Unfortunately, his terror wasn’t directed at me. Curtis was looking over my shoulder.
Chill bumps popped up on my arms and dread churned in my stomach. But before I could turn to see what he was so scared of, pain slammed into my skull, and the room spun around me. I fought the loss of consciousness, but darkness surrounded me from the periphery, a betrayal by the very element I was born to embrace.
The last thing I saw before my eyes closed against my will was the woman’s hand that plucked my gun from my grip.
Twenty
Sera
The ringing of a cell phone woke me up, and it took me a second to realize I wasn’t hearing my own ringtone. And one more second to remember I no longer had a cell phone. After that, everything else came crashing in, and for a moment, my loss—that fresh remembrance of it—was too thick to breathe through. As it was most mornings.
When I’d pushed it all back again, back into memory, where the pain was manageable, I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp, but Kris’s phone stopped ringing before I could answer it. The screen showed one missed call, from Anne.
Kris. He’d been in my bed. Or rather, I was in his.
I twisted, but I knew from the lack of warmth on my left side that he was gone before my gaze ever fell on the empty half of the bed. Still, the memory of the night before surged through me—shared grief, comfort through touch, and a mutual pleasure so perfect that in that instant, nothing else had existed. No pain. No fear. No memories. There’d been nothing but the two of us, and in that moment, I’d been sure we could actually be together. That maybe we were supposed to be together.
But now he was gone, and the bed was cold.
I glanced at the alarm clock and groaned over the numbers—it was barely five in the morning—then stretched to turn the lamp off again, when what I really wanted to do was pull on a bare minimum of clothing and tiptoe downstairs to curl up on the couch with Kris. But if he’d gone downstairs, he’d gone downstairs for a reason.
So I burrowed farther into the covers and closed my eyes. But sleep didn’t return.
Kris’s phone rang again, less than two minutes after the first missed call. I picked it up and scowled when I read Anne’s name on the screen again. Why was she calling him in the middle of the night?
What if this was some kind of emergency?
I pressed the accept call button, before I could overthink it and lose my nerve. “Hello? Anne?” I said, and for a moment, there was only silence on the other end. Then someone exhaled into my ear.
“The spider is dead,” a child’s voice said over the line, and I realized I was talking to Hadley. “The web is a trap.”
“What? Hadley? Is something wrong?”
“The spider is dead! The web is a trap!” she shouted, and her high-pitched scream skewered my brain, then bounced around the inside of my skull. “The spider is dead! The web is a trap!”
I held the phone away from my ear to save my hearing, and I had to half shout to be heard over her. “Hadley! Put your mom on the phone.” But she was still screaming those same two sentences. “Hadley!”
“Hadley!” Anne’s voice echoed mine from the other end of the line, and a plastic clattering followed as her phone hit the floor, but I could still hear the child screaming, and her mother trying to calm her down. “Hadley, what’s wrong? Who’s on the phone? Did you have a bad dream?”
“Anne!” I shouted, desperate to be heard over them both. I didn’t know what spider she was talking about, but I understood both “dead” and “trap.”
Something was horribly wrong. And the call had come on Kris’s phone.
I was still shouting at Anne, trying to get her attention, when my bedroom door flew open and crashed into the dresser against the wall. “Sera?” Kori had her gun drawn and aimed at the floor. “What happened?”
She stepped inside and Ian came in after her, similarly armed, and they automatically scanned separate halves of the room, looking for the threat. When they found none, their gazes returned to me, then slid down from my face. Which is when I remembered that I was naked. And holding Kris’s phone.
“It’s Hadley.” I held the phone out to Kori as I pulled the sheet up to my chest with my free hand. “She’s freaking out about a spider, or something.”
Kori set her gun on the end table, then took the phone and listened as Anne tried to calm Hadley. Ian turned around while I pulled my borrowed pajamas back on, and as I tugged the shirt into place, Kori handed the phone back to me. “They can’t hear us, and I can’t get to them until Anne turns off the infrared grid.”
