a punch.”

“You smashed my phone.”

“Sorry. I couldn’t let you call Julia.”

“Julia?” I scowled and backed slowly toward a microwave cart on the other side of the room, where several steak knives were spread out on a folded towel, evidently set out to dry. “I told you I don’t work for her. I was calling the police.”

He shrugged. “Well, that’s almost as bad. I’m sorry about your phone, though.”

“What kind of kidnapper apologizes? And lives with his grandmother? And forgets to take away the victim’s phone?” My spine hit the cart and I slid one hand behind my back, feeling for the handle of a knife. “You’re the worst kidnapper ever.”

He watched me closely, but stayed back. “I’m not a kidnapper.”

“My unwilling presence in your home says otherwise.”

“Okay, yes.” He acknowledged my point with another shrug. “But there are extenuating circumstances. Why don’t we sit and discuss this over a drink? Or are you hungry? I’m not much of a cook, but I can handle boxed mac and cheese, if you’re interested.”

I wouldn’t eat or drink a damn thing he gave me, but...

“What happened to the stove?” I glanced pointedly at the front of the ancient appliance, where all four of the burner-control knobs were missing. Was nothing normal in his house?

“Oh. Gran nearly burned the house down yesterday, so we had to take the knobs off the stove, and now I can’t remember where Ian hid them...” He turned and took a cookie jar from the top of the fridge, and when he peered inside, I let my fingers skim the cart at my back, searching for the knives.

My kidnapper huffed in frustration and put the jar back. “They were in here yesterday, but now they’re gone...”

My fingers closed around the handle of a knife and my stomach roiled when I brandished it at him, trying not to think about the damage a different blade had done behind my parents’ locked doors. Could I do to my kidnapper what was done to my entire family? Even though he hadn’t laid a hand on me?

Yet.

He hadn’t laid a hand on me yet. And he claimed not to want me to return to Julia Tower, but hadn’t he already proved he’d do anything to get his sister back? Why wouldn’t he trade me for her? I’d do it in a heartbeat, if our situations were reversed.

“Give me your phone, or I swear I will gut you.” By some miracle, my hand was steady. The same could not be said for my stomach. I hate knives.

His pale brows rose and he crossed his arms over his shirt. “Then how will you get out of here? You don’t know where you are, and it’ll take the police forever to trace a cell phone. My grandmother doesn’t have one. And she’s not a Traveler.”

I frowned and glanced at the kitchen window, mentally working on a Plan C.

“You could break the glass and shout for help,” he suggested. “But I can’t let you go, and even if you tried, you’d cut yourself trying to climb out.” Only an idiot would leave her blood lying around for anyone with the requisite Skill to use against her. “And there’s no one around to hear you scream for help. The nearest neighbor is more than a mile away.”

More than a mile between houses? Either he was lying—though the lack of traffic noise said he wasn’t—or his range was much better than I’d guessed.

Either way, I had to get out, and I had to do it before his friends came back and my odds got even worse.

“Why don’t you calm down and have a seat?” He glanced at the kitchen table and the four chairs around it. “If I put my gun down, will you put your knife down?”

“Hell, no! I’m not going to put the knife down, I’m not going to sit, and I don’t want to talk to you. So you can either let me out of here, or you can get ready to bleed.”

I scanned the kitchen, looking for something light enough to lift, but heavy enough to break glass.

“Sera...” His tone resonated with warning as he set the ice pack on the counter, tense now, as if he might pounce if I made one wrong move. “Whatever you’re thinking...don’t.”

My gaze landed on a ceramic napkin holder shaped like two halves of a pineapple, sitting on top of the microwave. The kidnapper took one step toward me, arms out at his sides, as if I might rush him at any moment.

Instead, I grabbed the napkin holder and hurled it at the nearest window.

Glass shattered and a jagged hole appeared in the pane. Both halves of the pineapple landed on the dark grass outside, about a foot apart.

“Damn it,” he swore.

“Kris?” a woman’s shaky voice called from the other end of the house, and recliner springs groaned as his grandmother sat up in her chair.

“It’s okay, Gran. Go back to sleep,” Kris—finally the kidnapper had a name!—said without taking his gaze from me. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he whispered, and anger flickered across his expression.

“I probably shouldn’t do this either, then, right?” I grabbed a wooden rolling pin from a stainless steel canister of large utensils and swung it at what was left of the window. Glass exploded outward, onto the grass.

“What the hell are you doing in there?” his grandmother demanded, and the chair groaned again. “If one of you hellions put another pool cue through my—”

“It’s fine, Gran,” he called back. “Stay in your room.”

I kept swinging and glass kept breaking. I knocked as much of it out as I could, to make the window safe to crawl through, and he only watched me, his eyes narrowed in irritation, a red blotch growing on his chin where I’d punched him.

When the glass was gone, I met his gaze, trying to decide whether to relinquish the bludgeoning weapon or the stabbing weapon—I’d need at least one free hand to climb through the window.

“Please don’t do this,” he said, and the earnest note in his voice actually made me hesitate. For about a second.

Then I threw the rolling pin at him and lunged for the window while he ducked.

I was halfway out when he wrapped one arm around my waist and tried to drag me back in. My heart beat so hard my chest almost hurt. I clutched the window frame and swung the knife behind me. The serrated blade caught on material and when I jerked it free from the snag, he swore again. But he didn’t let go or stop pulling, and I wasn’t strong enough to keep him from hauling me back into the house. At least, not without the use of both hands.

