Oath Bound

But that was years ago …

The notebook was all I had left of Noelle. Twenty-three pages of dates and phrases—a visible reminder of the hardest lesson I’d ever learned, like an alcoholic’s sobriety chip or a junkie’s faded track marks. In the beginning, I’d read it so many times that now the cardboard cover had started falling apart and the entries in pencil had started to fade. Most of them, in retrospect, made no more sense than they had when I’d written them in the first place.

But … how the hell had the notebook gotten into my nightstand? It should have been in storage with everything else Gran and I hadn’t brought with us to the hideout house.

Kenley and Olivia were ready to go, so the notebook mystery would have to wait. I shook my head, trying to dislodge Noelle from my brain, then shoved the notebook back into the drawer and grabbed my .45. I popped the clip free and counted the rounds, then slid it back into place with a satisfying click. On my way down the stairs, I shrugged into my holster and jacket, then dropped the gun into place beneath my left arm.

“Ready, Kenni?” I said from the landing.

“Liv should be there waiting for you.” Kori sipped from my coffee mug. Without asking permission. “Call me if you need anything. I can be there in an instant.”

“I know.” Kori and I were Travelers—shadow-walkers—able to step into one shadow and out of another, anywhere within our range. When she was twenty-two, Kori got roped into using her Skill on behalf of the Tower syndicate to protect Kenley, who was already trapped in the same organization.

Tower signed Kori more for her skills with a knife and gun—and so he could use her to manipulate Kenni—than for her strength and range as a Traveler, which is mediocre at best.

My strength and range as a Traveler are better than most people know. Definitely better than Tower knew. And I’d like to keep it that way.

“We’re sure this guy’s for real?” I stepped into the hall closet with Kenley as she turned off the light.

“He’s an asshole, but he’s legit,” Kori said from the hall. “Anne listened in on the original call.”

As a Reader—a human lie detector—Kori’s friend Annika was less helpful on the front lines than Olivia was, with her gun and her Tracker abilities. Liv had helped us find those interested in breaking their bindings to Julia Tower, and she’d been my backup on more than one occasion. But Anne was invaluable behind the scenes. She helped keep us from walking into traps.

“Thanks for doing this,” Kenley whispered in the dark as her small hand slid into my grip. “I know your work is important, and you didn’t have to uproot yourself and Gran, and—”

“This is important, too, Kenni.”

I knew much more about her work—and our work to undo her work—than she knew about what I’d been doing while she and Kori were slaves to Jake Tower’s every whim. While they were bound to the syndicate, there was so much I couldn’t tell them. So much I couldn’t show them. So much I couldn’t do for them, without putting them in greater danger and risking the lives of everyone else counting on me.

Knowing that didn’t ease my guilt over the years they’d spent bound to Tower, out of my reach. But finally, all that had changed. Now I could stand with them. Fight for them. Protect them.

Now I could help them take down the organization that had broken Kenley’s spirit bit by bit, with every binding Tower had made her seal. The criminal underworld that had heaped unspeakable abuse on Kori, left her scarred physically and psychologically.

Julia Tower was the brain at the center of her late brother’s operation, and with him gone, there was no one to apply the brakes to her ambition or restrain her psychotic enthusiasm for backstage world domination, or whatever evil scheme was currently sparking across her synapses.

“No one deserves to be tied to Julia Tower. Not even the assholes.” And if we actually managed to take down the Tower syndicate, one human brick at a time, no one would benefit more than the people I worked with. “So let’s go make this asshole a free man.”

Kenni squeezed my hand—as good as a smile in the dark—and I tugged her forward one step. Two.

Then the room around us changed.

The air tasted different at Meghan’s childhood home. Cleaner, with an antiseptic aftertaste that told me she was a much better housekeeper than anyone living at our hideout.

Meghan’s bathroom was colder, too, and the tiles sounded different beneath my boots—harder, and more echoey than the linoleum in the house we were renting under a false name.

Kenley released my hand and flipped a switch on her side of the wall, and soft light from one of those old-fashioned round bulbs lit the bathroom with a yellowish glow. Everything here was a little older. The tub was porcelain, standing on claw feet, and the rest of the house had real hardwood floors. Tongue and groove. Not that we could see much it from the bathroom, because the rest of the house was dark.

Unease crawled across my back. Why was the rest of the house dark?

Stay here, I mouthed to Kenley, and she nodded, eyes wide. She could feel the wrongness, too.

I stepped into the hall and the floor creaked beneath my feet.

“Kris?” Olivia called, and the pain in her voice triggered alarms like bolts of electricity shooting through me.

“Liv!” Kenley cried, and I was so busy trying to hold her back that my brain didn’t process what else Olivia had said until it was too late. Until Kenley had already pulled free from my grasp and was halfway down the hall, her shoes squeaking on those hardwood floors.

“Run!” Olivia’s frantic shout ended abruptly, then echoed in my head as a hand shot out from a bedroom on the left side of the hall.

Kenley screamed as the hand dragged her into the room, pulling her right off her feet. I charged into the bedroom an instant later, my gun drawn, and nearly ripped the light switch out of the wall as I flipped it. Bright light flooded the unused bedroom, but I was too late. They were already gone.

“Kenley!” I shouted as I threw open the closet door and checked under the bed, just in case. But no amount of screaming my little sister’s name would bring her back.

Furious, and more scared than I could ever remember being, I raced out of the room and down the hall in the direction of Olivia’s shout, but my footsteps went silent the moment I stepped into the living room.

I froze, trying to puzzle out the problem. Trying to hear around the sudden, unnatural silence.

“Wallace.”

I said his name aloud as the realization sank in, but though I could feel the rumble of air being forced over my vocal chords, they made no sound. Or, rather, the sound they made was swallowed before it could be heard.

That same silence swallowed my roar of frustration.

The lights were off in the living room, just like in the rest of the house, but the drapes were open and the light shining in from the street was enough to illuminate Olivia, hunched on the floor with one hand pressed against her bloody temple. A man knelt behind her, the barrel of his gun pressed into the back of her head.

Olivia was saying something. No, she was shouting something, but I couldn’t hear her. Wallace—the human Silencer—wouldn’t let me hear her. But her point was obvious.

This was a trap.

My teeth ground together and my finger tensed on the trigger of my gun.

“Where is she?” I shouted, but no sound came out. “Where the hell is my sister?”

Wallace only smiled at me, one half of his face shrouded in shadow.

I aimed at his head, and my gun made no sound as I clicked off the safety.

Olivia shouted harder, shaking her head, her face red with the effort, but Wallace didn’t look worried. He wasn’t prepared to actually shoot Olivia, because he didn’t think I’d pull the trigger. He kept not-thinking that until the moment I shot him in the forehead, and his brains sprayed the wall at his back.

The first thing I heard was the thunk of his body hitting the floor.

Olivia gasped, and the sound was as sharp as a scream after such heavy, unnatural silence. She scrambled away from the dead man and stood, gaping at me. “You could have hit me, you asshole!”

“Give me a little credit, Liv.” I hadn’t missed anything I’d aimed at in the past decade. “Kori learned to shoot from me. Remember?”

“Kenley?” Liv grabbed a dusty white doily from the nearest end table and pressed it to her bleeding forehead.

“They got her. Dragged her out through the shadows, right in front of me.” My baby sister was gone, and I felt her absence like a gaping hole in my own heart. I’d lost her, but I would damn well get her back. “Was it the Tower bitch?”