Oath Bound

Or maybe she was just trying to disarm me, so I couldn’t shoot her when they shot me.

Sera held out her hand for my gun.

I glanced at the disarmed guards. Then I glanced at Julia and Lynn Tower, watching us both from inside the office, one nervous, one furious. Then I glanced to my right, and saw the open storage closet a few feet away, where a housekeeper had been digging for supplies when I’d come down the stairs waving my gun.

Instead of giving Sera my pistol, I grabbed her hand and pulled her with me into the closet.

She screamed, and I threw the door shut.

“Kill him!” Julia shouted.

“No!” Lynn screeched.

I fired twice into the ceiling, killing both the visible and the infrared lights at once. Then, as the first bullets ripped through the closet door, I pulled Sera into the shadows with me.

I took the woman in the yellow scarf.

Three

Sera

His eyes were a pale bluish gray. They were the first things I noticed after Lynn Tower opened the office door over my aunt’s protest.

The next thing I noticed was his weapon, and the two men bleeding on the marble tile in the foyer. Bile rose to my throat at the sight of so much blood pooling on the floor, and brutal memories tried to surface, but I shook them off. None of the bystanders were hurt. He’d only shot people who’d aimed guns at him.

This man may have been a killer, but he was no murderer. The distinction was small, but important.

The man aiming his gun at me looked furious, pale brows furrowed, jaw clenched, aim unwavering. He was looking for someone—I’d missed the specifics, thanks to the alarm—and was obviously willing to do whatever it took to find … whomever. He looked desperate.

But not crazy.

Those blue-gray eyes seemed to see everything all at once—every guard aiming a gun at him, every witness watching, and every possible escape route. He was too calm to be crazy. And if he was sane, he could be reasoned with.

He had to be reasoned with, because if Julia had him shot and his finger twitched on his own trigger, he’d blow a hole right through me, and no one other than Gwendolyn Tower seemed particularly concerned by that possibility.

My heart thudding in my ears, I held my hand out for his weapon, demanding focus and calm from myself as I mentally counted the shots I’d heard. But I couldn’t be sure of the number, thanks to the alarm.

He glanced at my scarf, then at my hand, and for a moment I thought he was actually going to give me his gun.

Instead, he grabbed my hand and dragged me into a supply closet, nearly hauling me off my feet. Startled, I screamed when he kicked the door shut, but then he raised his gun and shot into the ceiling, once, twice.

The closet went dark and glass rained down on us from the broken fixtures. Too shocked to speak, I tried to jerk my hand from his grip, but he pulled me again, and I stumbled after him, one step, then two.

The last thing I heard was gunfire coming from the foyer. They shot at us. They knew I was with him, and they’d fired anyway! On Julia’s command!

That bitch!

Then there was silence, except for the sound of my own panicked breathing—too fast and too hard.

The darkness was absolute, and I couldn’t see a thing. I couldn’t feel a thing, except for his hand tight around mine, and the body heat that told me this room was smaller than the last, and that he was standing much too close.

I opened my mouth to scream again and he dropped my hand. A door opened and he stepped out of what I could now identify as an empty coat closet, his gun aimed at the floor.

That blue-gray gaze found mine again from a narrow hallway outside the closet. He was staring, as if something about my face made no sense.

“What the hell just happened?” I demanded, torn between the need to know exactly where I was and reluctance to venture beyond the closet into unknown territory.

“Traveling. Colloquially known as shadow-walking.”

“I know what it means. Where are we? Who are you?”

“I’m the man who just saved your life.” He holstered his gun. “You’re welcome.” Then he turned left and marched down the hall. “You want a drink? I’m having one.”

“Wait!” I wrapped one hand around the door frame and leaned into the hall as he turned to face me from a living room full of dated furniture. “Are you damaged? You didn’t save my life. You nearly got me killed!”

He crossed his arms over a well-defined chest put on display by a snug blue T-shirt. “I pulled you out of the line of fire.”

“I wouldn’t have been in the line of fire, if it weren’t for you. And if it weren’t for me, they would have killed you!”

“They tried. They shot at us both.” His wary focus narrowed on me until it felt invasive. “Sera, right?” he said, and I declined to answer. “Why were they willing to kill you, Sera?”

I blinked, scrambling for a response that wouldn’t actually tell him anything about me. “Where are we?” I demanded when I couldn’t come up with any answers of my own. “What am I doing here? Who are you?”

“Who am I?” Anger hardened his features and furrowed his brows. “Who the hell are you, and where’s Kenley?”

“Who’s Kenley?”

His anger visibly swelled in response to my question and he marched toward me, fists clenched at his sides, warning echoing in every step as his heavy boots clomped on the wood floor.

My heart lurched into my throat. I backed into the closet, peering through deep shadows for something to use as a weapon, but there was nothing. The closet was completely empty.

He was two steps away when I pulled the door shut, my pulse whooshing in my ears, then held the knob, using all of my weight to keep the door closed. What the hell was I thinking, jumping in the middle of syndicate business? I should have let Julia kill him….

The man growled, then the door was ripped from my grasp so fast I stumbled into the hall after it. He caught me before I could fall, but I shoved him off so quickly I almost missed the change in his expression.

“You’re not a Traveler.” He exhaled and the relief lining his features echoed within the sound. “I thought you’d disappeared through the shadows.”

If I could have, I would have, but even without having grown up in the Skilled subculture, I knew better than to confirm or deny my own abilities.

I backed away from him, past the open closet door, hands open and ready to grab the first potential weapon I came across. “Let’s try this again. Who are you?”

Anger resurfaced behind his eyes, but was quickly replaced with confusion. “You really don’t know?”

“Why should I?”

He shrugged, and his jacket rose to reveal his holstered gun. “Well, if you work for Julia Tower—”

“I don’t.”