Oath Bound

by Rachel Vincent

  “Come with you where?”

  “To get Kenley back.” Vanessa said it as if it should have been obvious. “We think we know where they’re keeping her.”

  “Why are they keeping her alive, exactly?” I regretted the question almost immediately. I’d just lost my whole family. I should have been more sensitive to their potential loss. “Sorry. I just... The Towers haven’t demonstrated any particular respect for human life, that I’ve seen, and no one’s actually explained why they need Kenley alive.”

  “They can’t kill her.” Kris glanced at Kori and Ian, who were leaning against the counter, side by side. They both nodded, so he continued. “Kenley sealed the contracts that bound Jake Tower’s employees to him. The bindings Julia Tower inherited when he died.”

  Whoa...

  I stared at the table, trying to hide my stunned reaction. “You can inherit someone else’s bindings?”

  Kris shrugged. “Only under certain circumstances.”

  “With very well-thought-out contracts,” Kori added.

  Ian took her hand. “And the strength of one of the world’s best binders.”

  “So...what you’re saying is that when Jake Tower died, his sister inherited all of the bindings that tied his employees to him? So they’re now her employees?” I’d known she’d taken over the business, but I’d assumed any employees blood bound to her had taken the oath voluntarily, after Jake died. But if I understood what they were saying, none of those employees had been given any choice in the matter. Their contracts had been transferred without their approval.

  “Yes,” Kori said. “Which means she can’t kill Kenley without losing nearly every employee she has.”

  But I hardly heard her. That made no sense. Why would Jake leave his employees to his sister, but his business assets—properties and capital, presumably—to his oldest living heir?

  He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t leave the employees to Julia and the cash and infrastructure to...me. Those bindings were part of his business holdings. They had to be.

  I sat back in my chair, stunned.

  I hadn’t just inherited money and buildings, and whatever dummy corporations they were shielded by. I’d inherited people. Dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe.

  I’d inherited the fucking mafia!

  With sudden, nearly blinding clarity, I understood why Julia had wanted me to sign away any claim to my inheritance and why, when that fell through, she’d been willing to kill me. As long as I lived, the Tower empire wouldn’t truly be hers.

  Kris saw the shock on my face and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I know. It’s kind of creepy to think about.” But he didn’t know. Not what I knew, anyway. “But those bindings are the only thing keeping Kenley breathing, and that’ll only last until Julia has a chance to rebind the employees to her directly, using another Binder. Cutting both Jake and Kenley out of the process. She’s already started, and once she’s finished, she won’t need Kenley alive.”

  “Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t be able to rebind them,” Vanessa said. “We all signed non-competition clauses from the start. But since she’d be rebinding them to the same organization, just under different leadership, the noncompetition clause doesn’t seem to be functioning like we’d like it to.” She shrugged thin shoulders. “Or at all. Fortunately, it’ll take her a while to break all the bindings and institute new ones, making Kenley completely obsolete.”

  “Okay. Give me a minute.” I gripped the edge of the table. My head was spinning. The whole damn room was spinning. “How sure are you that Julia Tower inherited all that from her brother?”

  Kori and Kris glanced at one another and something unspoken passed between them, but it was his sister who answered. “Trust me—Jake’s people would never follow orders from Julia unless they had to.”

  Okay, that made sense. But nothing else seemed to. I needed more information, but I couldn’t outright ask for it. “Why would he leave everything to his sister instead of his wife? Or his kids?” What I really wanted to know was how Julia had wound up with what he’d intended to leave to his children.

  “He left some stuff to Lynn,” Kori said. “Personal stuff. The house is hers, but Julia gets to live and operate there, because it’s always been the home base of the syndicate. But Jake would never have left business stuff to Lynn. She knows next to nothing about what he does, other than that it’s illegal, immoral and pays very, very well.”

  “And technically, he did leave the business to his kids. The oldest, anyway.” Kris looked disgusted by the mention of the little...rascal. “His name’s Kevin. But he can’t inherit until he’s twenty-one, and until then, Julia has total control.”

  “Power of attorney?” That would explain her obvious authority.

  “More like regent.” Kris scooted his chair closer to the table and met my gaze with a solemn one of his own. “No one thinks either of Jake’s kids will make it to twenty-one. Julia can’t afford to let that happen. She’s not allowed to hurt them, or outright ask anyone else to, but she had the same restrictions with Jake and still managed to have him assassinated.”

  Everyone glanced at Ian, who nodded solemnly—Julia had used him to kill her brother.

  “How do you know all this?” Surely the Towers hadn’t advertised the terms of Jake’s will...

  “Kenley.” Kris smiled at the mention of her name. “She bound Julia as the executor of his will.”

  The executor. Not the beneficiary. So why were his guards still following her orders, if their bindings actually belonged to me? Because they hadn’t been formally introduced to the true heir? Because the will hadn’t yet been properly executed? Because I hadn’t claimed my inheritance?

  Whatever the reason, Julia couldn’t afford for me to inherit. She’d keep trying to kill me—likely as collateral damage in the fight against the Daniels clan—until she succeeded.

