Oath Bound

by Rachel Vincent

  But, of course, it had happened to them, too. Obviously Jake had stomped out any rumors before they could spread. Julia must have been taking notes.

  “Assuming any of that actually happened...” Ned added.

  “It did. I was there, and when he escaped through the shadows, he dragged me with him. Thus—” I shrugged “—the kidnapping.”

  Ned looked unconvinced, but I didn’t have time to try to rectify that. So I pressed on. “If Julia were to tell you to...I don’t know...sing the national anthem, would you have to do it?”

  He nodded, obviously confused. “That, and anything else she wanted. Why? What’s this about?”

  I took a deep breath. Let the great inheritance experiment begin....

  “Ned, my name is Sera Tower. My father was Jake Tower. I’m his oldest living...um...”

  “Child” felt too familiar—I’d never known him as a father and I wouldn’t change that for the world. But “descendant” felt too distant, as if Jake and I had lived in different time periods. So I went with...

  “...offspring. I’m his oldest living offspring. And as such, your binding actually belongs to me, not to Julia Tower.”

  “Yeah. Right.” Ned snorted, then shifted again, trying to take pressure off the arm tied to the refrigerator. “And I’m a midget in forty-eight-inch heels.”

  “It’s true. That’s what I was doing there yesterday. That’s why Julia’s trying to kill me—because if people find out she hasn’t truly inherited her brother’s kingdom, she’ll be out on her ass.”

  Ned’s focus narrowed on me, more in interest now than in skepticism. Everyone loves a scandal. “If you’re Jake Tower’s heir, why have I never heard of you?”

  “Because I’m a secret. Probably an embarrassing one. Jake Tower, the family man, had an illegitimate child.”

  “Why the hell would he leave everything to an illegitimate child no one’s ever heard of?”

  “I don’t think he meant to.” I shifted on my heels. Squatting on the linoleum was getting uncomfortable. “In fact, I don’t think he knew I existed. My mother spent most of my life hiding me from him, and I’m starting to think she was very, very good at that.” No reason for him to know that I was even better at hiding myself—and anyone within my jamming zone. “This inheritance seems to be the result of a sloppily phrased last will and testament. But the only thing I’m really sure of is that Julia Tower wants me dead. If she gets her way, you may never be free of her.” I was taking a gamble with my next statement—assuming he wasn’t happy with his current state of employment. “If she doesn’t...if I inherit the bindings...I’ll let you all go.”

  Ned rolled his eyes and pushed himself into a straighter sitting position with his free hand. “Right. You’re just going to break every binding your father ever had sealed. Dissolve his life’s work. Give up unbelievable fortune.”

  I knew I had him when he called Jake my father.

  “Yup.” I nodded firmly. “I don’t want to run the mafia.”

  His gaze narrowed until his eyes were mere slits, staring at me more in puzzlement than in disbelief now. “You’re serious. You’d give it all up? Why?”

  “Because I don’t have any criminal inclination, nor do I have the right to control your life. But I am going to ask you to help me out with a little test.”

  “What kind of test?”

  I stood and pulled open the last kitchenette drawer, where I’d found a box of plastic forks. They wouldn’t have been much good as a weapon, when I’d needed one, but they’d be fine for the job I had in mind. I pulled one fork out and dropped it on his lap, careful to say out of reach of all three of Ned’s unbound limbs. “Stab your right arm.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Pick up the fork in your left hand and stab your right arm, between your elbow and your wrist.” My theory was that in making him understand and believe that I truly was Jake Tower’s heir, I’d taken his binding back from Julia Tower, without her even knowing it. But the only way I could think of to test that and be sure he wasn’t faking—playing along, so he could report back to her—was to ask him to do something he’d never do, unless he really had no choice but to obey me.

  No one who understood how much power blood truly holds would ever willingly spill his own in front of a stranger.

  “I’m not gonna—” Ned flinched, and his left hand flew to his forehead. Resistance pain; it was easy to recognize. Whether or not he was faking was harder to determine. “You’re a bigger bitch than she is! Julia Tower never made me spill my own blood!” he insisted, still rubbing his forehead.