In the kitchen once again, he pinned my left arm to my side with his other arm wrapped around my waist. I shoved the knife in my right hand backward, hoping to catch a vital organ, but he caught my wrist before the blade made contact.

“Please drop the knife, Sera. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Sorry I can’t say the same.” I tried to twist my arm free, but his grip was relentless and I couldn’t reach anything with the blade.

“Kristopher, what the hell is going on?”

My shoes brushed the floor when he spun with me still in his grip, evidently as startled as I was to find his grandmother standing in the kitchen doorway, her stern frown aimed at us both.

“Call the police,” I demanded, tossing hair out of my face. He grunted when my skull smashed into his...something. “I’m a hostage being held against my will.”

Her frown bled into a sympathetic smile. “Oh, hon, you’re not being held, you’re being moved. We’re the good guys. But I need you to hold it down, so you don’t wake up the rest of the kids.”

“The rest...” Fresh panic made my pulse trip faster. “How many other hostages do you have?”

“None.” Kris groaned in frustration. “She’s not a kid, Gran. We don’t have any kids right now, remember?” He shifted, and his next words were softer, spoken near my ear. “You’re not a hostage. She’s confused.”

The old woman propped wrinkled fists on ample hips. “Kristopher, let her go. That’s no way to earn her trust.”

“I can’t let her go. She has a knife.”

“Good. I hope she skewers you with it.” His grandmother marched past us both, glanced in obvious irritation at the stove with no knobs, then pulled a mug from the cabinet above the coffeemaker. “You can’t keep bringing them in with no notice, Kris. We don’t have a bed for her right now. One of the boys will have to sleep on the couch until we find someplace safe to send her.”

Boys?

Kris groaned again. “She’s not a kid, Gran. She’s fully grown.” His declaration carried equal parts appreciation and frustration over that fact, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. “And we’re not sending her anywhere.”

“What the hell are you people talking about? I haven’t been rescued, I’ve been kidnapped.”

Kris’s grandmother shot him a questioning look over her mug, as if I were the one who made no sense.

“I didn’t kidnap her. Exactly,” he said. “But if I let her go now, she’ll stab me. Again.”

Again? Was he already bleeding?

The grandmother pulled the full carafe from the coffee machine. “Is this decaf? You know I hate decaf.”

“It’s fully leaded,” he said, his mouth inches from my ear, his grip on me unrelenting.

“What is wrong with this family?” I demanded when the hard kick I landed on his shin did no good, and she made no move to help me.

Gran gave me a stern frown and poured coffee into her mug. “We have a strict no-weapons policy for the residents. He’ll let you go as soon as you put the knife down, but not a moment sooner.”

My grip on the knife tightened. “Who are you people?”

“Don’t tell her anything,” Kris said, hauling me backward when I tried to kick the nearest cabinet. “I think she works for the Towers.”

Gran’s eyes widened. Then she blinked and gave her head a little shake, as if she’d just woken up and needed to clear the cobwebs.

I kicked backward again, and again I caught Kris’s leg. He grunted, but didn’t let go. “I don’t work for anyone,” I insisted, but no one was listening.

His grandmother looked up from her mug, scowling fiercely, and everything about her was suddenly different, from the harder edge to her voice to the stiffness of her posture. “Kristopher Daniels, tell me you did not bring a Tower employee into this house.”

Kris groaned into my ear. “Gran, my name is top on the list of things you weren’t supposed to tell her!”

“Take her back.” Gran blew calmly over the surface of her coffee as I kicked her grandson over and over again, growing angrier each time he only grunted and squeezed me tighter. “If she works for the Towers, she’s dangerous.”

“Taking her back won’t make her any less dangerous. And anyway, I can’t take her back.” Kris oofed when I threw my head back and my skull caught his...chin? But his grip around my waist never loosened. “They tried to shoot her. Right now, I can’t really blame them.”

“Why would they shoot their own employee?” Gran asked.

“I don’t work for them! And they weren’t shooting at me, they were shooting at him.” Though they were clearly willing to count me as collateral damage. “Let me go!” I shouted when my anger crested, and I shoved the knife back with all the strength I had.

The blade snagged on material again, and Kris gasped, then grunted in frustration. “Damn it, Sera!” He let go of my waist, but before I could do anything with my freed left arm, he spun me around and slammed me against the front of the refrigerator.

Air burst from my lungs, then his forearm pressed into my collarbone through my sister’s yellow scarf, pinning my shoulders to the fridge. Panic tightened every muscle in my body. I fought blindly as memory obscured reality and it became hard to focus on his face.

His free hand curled around my right one, which still gripped the blade. His angry blue-gray gaze bored into me, his legs pinning mine so that I couldn’t kick. “Please drop the knife, Sera! You got me. I’m bleeding. You win.”

“Open the door and let me out,” I growled through clenched teeth.

He exhaled heavily. “I can’t. I’m sorry you can’t see that, but I can’t let you leave yet, for your safety and for ours. I have to ask you some questions, and you have to answer them. But it doesn’t have to be this hard. Please, please, please let’s do this the easy way.”

“F*ck you.” I glared into his eyes from inches away. “I don’t owe you anything.”

His expression hardened. “Fine. We’ll do it the hard way. Just keep in mind that that was your choice.” He squeezed my left wrist, but I gripped the knife in spite of the growing pressure and pain until I actually lost control of my own fingers.

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 f*ck 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 a*shole!” 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.