“What happened? Where are you cut?”
Gran scowled at me. “I’m not cut, I’m just old and clumsy.”
Several sets of footsteps slowed to a stop at my back and Sera laughed as she brushed past me and took the open can my grandmother held. Thin red liquid dripped down the side of the label, over her fingers. “It’s tomato sauce.” She set the can on the counter next to three others lined up there, and took my grandmother’s hand. “Here, let me help you out of that mess.”
Gran stepped out of her house shoes and onto a clean spot on the floor, clutching Sera’s hand for balance. “Thank you, hon.” She shook her head. “I guess that’s what I get for using marinara out of a can, but you don’t leave me much choice when you buy the wrong tomatoes and lose all the chopping knives, Kristopher.”
I’d “lost” all the chopping knives just like I’d “misplaced” the stove knobs. Life and work had both gotten much harder when senility had started to affect Gran’s everyday function, instead of just her perception of time.
“Gran, that’s way too much sauce. There are only five of us now.” Six if I counted Kenley. Or Sera.
Sera shot me a questioning look, but I couldn’t figure out how to explain what reality Gran was living in at that moment without telling her about the kids. And I could not afford to tell her about the kids.
She turned back to my grandmother. “Here, you have a seat, and I’ll get that cleaned up.” She pulled out a chair at the table for my grandmother, then turned toward the mess on the floor and grabbed a roll of paper towels.
“Don’t worry about that, hon. You’re a guest. Kristopher will get it. Kristopher?” Gran glanced at me expectantly and I held up my arm, silently pleading my bloody hardship.
Gran rolled her eyes. “Oh, fine, bring me my sewing kit, and I’ll stitch you up.”
Ian noticed my panic as I tried to come up with a reason to refuse my grandmother’s offer—some reason other than the fact that she could no longer see well enough to cross-stitch, much less repair my open, bleeding wounds—and he stepped in.
“I got it, Gran.” Everyone called her Gran. That’s the only way she’d have it. “I need the practice, but maybe you wouldn’t mind giving me some pointers while I work?” Ian pulled out a chair for me and I sank into it, grateful both for the rescue and for his tact.
“Be glad to, hon.” Gran scowled at me as she spoke. “Anything for a man not ashamed to admit when he needs help.”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t need help. I need stitches.”
Ian chuckled as he pulled the first aid kit from the top of the fridge.
Sera turned off the stove, then knelt to help Vanessa clean up the spilled sauce. When she gasped, I turned to find her staring at the series of straight, thin scars climbing Vanessa’s bare forearm. “What happened?”
Van scooped up a sloppy handful of sauce with a paper towel, then dropped it into the trash can. “Jake Tower had me tortured to get to Kenley.” She shrugged as if the memory meant nothing to her. And maybe it didn’t. She’d certainly been through worse. “It happens.”
Sauce dripped from the napkin Sera clutched. She looked sick. “No, it doesn’t. Torture doesn’t just happen.”
Vanessa blinked at her with round, sad eyes, as if she pitied Sera’s naïveté. But I remembered the warring pain and anger I’d seen in in her earlier, and I wondered if we weren’t seeing naïveté at all, but the memory of some trauma of her own.
“Let’s see that arm.” Ian sat on the edge of the chair next to mine and opened the first aid kit on the tabletop, while I laid my forearm on a clean white dish towel.
Sera stood and dropped her soggy napkin into the trash, then plucked a bottle of rubbing alcohol from the kit and handed it to Ian, who burst out laughing. Too stubborn to ask for the hydrogen peroxide instead, I glared at her and clenched my teeth while he poured alcohol over my forearm.
“Clean and shallow,” he said after a close look at the cuts, while they continued to sizzle in sterile liquid. “How did this happen?”
“She sliced my arm open.”
“I was going for something lower,” Sera said, and my own grandmother laughed out loud.
“That would have made this moment much more awkward.” Ian popped the cap from a tube of liquid bandage. “You want this, or sutures?”