  “Sorry about that. Can’t be helped. Do it. Now.”

  His hand shook, hovering in the air between his forehead and the fork on his lap, and I watched, fascinated, as he silently weighed his options.

  Then I heard faint footsteps in the hall, and my pulse raced so fast I got dizzy for a second. “Sera? You okay?”

  “Yeah. Fine,” I called through the door. Then I turned back to Ned. “I don’t have time for you to think this through. Stab yourself in the fucking arm. Now!”

  Ned groaned in pain, but his hand picked up the fork, squeezing it so tight his skin turned white from the pressure.

  “Do it!” I repeated in a fierce whisper.

  “Aaahh!” he shouted, resisting mentally, even as his body obeyed. Even as he stabbed himself in the arm, halfway between his elbow and the wrist lashed to the refrigerator door handle.

  The fork stuck in his skin, standing up like a tower in the middle of his arm, blood welling slowly around the four buried tines.

  “Sera!” Kris’s footsteps grew faster and louder. “Sera!”

  “I’m fine!” I shouted, staring in fascination as dark drops of blood dribbled down the side of Ned’s arm and onto his pants. His breathing was ragged. Uneven. But that had to be from his efforts to resist—the fork hadn’t penetrated deeply enough to do any real damage.

  “Fucking bitch!” he growled through clenched teeth, and I almost shouted in triumph. He clearly hadn’t wanted to stab himself. Which meant he’d had no choice. Which meant that his binding had transferred from Julia to me. “You are one of them.”

  I blinked at him in surprise. Then in horror. I wasn’t one of them. Not in the way that he meant it.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, my words running together in my haste to say what had to be said before Kris got there. “Don’t tell anyone what I’ve told you. Ever. Other than that, you are a free man. I release you from your binding.”

  Ned’s eyes widened and he craned his neck, trying to see something on his arm, and as Kris threw the door open behind me, I saw what Ned couldn’t. The marks on his arm had faded to a muted gray.

  Shit! Kris would see. I lurched forward and pulled the flap of his sleeve over the mark as Kris’s arm wrapped around my waist and hauled me away from Ned.

  “Are you trying to give him back his gun?” Kris demanded, setting me on my feet out of the guard’s reach, which is when I realized I still held the pistol. And that Ned had been reaching for it with his left hand when Kris pulled me out of reach.

  The ungrateful bastard was going to shoot me! After I set him free!

  But then, I had made him stab his own arm, then freed him of any restriction from hurting me. Maybe I hadn’t thought that one through very well...

  “What the hell happened?” Kris stared at the fork in Ned’s arm.

  “Ask your bitch,” Ned snapped, and I was relieved to see that he was evidently still bound to silence, even though his employment binding had been broken.

  Kris glanced at me, muttering something about how I wasn’t anyone’s bitch. Which almost made me smile. But I could only shrug in answer. “I don’t know. He found a fork, and before I could take it away from him, he just...stabbed himself in the arm. It wa
s weird.”

  Kris frowned as though he didn’t believe me—go figure—but it took most of my concentration to keep from grinning in return. I’d done it. I’d figured it out. Now, if I could figure out how to do the same thing I’d done to Ned, only on a large scale, I could single-handedly put that bitch Julia Tower out of business for good.

  Twelve

  Kris

  “How is he?” I leaned against the door frame in the threshold of Kori and Ian’s room. Ian was asleep on the bed, shirtless, the thick bandage on his shoulder pale against his dark skin.

  “He’ll live.” Kori closed her laptop without turning it off, then leaned back in the desk chair. “Gran got him all patched up and gave him something for the pain.”

  “I hope you double-checked the dosage.” Gran only remembered what decade she was living in about half the time, and as much help as she was as a triage nurse—with forty years’ real-world experience—on her bad days, she was as likely to overdose you as underdose you.