  If Kris hadn’t kidnapped me, would I be dead already? Had I been minutes away from a bullet to the brain, that day in her office?

  I wasn’t sure enough of that to give him credit for saving my life, instead of nearly getting me killed. But I was sure that there was nowhere else in the city safer for me at that moment than with this band of heavily armed criminals—now that they’d decided not to kill me themselves.

  But they would kill me in a heartbeat, if they found out I was the new head of the Tower syndicate.

  Ten

  Kris

  On my way down from the upstairs bathroom, I glanced into the room that used to be mine and saw Sera staring at herself in the mirror. Just...staring.

  “You okay?” I stopped in the doorway, hesitant to enter without permission, since a third strike would mean I was out. And whether or not I was ready to admit it, I very much wanted to be in.

  She shrugged and met my gaze in the mirror. “I don’t know what one wears on a covert mission. Not that I have many options.” She held her arms out, inviting me to look. “Is this okay?”

  “Waaay better than okay.” The black top and dark jeans were Kori’s, but Sera filled them out...better. So well, in fact, that I tried to forget they were my sister’s clothes. “Doesn’t matter, though. If this thing goes like we expect it to, it’ll be less about stealth than about speed and brute force.”

  Still watching me in the mirror, she pulled her long brown hair into a high ponytail, and suddenly she looked eighteen years old. Young and vulnerable. Except for her eyes. The gaze that stared back at me in the mirror was ancient and war-wearied. Scarred. Which made a brutal kind of sense, now that I knew what had happened to her family.

  She turned back to her own reflection. “So, what do you need me to do?”

  “Just come with us.” I stepped into the room, and when she didn’t object, I took three more steps and half sat on the edge of the desk that had been mine a day
and a half ago. “You don’t even have to pick up a gun.”

  “In fact, we’re not gonna give you one.” My sister appeared in the doorway, and Sera turned to face us both. “Kris says you can’t shoot.”

  “I said she can’t shoot yet. But I’ll teach her.”

  Kori shrugged, arms crossed over her chest. “If you’re not planning to teach her in the next ten minutes, she’s not getting a gun.”

  “Ten minutes?” Sera stepped into the boots she’d been wearing when I’d pulled her through the shadows in Tower’s supply closet, and I made a mental note to take her shopping. She deserved clothes of her own. And for my own comfort, I really needed to see her in something my sisters had never worn.

  “Yeah. Kori says they have fewer employees on hand after 6:00 p.m.”

  Sera’s eyes widened and she glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand. My nightstand. “How did it get so late? I think I forgot to eat lunch.” Before I could offer her a snack, she sat on the bed to zip her boots and looked up at me. “Employees of what? Where are we going?”

  “Well...” I glanced behind me, expecting Kori to answer, since she’d actually been where we were headed, but she was gone. “It’s a pharmaceutical company. Of sorts. Only you don’t want the kind of drugs they make.”

  * * *

  “Why does a pharmaceutical company have a darkroom?” Sera whispered, still holding my hand in the dark. Kori and Ian stood less than a foot in front of us. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them breathing. Hell, I could practically feel their body heat in the cramped quarters.

  “The drugs produced here are very...special,” I whispered, fighting the urge to squeeze her hand, to run my thumb over the back of hers. Sera made me hungry for something I couldn’t define—couldn’t even understand—and each moment I spent with her made that craving worse. Yet the moments spent away from her didn’t ease the urge.

  I let go of Sera before I could embarrass myself, and for a second she let her hand hang between us, as if the release had caught her by surprise. Which is when I realized I hadn’t done a damn thing right since the moment I’d met her.

  “Keep in mind that ‘special’ doesn’t imply legality or ethics,” Kori added just as softly as I’d spoken.

  Sera shifted her feet next to me. “So, how do we get out of the darkroom without alerting security?” Secure darkrooms have no interior doorknobs, as a precaution. Under normal circumstances, someone in the control room would have to buzz us into the building, but in this particular case, they were more likely to gas us through specialized vents in the ceiling.

  We could shoot our way out, as I’d done at the Tower estate, but that would kill any hope of a stealthy entry.

  “Have I mentioned that I’m a Blinder?” Ian’s whisper was somehow even deeper than his normal voice.

  Sera chuckled. “Yeah.”

  “Have we mentioned that he’s the best in the country?” Kori added.

  “Okay, we’re all ready,” Ian said before Sera could answer. A second later, he and my sister were gone, though in the absence of light, I felt, rather than saw them leave.

  “What happened?” Sera’s whisper held an edge of fear. In answer, I fumbled for her hand again—and got her hip instead. I thought she’d yell at me, but she just took my hand and held on tight, and I realized she’d figured out the plan. I tugged her forward, through the darkness Ian had produced, and two steps later, the echo of our soft footsteps changed when our boots hit the floor in the hall, which was just as dark as the adjacent darkroom had been.

  That time, before I released her hand, I squeezed it in the intimate semi-privacy of near-total darkness.