Her house had state-of-the-art security, which—Kris had explained—Ruben Cavazos had paid for, in order to protect his love child. Noelle’s biological daughter.
“Is that Kris’s phone?” Van said from the doorway as Kori slipped past her into the hall, and I realized that my shouting into the phone had woken the entire household. “Where is he?”
“Downstairs, I guess.” I stood and held the phone a foot away from my ear, and could still hear Hadley screaming.
Kori stepped back into my room a minute later wearing jeans beneath the T-shirt she slept in, with her own phone in her hand.
“Anne still has a home phone,” she explained, pressing buttons on her cell.
I listened on Kris’s phone, and over the line, as Hadley’s screams quieted to a whimper, I heard the home phone ring. Something clattered against wood, and Anne said, “Hello?”
“It’s me,” Kori said from my room. “Turn off the grid. I’m coming over.”
“Just a second.” Anne’s voice was distant now, over Kris’s line. Kori hung up and shoved her phone into her pocket, then headed into the hall. A second later, her footsteps clomped down the stairs so fast I was surprised she didn’t trip over her own feet and plummet to her death. An instant after that, the closet door slammed, and I knew she was gone.
“Anne, can you hear me?” I said into Kris’s phone, and finally she picked it up.
“Who is this?” she said, and I could hear Hadley crying softly in the background, still mumbling about a spider.
“It’s Sera.”
“Where’s Kris?” she said. “Why are you on his phone?”
“He—” I said, but before I could admit to anything—which I wasn’t eager to do—I heard Kori’s voice over the line as she stepped into some shadow in Anne’s house. Almost at the same time, more footsteps raced up the stairs, and Vanessa stepped into my room again.
“Kris is gone.”
“What?” I said, but she could only shrug. That was the extent of her information. “Anne, I gotta go,” I said into the phone, then ended the call and slid Kris’s cell into the shallow pocket of my pj shorts. Ian, Van and I all headed for the stairs, and Gran was just trudging into the living room when we got there, her hair standing up in odd places, rubbing one tired, swollen eye.
“What’s all the ruckus?” She tried to smooth her hair, but it wouldn’t cooperate.
“Hadley’s hysterical and Kris is gone,” Vanessa said.
“Have you seen him?” I added, and Gran shook her head.
“He’ll be back.” She looked confused. “It must have been an emergency, or he wouldn’t have left in the middle of the night. He’s a good boy.”
“I know. Would you like some hot tea?” The offer was as much for me as for her. I couldn’t get Hadley’s screaming out of my head. It wasn’t a coincidence that she’d called Kris’s phone with what was obviously a prediction I couldn’t understand, and now he was missing. Kris and Hadley’s spiderweb trap were connected. And that could not be good.
“Screw hot tea. I’ll make coffee.” Gran brushed past me and I followed her into the kitchen, where Vanessa stood at the table, scrolling through something on her laptop.
“Ian, were you going through the police files I downloaded?” There was something ominous in her voice, as if she already knew the answer before she’d asked the question.
“No. Why?”
I edged between them, trying to see the screen.
“Sera, wait,” Ian tried to hold me back, but he let go with one angry look from me.
“I was going to show them to you this morning,” Van said softly as I closed my eyes and exhaled, trying to prepare myself for what I might see. “But it looks like Kris did some research of his own.”
I opened my eyes, and the face on the screen came into focus. My throat closed and the air trapped in my lungs seemed to solidify. I sank into the chair to my left and pulled the laptop closer. My hands shook as I zoomed in, then scrolled to recenter the picture.
It was him. The smiling man. The man who’d killed my entire family and ended any chance I had of having children.
“His name is Chase Curtis,” Vanessa said, but I didn’t give a shit what his name was. I didn’t even have a chance to properly process the fact that we’d identified him, because my gaze was stuck not on his face, but on the back of his bare right shoulder, where the tattoo of a crawling tarantula stared back at me.