  “I did.” Kori waved one hand at the closed laptop. “Thank goodness for the internet, slow though the connection is. I wanted to call Meghan.” Ian’s sister-in-law was a Healer. “But he wouldn’t let me. He says he can’t drag Steve and Meg into any more danger, at least until his brother’s fully healed.”

  “I can respect that.” And Kori could, too. I could tell from how she was just frustrated, rather than actually angry. Ian’s brother had hovered on the edge of death for weeks, resisting a binding that had been sealed using Kenley’s blood without her knowledge. A few months earlier, Ian had been willing to kill Kenni to break the binding and save his brother. But then he met Kori, and now he was practically family. The brother I’d never had. He’d fought for my sisters when I couldn’t be there.

  I owed him more than I could ever possibly repay.

  “Has Van had any luck ID-ing Sera’s family?”

  Kori shook her head. “I don’t think she’s actually looking anymore. Since the two of you came back with that scrap of intel, she’s been exhausting every resource trying to figure out what warehouse Julia moved the blood farm into.”

  “At least that’s keeping her mind occupied.” Which was more than I’d managed for myself. “Try to get some sleep, Kor. We’ll find Kenni tomorrow.” Or die trying.

  On my way down the hall, I stopped in front of the door to my former room out of habit and had one hand on the doorknob before I remembered it wasn’t my room anymore. I stood there for a minute, thinking about Sera, and how much we still didn’t know about her. About how badly I wanted to trust her. How badly I wanted her to trust me. But in the two days since we’d met, I’d nearly gotten her killed several times—it was a miracle she didn’t run when she saw me coming.

  But then, I had yet to see her run from anything.

  She could have taken the coward’s way out tonight. She could have told me to shoot Ned the guard, which would have kept her off of Julia’s radar. Or, as close to off the radar as possible, for someone who’d survived being shot at by Tower’s goons three times in less than two days.

  Instead, she’d let Ned live and exposed herself as our ally, damning her to be hunted alongside us.

  Why would she do that? We would have helped her hunt the bastard who’d killed her family either way.

  When I finally lay down on the couch with the pillow I’d stolen from my own bed while she was in the shower, I couldn’t get Sera out of my mind. Every time I closed my eyes, she was there, but the mental picture was never what I expected. Instead of a self-indulgent memory of her standing naked at the foot of my bed, I kept seeing her as she’d looked the day we met, in Tower’s foyer, when her reckless bravery had nearly gotten us both killed.

  After an hour and a half of staring at the muted television—any noise from the TV was guaranteed to wake Gran, even though she would have slept through World War III itself—I gave up and headed into the kitchen to nuke a cup of hot chocolate.

  Armed with my steaming mug, I sat at the table with Elle’s notebook and started flipping through the pages again, looking for new meaning in old words. Hoping that Ned’s sliver of information would fit in with something I’d long ago forgotten I’d ever written.

  “That stuff is crap in a mug,” Sera said, and I thought I’d imagined her voice—wishful thinking—until I looked up to find her standing in the kitchen doorway, in Kori’s robe.

  “We have to get you some new clothes.” I flipped the notebook shut. “Preferably something neither of my sisters ever wore.”

  “Why?” She glanced down at the robe, which hung open to reveal a snug tank top and shorts so short I didn’t want to know which sister they belonged to. “Kori wants her clothes back?”

  “Not that she’s mentioned. But that’s just creepy.” I waved a hand at her...whole body. “From my perspective.”

  “Your sister’s clothes are creepy?”

  I frowned. She was going to make me actually tell her how hot she was. “On you? Yes,” I said, and her hurt expression clued me in to the fact that I’d just failed the Communicating With Women pop quiz. “That’s not what I meant. You look...so good, in a way I don’t want to associate with my sisters’ clothes.”

  But that didn’t do her justice. Sera looked practically edible, in that you’ll-never-taste-anything-this-sweet-ever-again kind of way. In fact, all I’d had was a taste, and the thought of never tasting her again made me want to bite my own tongue off, to put it out of its misery. “Does that make sense?”

  She gave me a mischievous smile. “I’m not sure. That almost sounded like a compliment.”