I studied the two two-inch cuts. Then the wickedly curved suture needle. “Liquid bandage.”
He sealed my cuts while Sera and Van mopped up the spilled sauce, and my grandmother made a production of directing both operations. As Ian was packing up the first aid kit, the closet door opened once again.
I stood so quickly my chair scraped the floor, and Sera backed away in surprise. Ian put one hand on the butt of his gun and Vanessa grabbed a knife from the butcher block beside the stove. Gran’s knuckles went white as she grasped the edge of the table.
We had no reason to suspect that Julia had found our hideout yet, so we kept the closet dark, for ease of use. But there was no stopping that moment of tense silence, waiting to see who would step out into the hall. Especially since Julia had sprung a trap for us at Meghan’s house.
“It’s us,” Kori called as the door creaked open.
Gran exhaled softly, Van put her knife back and Ian let go of his gun and stood.
“Hey.” Kori glanced at Sera, then went straight into the arms Ian held open. Behind her, Annika and her daughter, Hadley, stood in the living room. Only Hadley wasn’t really Annika’s. She was Noelle’s.
For a while, when we were young, and stupid, and unfettered by the bitter obligations of our adult realities, I’d loved Noelle, and she’d been mine. But her baby was not.
Hadley could have been mine, if the cards had fallen another way, and maybe that would have changed Elle’s fate. I’d never really thought about being a parent, but I would have done it for Elle. There was a time when I would have done anything for her, if she’d asked. Anything.
Instead, she carried, delivered and let herself die to protect Ruben Cavazos’s secret baby.
There were days I still hated her for that. Though, mostly I hated her for not telling me. For never once telling me that she was pregnant, and that the father was the head of a fucking Skilled mafia family. The married head of the Skilled mafia.
I’d found out about Hadley less than six months earlier, when Anne was finally forced to admit that her child wasn’t really hers and Olivia figured out who the father was.
The child looked like Cavazos, in a certain light. But mostly, she looked like Noelle.
“Hey, Hadley!” Vanessa called as my grandmother wrapped the little girl in a hug and Ian scruffed her hair. Everyone loved Hadley the same way everyone had loved Elle. And not just because—like her mother—she was beautiful.
Hadley harvested love like it was a plant in her garden. She tended it with hugs and watered it with sweet smiles, and I, too, loved her, even though looking at her hurt.
She had no idea I’d ever known her birth mother beyond the occasional hello.
There were days when that still broke my heart.
I could have helped Noelle. I could have protected her. I could have saved her, and kept her little family together. If I’d been able to interpret the lines scribbled in that damned notebook.
But I’d failed Noelle, and although I didn’t know it at the time, I’d failed Hadley. And I’d put my notebook away, convinced after Noelle’s disappearance that I would never be able to interpret enough of fate’s Rosetta stone in time to truly make a difference for anyone referenced in it.
I’d remained convinced of that until the moment I saw Sera and recognized her scarf from a line written with my own hand.
In the kitchen, I ran one finger over my sealed cuts, then I looked up and found Sera watching while everyone else fussed over Hadley. A ghost of a smile haunted her lips—her mouth was beautiful, now that she’d stopped scowling—and some private pain shone in her damp eyes.
The window she’d broke
n hadn’t been repaired, yet she wasn’t running. Maybe she knew there were more than enough of us to stop her. Maybe she finally understood that she was safer with us than on her own, if Julia Tower was willing to kill her.
But ultimately, she was there because she was supposed to be with us. Sera was there to help us get Kenley back. Or maybe I was supposed to help her with whatever accounted for that battered determination—that visceral need to fight—that echoed in every word she said. Or maybe both.
Either way, in the hour since I’d met her, Sera had frightened, fascinated and fought me. She’d drawn my grandmother’s amusement, Kori’s compassion and my blood. Even if I’d wanted to let her go, deep down I knew it was too late. Like Van and Ian, she’d already been caught by the Daniels’ family snare, snagged not just by my interest, but by everyone else’s, as well.
