Oath Bound (An Unbound Novel)

by Rachel Vincent

  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 was 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 slee
p 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 neither 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.

  “Do you like mint?” She dumped sugar into the pot, and it took me a second to make the mental jump. We were talking about cocoa again. “I saw some mint extract in the pantry...”

  “Sera. Put down the whisk and talk to me. Please.”

  I didn’t think she’d do it. But then Sera set the whisk in the pan and turned to stare up at me. She looked as if the world had just crumbled beneath her feet and a step in either direction would send her tumbling into that void along with everything else she’d ever cared about. With the life she’d lost when her family was murdered.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” But what I really meant was, Why didn’t you tell me?

  “Why didn’t I tell you?” Her voice was sharp, but her eyes were sad. “Why didn’t I tell the guy who kidnapped me at gunpoint that I saw my parents and sister murdered in our own home?”

  I closed my eyes and made a silent wish that would never come true, and when I opened them again, she’d turned back to the counter, measuring cocoa powder this time with stiff, precise movements. I wanted to touch her so badly my hands actually ached for the feel of her skin, and for just a moment, that ache was enough to overwhelm logic and common sense, both of which were telling me that I couldn’t get involved with Sera.

  Not while she was still grieving.

  Sera was wounded and fragile, beneath a tough, knife-wielding exterior, and while she certainly needed and deserved comfort, she wasn’t in the proper state of mind to make decisions about her personal life. At least, not the kind of decisions intended to last beyond the closure she hoped to find with vigilante justice.

  I didn’t want her to associate me with such a sad, dangerous part of her life, because when she put that all behind her, she’d want to put me behind her, too. I would remind her of the painful past.

  “My biggest regret in the world right now—other than failing Kenley—is how we met.” Too late, I realized that sounded like a confession.

  It was a confession. I was practically admitting that I wanted things from her that I couldn’t have. That she couldn’t afford to give me, with so much grief in her heart.

  Sera dumped cocoa into the sugar and milk mixture and began to stir with the whisk. “You saved my life, remember?”

  “No, I nearly got you killed.” I forced a smile I couldn’t truly feel as I fed her own words back to her. “Remember?”

  “That wasn’t your...” She bit off the end of her sentence and I got the feeling it had veered from her original intent. When she turned to me again, there was something new behind her eyes. Something sad, and strong, and...resigned. “You didn’t fail Kenley. It sounds like she rushed into an unknown situation, and we all know you’d do anything to get her back. And you will get her back. We will. Then we’ll track down the bastard who took everything from me and gut him like the animal he is.”

  “You want him gutted?” I shrugged and half sat on the edge of the table. “I’m better with guns than with knives, but that bastard killed three people in cold blood, right in front of you. I’ll kill him however you want. And yes, you can watch, if you think that’ll help. But I have to tell you, in my experience, that only makes it worse. Violence may balance the scales, but it can’t heal wounds. Only time can do that.”

  “No. Time lets untreated wounds fester.” Sera turned back to the stove and tried to ignite the burner, but the knobs were gone again. “And there were four.”

  “Four what?” I pulled the cookie jar from the top of the fridge and took the lid off, then held it out to her.

  “Four people.” She selected a knob, then slid it into place on the stove. “He killed four people. There was a baby. Well, there would have been a baby. In a few...” Her hand clenched around the stove knob and her words cracked and fell apart. “My sister...”

  “She was pregnant?” Something cold, and dark, and nearly uncontrollable unfurled in the pit of my stomach, and my hands clenched into fists at my sides. What kind of sick bastard kills a pregnant woman?

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Sera lit the burner and adjusted the flame, then stirred the milk in silence while I retreated to my seat at the table, trying to process what I’d just learned. To truly understand the scope of her loss.

  I couldn’t do it. Even when I’d lost my parents, I’d still had my sisters and Gran.

  Sera had been there. She’d seen them die. How the hell had she survived? Had she hidden? That would have been the smart thing to do—surely the only way to preserve her own life. But when had I ever seen her do the cautious thing? When had I seen her try to save herself?

  She’d stepped in front of my gun and demanded I hand it over, before she’d had any reason to know I wouldn’t shoot her. She’d risked being shot to claim her mother’s photo album. She’d attack the man who shot Ian. She’d sprayed bleach in Ned’s face to keep him from shooting me, then dented his skull with a fucking toaster.

  In the two days I’d known her, I’d seen her step into the path of danger more times than I could count on one hand, but I’d never once seen
her hide.

  So how the hell had she survived the attack that killed her entire family?

  I didn’t realize the cocoa was done until she set a mug on the table in front of me, then slid into her chair with a mug of her own. There was a yellow, sugar-coated duck floating in my hot chocolate. I picked the mug up and eyed it, then laughed out loud when I recognized the Marshmallow Peep.

  Sera shrugged, and I swear I saw just a hint of a smile. “You’re out of marshmallows. That’s the best I could do.”

  Gran had never once given me marshmallows in my cocoa. Much less fluffy little sugar-coated ducks.

  Sera’s Marshmallow Peep was green, and it left a sparkly spot of sugar on the end of her nose when she sipped from her mug. I wanted to kiss the sugar off her nose, but I was pretty sure that would make her want to stab me again.

  “What is that?” She stared at my notebook, open on the table in front of me. “Poetry?” Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Do you write poetry?”

  “Your skepticism stings.” But her interest felt like a ray of sunshine on an overcast day and the moment I saw it, I craved more. “Why is it so unbelievable that I might write poetry?”

  “It doesn’t really fit with your...image.”

  “My image?” I closed the notebook and folded my hands over it, watching her expectantly. “I gotta hear this. What is my image?”

  “Well, admittedly, my perspective is colored by my initial impression of you as a homicidal kidnapper who screwed all the doors and windows shut to keep his grandmother prisoner in her own house...”

  “That’s not what I did. This isn’t her house, and she’s not prisoner.” But Sera wasn’t listening.

  “...but you’ve kind of got this badass-next-door routine going on, with the blue eyes and the clean-cut thing you have going on here—” she waved one hand vaguely at my face and hair, and suddenly I regretted shaving that morning “—and the guns, and the whole ‘you want me to kill him or let him live?’ thing.”