  “I’m only human, and you’re...flaunting.”

  Her brows rose and she tied the robe closed. “Better?”

  I had to swallow a groan. That wasn’t better at all.

  Instead of answering, which I wasn’t sure I could do without begging for another peek, I kicked out the chair next to mine in wordless invitation.

  Sera sat and picked up the empty hot-chocolate packet. Then she peeked into my mug and grimaced. “Seriously. How can you drink that crap? Hot chocolate is made with milk, and sugar, and cocoa. And a pot. On the stove.”

  I shrugged. “The microwave’s easier.”

  She laughed. “Do you always make such little effort?”

  I shook my head slowly, studying her, trying to decide whether I’d imagined smut behind likely innocent words. “No. The rest of my life is complicated. Food seems like the safest place to take a shortcut. We are still talking about food, aren’t we?”

  “Were we ever?” She stood before I could interpret either her tone or her expression and dropped the empty paper packet into the trash, then snatched my mug from my hands.

  “Hey!” I protested as she dumped thin, chocolate-flavored water into the sink.

  “I’ll make cocoa. You tell me how you’re going to kill the bastard who murdered my family.”

  “With a gun, almost certainly.” I watched as she pulled a half-full jug of milk from the fridge, then started opening cabinets. “That’s kind of my specialty.”

  “Are you armed right now?”

  I took the .45 from my lap and set it on the table.

  She frowned and pushed the last cabinet door closed. “I think you have a serious problem. Do you sleep with that thing?”

  “Only when I sleep alone,” I said, and either I was imagining things, or she blushed. A lot.

  “Sugar?” Her brows rose in question, surely an attempt to cover her own...interest? Curiosity? Either way, I had sudden hope that she might not permanently hate me.

  “Pantry. If we have cocoa powder, it’ll be in there, too.”

  “I want to watch,” Sera called over her shoulder as she dug in the small pantry, and for a second, I thought we were still talking about sleeping, and guns, and innuendo neithe
r of us was likely to admit to. But that couldn’t be right.

  “Watch what?”

  All noise from the pantry ceased, and her shoulders tensed. “I want to watch him die. I want to be there when the life fades from his eyes and he bleeds out on the floor.”

  “That might not be...” Healthy. It might not give her the closure she obviously needed. “Safe.”

  “Screw safe.” She turned with an unopened bag of sugar tucked under her left arm and a yellow plastic canister of cocoa powder in her right hand. “My parents and my sister were ‘safe’ in their own home, behind locked doors, and look where that got them.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Safety is an illusion, even in the best of times. The only true defense is vigilance, but that wasn’t something a daughter/sister in mourning needed to hear. Yet I wasn’t going to insult her with polite platitudes, either. Those hadn’t helped me when my parents died.

  “How are you going to find him?” She set the ingredients next to the stove, then pulled a pot from beneath the counter.

  “Do the police have a description?”

  Sera ripped open the bag of sugar, and thousands of tiny grains spilled onto the counter. “I can get you one.”

  “How? Was there a witness? Did the police take a statement? Because Van can get into their records, no problem, and you won’t have to—”

  “There was a witness, but her statement won’t help.” Sera lowered her head, and I knew her eyes were closed, though I couldn’t see them with her back to me. “She told the police she couldn’t remember anything. But that was a lie.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.” She pulled the blue plastic cap off the milk carton and set it in a scattering of sugar on the counter. “The witness lied because she was scared.” Sera poured milk into the pot, but her hand shook, and some sloshed over the side. And that’s when I made the connection.

  “Oh, damn, Sera, I’m so sorry. I’m such an idiot.” I stood, but she wouldn’t look at me. She just scooped sugar into a measuring cup she’d found in a drawer I’d never even noticed before. “You were there, weren’t you? You saw what happened to them....” I reached for her because I’d never seen anyone in more desperate need of a hug, but she pulled away from me as if my hands were on fire, and that vicious ache was back in my chest, like it had been every time I’d failed to help someone I cared about.