And like the Towers—perhaps the only thing our families had in common—once the Daniels get a good grip, they don’t let go.
Five
Sera
“Okay, here’s how this works.” Kori Daniels dropped into the chair on my right, and it took most of my concentration to avoid looking as on-guard as I felt. She was serious about giving me a quick death if I turned out to be a threat to her sister, and the scary part was that she truly seemed to think she’d be doing me a personal favor. “Kris and I are going to ask you some questions and you’re going to answer them. Anne’s going to let us know whether or not you’re telling the truth.”
I crossed my arms on the table, hoping my anger came across as confidence. “So this little game is predicated on the fact that you all already think I’m a liar? Doesn’t that mean the deck is stacked against me?”
Across the table, Kris scooted forward in his chair and my gaze was drawn to his as if the man had his own gravitational pull. Why was it so easy for me to look into his eyes, yet so hard to do...everything else in the world? “We don’t think you’re a liar,” he said, and I didn’t get a chance to point out the irony of him saying that in the company of a Reader because Kori opened her big mouth. Again.
“Yes, we do,” she said. “Everyone lies. I don’t give a shit about most of your lies. I just need to know you’re telling the truth about a few things.”
I glanced at the little girl seated to my left, contentedly munching on spaghetti I’d helped make. No one seemed concerned about her picking up bad language. Or hearing something that might scare her.
Maybe that was all par for the course with Skilled children—surely she was Skilled, if her mother was a Reader. Unless her father was unSkilled. With only one Skilled parent—as in my case—a child had a slightly less than fifty-percent chance of inheriting a Skill. At least, according to what I’d read online.
“Ready?” Kori glanced over her shoulder at Anne, the Reader, who leaned against the kitchen counter near the stove. Anne nodded. Ian, Gran and Vanessa all watched as they ate from bowls of sauce-drenched noodles.
I felt as if I was on trial. In Wonderland.
Kori started to ask the first question, but Kris beat her to it. “Who are you?”
I exhaled slowly, reminding myself for the millionth time that losing my temper in a room full of armed and hair-trigger people would be a very bad idea. “I told you, my name is Sera. And that’s all you’re going to get out of me until you’re ready to reciprocate.” But even then I couldn’t tell them the whole truth. These were the last people in the world I wanted to tell about my connection to Jake Tower.
Fortunately, I already knew more about them than they knew about me. Than anyone still living knew about me. Gran had given me Kris’s last name and after learning that Kori had worked for Jake Tower, I’d made the connection. She wasn’t just your average former Tower employee, assuming there was any such thing. She was Korinne Daniels, the most visible member of Jake’s personal security team for years—her face was in the background of nearly every photo I’d found of him online.
Shortly before his death, however—which I now knew she’d had a hand in—she’d disappeared from the photos.
Unfortunately, once I’d made the connection, I couldn’t unmake it. At the very least, Kori Daniels was a murderer. Who knew what else she’d done for my biological father—she’d clearly been on the receiving end of the Tower brutality, but I found it hard to believe she hadn’t also dished it out. How could she not have, working for Jake Tower?
Did Kris and his sister have that in common? I hadn’t seen his bare arms or back, but I’d seen his gun and his proficiency with a zip tie, which didn’t quite fit with the quiet but intense way his gaze held mine or the protective anger that emanated from him when he thought about his missing sister. If they didn’t like my answers—if they thought I was a threat to Kenley—would I even have a chance to fight, considering all those weapons in the room?
Would they kill me in front of the little girl?
“Sera what?” Kris folded his arms, watching me as if there was no one else in the room. As if my name was the most important piece of information he’d ever lacked. “You said you’d play nice if we untied you. Please don’t give us a reason not to trust you.”
“I said I’d tell you what you need to know, but you don’t need to know my last name to know if I work for Tower.” I leaned forward, looking right into his blue-gray eyes. “I don’t work for Julia Tower. If you don’t believe me, consult your pet Reader.”