The spider.
“Oh, shit. Kris found the spider.” I could hardly hear myself because I hadn’t taken in enough air to give my words much volume, but they both heard.
“What spider?” Ian said, and Van tapped the tattoo on her screen.
“That’s what Hadley was trying to tell us.” I scrubbed my face with both hands, but couldn’t erase what I’d just seen. Nor could I make any sense of it. “She said, ‘The spider is dead. The web is a trap.’ And she said it on Kris’s phone.”
Vanessa exhaled heavily. “He went after Curtis.”
“And the web is a trap.” I wasn’t sure what that meant yet, but I was sure it was true. “Who would set a trap for Kris?”
“It’s not a trap for him, it’s a trap for you,” a familiar voice said, and I looked up to find Anne and Hadley standing in the middle of the living room, the child’s face still red and damp from tears. Kori was behind them closing the hall closet door. “And it was set by someone who wants you dead, and knows you’re going after the spider.”
“Julia,” I said, and everyone around me seemed to be nodding. “She set a trap for me, and got Kris instead.”
“This is my fault.” Ian met my gaze with a heavy one of his own. “I told him to give you what you want most.”
“What? Why?”
“Because he’s in love with you, and he wants to prove he can protect you.” There was more to it than that. I could almost see what he wasn’t saying. But before he could elaborate—assuming he would have—Kori turned on me.
“That means this is your fault!” Anger rolled off her voice like smoke from a fire. “And if he’s dead, you’re going to pay.”
I couldn’t process all that at once. Hell, I couldn’t process any of that. “He’s in...” I shook that off. I couldn’t deal with wondering whether or not she was right, and whether or not loving me had just gotten the best man I’d ever known killed. So I focused on Hadley, who was the only one in the room, other than me, who’d ever seen Chase Curtis.
She was staring at something behind me, as though she’d totally lost touch with reality, her mother’s hand still gripped loosely. “Hadley?” I wondered for a second if she’d understood what Kori had just said. Did she know that her biological mother was Kris’s other love? Did she know she was the baby Elle had had with someone else—a mafia king, just like my own biological father?
But when I turned to see what she was staring at, I realized her current state had nothing to do with what Kori had said. I doubted she’d even heard it.
She was staring through the kitchen doorway at the picture of Chase Alexander Curtis, still open on Vanessa’s laptop.
“The spider is dead,” she whispered as if she hadn’t already said it a dozen times. “The web is a trap.”
“Where?” I dropped onto my knees in front of her and took her free hand in mine. “Where is the spider? Where is the trap? Did you see it?”
Anne knelt next to me, and I thought she’d shove me away from her daughter, or tell me to leave her alone, but she only squeezed Hadley’s hand and waited for the answer with us. “Don’t hold it in, sweetie. You’ll feel better once you have it out of your system,” the mother whispered to her daughter. “Once you’ve told us everything you remember. Noelle always did.”
“House,” Hadley whispered. “The spider died in a house. By the wall. Kris was there.”
“Is he still there?” I asked, and Hadley made an obvious effort to focus on me. “Can you see anything else? Is he still there?”
She shook her head, then looked past me to where Gran stood in the doorway, silent as she took it all in, sipping from a steaming mug of fresh coffee tightly gripped in both hands. “Is it morning? Can I have some chocolate milk?”
“Of course.” Gran held one arm out and Hadley dropped her mother’s hand and let Gran fold her into a hug, careful not to slosh coffee on the child. Then she ushered her into the kitchen and pulled a carton of milk from the fridge.
I stood, my hands shaking again. “We have to find him. Olivia?” I glanced at Kori in question. “Cam? Can one of them find him?”
She nodded, already dialing. I put aside the fact that I’d only met her a few days earlier and broke my own rule about respecting other people’s personal space—especially those who sleep armed—and stood close enough to hear what was said when Olivia answered her phone.
“Liv? Sorry for the early call. I need you to track Kris.”