Anne bristled at being called a pet, but she nodded, confirming the truth in my statement.
Kori only rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair.
“That’s not specific enough. Do you now, or have you ever worked for the Tower syndicate in any capacity?”
“No.” I held Kris’s steady gaze, glad his sister’s question gave me no reason to be nervous.
Readers don’t function like so-called lie-detector tests. They don’t read changes in body temperature and blood pressure; they taste or scent the truth in a statement. Some are better than others. Some can tell you’re lying, but not what about. Some can tell you thought about lying. Some can tell that you’re hiding something, even if you never technically lied about it.
I had no idea how good Anne was. I hoped I wouldn’t have to find out.
Anne nodded, confirming my honesty again, and every gaze in the room centered on me once more.
“What were you doing there?” Kris asked, and I realized he hadn’t even glanced at Anne after my previous answer. Did he think he could read the truth for himself? Was he looking for a specific reaction from me? “Why were you in Julia Tower’s office?”
I hesitated.
I hesitated so long that people started looking at Anne again, even though I hadn’t said anything. But they didn’t need a Reader to tell them I was considering lying; my silence said that clearly enough.
Finally, I exhaled slowly and decided to tell them the truth. Most of it, anyway.
“I was trying to hire her. Well, her people, anyway.”
Kori leaned forward, obviously skeptical now. “Hire them to do what?”
It took me a second to understand her suspicion. I wasn’t the typical Tower client. I didn’t drive an expensive car or wear fancy clothes. I had no obvious wealth, power or authority. I had no discernible means with which to hire the Towers, other than a service agreement.
I met her gaze and held it. “The kind of thing the Towers do. You’d know that better than I would.”
She glanced at Anne, who shrugged. “Nothing yet.”
Their Reader wouldn’t scent any untruth from me. I couldn’t afford to let that happen.
“And you can pay for something like that?” Ian quietly voiced the question they were all thinking. No one looked at him. They were too busy watching me.
“I...” Don’t tell them more than they need to know. My strategy for dealing with Julia Tower had turned out to be just as useful with the Daniels family. Which did nothing to set me at ease. “Yes, I can pay.”
Anne frowned. “She’s not lying, but s
he’s not being straightforward, either. I don’t think she planned to pay in cash.”
“Blood?” Kori asked, and I understood that she didn’t mean my blood. People often paid with the blood of—and thus the means to control—someone else. Someone more important.
“Service?” From Vanessa.
“Information?” Kris held my gaze with an intense one of his own. “Do you have information Julia wants?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Are you going to sign with them?” Vanessa repeated, her forehead deeply lined. Kori hadn’t asked me if I would work for the Towers—only if I had. “Don’t sign with them.”
Before I could answer, Hadley spoke around a mouthful of noodles. “Sera won’t work for them.” The child chewed and swallowed, while every head in the room turned toward her. “She’ll work for herself.”
“What, she’s a Reader, too?” I couldn’t tear my gaze from the little girl, who seemed completely unaware of the seven sets of eyes staring at her. “What is she, five?” How could a child that young already have a Skill?
“Seven...” Anne mumbled. “But she’s not reading you.” The mother sank into a squat next to her daughter’s chair, one hand on the little girl’s denim-clad knee. “Hadley, honey, how do you know that?”
Hadley shrugged, digging another spoonful from her bowl. “Dunno.”
“Are you sure?” Anne asked, while everyone else seemed to be holding their breath, and I wasn’t sure if she was asking whether the child was sure about what she’d said, or about not knowing how she knew.
“Yeah.” Hadley looked up from her bowl. “Can I have some cheese? The sprinkle kind?”
Ian opened the refrigerator door and pulled out a green canister of Parmesan, then set it on the table in front of Hadley, who immediately opened it and dumped what must have been a quarter of the canister into her bowl.
“Do you know anything else interesting?” Anne said, while her daughter stirred dried cheese into her noodles.
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