“He didn’t tell you he was coming, did he?” Olivia said, and I began to put it together in my head even before Liv spelled it out for Kori.
“Coming where?”
“Here,” Liv said. “He was here less than an hour ago, with a name for Cam to track.”
“Chance Curtis?” Kori said, and as I’d known she would, Liv mumbled something in the affirmative. “Can you track him for us? Both of them?”
“How ’bout I just give you the address?”
“I’ll certainly take that, but could you also track him for me, to see if he’s still there?”
“Sure.” Olivia said something I couldn’t understand to Cam, then she read Kori an address. Kori scribbled the information on her hand with the purple pen Van handed her, then Olivia was back on the line. “Cam says he’s not there anymore. Or else he’s being Jammed. Maybe Sera’s with him.”
“No, she’s here with us. I’m going after him.”
“Come get us. We’ll help,” Olivia said.
“No time,” Kori said. “But thanks.” She hung up and glanced at Ian. “Ready?”
“And willing.” Ian shrugged into a jacket, covering a shoulder holster I hadn’t even seen him put on.
“I’m coming.” I followed them toward the hall. “But I need a holster.”
Kori stopped and turned to look at me, and I could feel her assessment like a visual pat-down, only she wasn’t looking for weapons. She was looking for competence. “I’ve never been hit by friendly fire,” she said, her voice deeper than usual, and deadly serious. “And I have no plans to start now.”
“I’m not going to shoot you,” I promised as Van shoved a pair of jeans into my hands. I changed from pj shorts into the jeans in Gran’s room in record time, while Kori rummaged in the hall closet for an extra holster. She showed me how to wear it, then slid two full clips into a pocket beneath my right arm and adjusted the straps quickly as I got accustomed to the feel.
I checked my clip, then chambered a round, double-checked the safety and slid the gun into my holster.
“Draw,” Kori said, her hand already on the closet door. She was eager to go. We both were.
I drew, but the movement was slow and awkward.
“Again.”
I holstered the gun and drew with my right hand, again. And again, the movement felt...strange. Kori made a couple of adjustmen
ts in the straps, then handed me a jacket and told me to try it again. I put the jacket on, then drew again. My draw was better that time. Smoother, even with the extra material. However, I still wasn’t quite confident that I wouldn’t accidentally shoot a hole in the borrowed jacket.
But I didn’t let her see that. Lots of people learn through on-the-job training, right? Trial by fire. If they could do it, so could I.
Kori nodded her approval, then waved me into the closet. She and Ian followed, and she closed the door. There was only darkness and silence for a moment, when I assumed she was making a mental search of the address Olivia had given her—fortunately, she was familiar with the building.
“The whole apartment is dark. At least, dark enough to travel into. Get ready.”
Her right hand bumped my left, and I took it, my right hovering near the gun, a conspicuous weight at my side. Then she tugged us forward.
Two steps later, the air around us changed as we stepped out of the closet and into Curtis’s brother’s apartment. Carpet muffled our steps.
The smell hit me with my next breath. Feces. And beneath that, the milder yet more alarming scent of blood.
Kori let go of my hand the instant her first foot landed on carpet. For a moment, she and Ian stood absolutely still, letting their eyes adjust to the slightly lighter room, so I did the same. Fortunately, the only light source was what bled through the blinds from the streetlight outside. We adjusted quickly.
On my left, Kori’s head turned as she scanned the room, and I knew Ian was doing the same. So I glanced around, too, and discovered that she’d walked us into the living room—the outline of a couch was a dead giveaway—less than a foot from the closed front door. Where we were least likely to bump into furniture. Where no one could sneak up on us without opening the door at our backs, which would serve as a warning.
Kori thought of everything.
I needed to think of everything, too.
Ian’s tall, dark silhouette took several steps toward the wall near the window. “Light?” he asked, and Kori’s profile nodded. Something clicked, and soft light flooded the room from a lamp in the corner.
Oath Bound (An Unbound Novel) Page 33