  The shadows around us faded completely in less than a second and a glance around revealed only a sterile white hallway, lined with doors. Sera turned and found the darkroom door behind us, marked and missing its exterior doorknob, as well, as only the most high-security rooms were.

  “What the hell just happened?” she demanded, in spite of the finger I pressed against my lips, reminding her to keep it quiet. “I thought you were taking us into some other darkroom.”

  “There aren’t any other darkrooms in the building. The whole place is fitted with an infrared grid.” I gave her a smile. “Good thing we have Ian, huh?”

  She glanced at him and nodded, and Kori leaned closer to whisper. “He can throw darkness through walls. Comes in handy.”

  Sera nodded, eyes wide.

  Kori led the way, silently pointing out video cameras as we went. Even unspoken, her point was clear. If someone was watching those monitors, we were screwed. But unless their alarm was the silent kind, so far, the coast was clear. Yet that put me even more on edge, because it made no sense. We’d expected to have to fight our way to Kenley.

  Halfway down the next hall, I stepped closer to Kori and whispered into her ear. “Where is everyone? This is weird.”

  “I know. I expected the traffic to be light, but not nonexistent.”

  “We’ve walked into either a trap or a truly abandoned building.”

  She nodded solemnly. “We can either push forward or go home.”

  We weren’t going home without Kenley. I gestured down the hall for her to lead on. “Just be prepared for anything.”

  She nodded again and stood on her toes to whisper in my ear. “Ian and I will take point. You watch out for Sera. A damsel in distress is always the weakest link.”

  Sera was far from helpless—the still-healing cuts on my arm were proof of that. But I would gladly watch out for her.

  After several turns and an unlocked white door, then another Ian-assisted shadow-walk through a locked door, we came to a third door with a different, more complicated-looking finger-print pad/pass-code lock. “We’ll go first and disable whoever’s on duty, then open the door for you guys.” Kori’s shoulders were stiff with tension, her arms taut, her jaw clenched. My heart beat harder in response to her anxiety.

  We were close.

  In minutes, we could have Kenley, and she could be just fine, and maybe she would forgive me for losing her in the first place.

  “I’m sure she’s okay,” Sera whispered, and I looked up to find her watching me with big, worried eyes, her beautiful mouth turned down in what I first mistook for sympathy. But it was more than that. Deeper. I was seeing empathy. Sera had already been where Kori and I were, and her sister hadn’t been okay.

  I was so tense I could hardly breathe as Ian called up a small, precise cone of darkness. A second later, he, Kori and that darkness were all gone.

  Sera and I waited, listening anxiously for the thud of impact or the thwup of a silenced gun. But the only sound was the click of the door lock as it disengaged. Kori pulled the door open with a scowl, then ushered us inside.

  “What happened?”

  In answer, she gestured toward the room they’d just broken into, which was empty except for a single long table scattered with loose sheets of paper. There were no employees. No other furniture. And no Kenley.

  I was willing to bet that the papers they’d left behind held no useful information at all.

  A glass panel in one wall overlooked another, much larger, even emptier space.

  “This was the observation room.” Then Kori pointed through the window, and I peered into the empty space, wondering if our sister had ever been there. Or had we been barking up the wrong tree from the beginning? “That’s where they kept the vegetables.”

  “Vegetables?” Sera stared through the window, gripping the edge of the table so tightly her knuckles had gone white. “Why do I get the feeling you don’t mean roots and tubers?”

  “She’s talking about human vegetables.” The words hurt to say. They hurt even worse to think about as my gaze caught on a length of medical tubing abandoned on the floor in the next room. “Only Tower wasn’t
growing them. He was bleeding them.”

  “Bleeding?” Sera’s voice was brittle, as though it might actually break. “I’m not sure I want to know what that means.”

  “Jake collected people whose Skills he wanted and kept them in medically induced comas so he could take blood from them as often as possible, without actually killing them.”

  Sera blinked at me. “He collected...people?”

  “And bled them.” Kori pulled a string next to the windowsill and blinds dropped to cover the window, as if that could actually erase the memory of what she’d once seen through it. What I’d imagined. “Then he sold their blood as transfusions, intended to give the receiver temporary Skills. At significant cost.”

  I sank onto the edge of the table, struggling to breathe through my own disappointment. “Or for an equivalent investment of information.”

  Sera trailed her fingers down the closed blinds. The metallic rattle was loud after the eerie silence of the deserted building. “Information?”

  “Tower also collected names and blood samples from anyone he might one day want to manipulate. Or blackmail. Or profit from.”

  Sera looked sick. Pale. Disgusted. And a little...guilty? Why would she feel guilty? I was the one who’d lost Kenley. “Is there any crime Jake Tower didn’t commit as a matter of course?”

  Kori shrugged. “I never saw him jaywalk.”

  “So, why did you think Kenley would be here?” Sera picked up a sheet of paper, glanced at it, then dropped it on the table.

  “Because Julia would have to keep her nearby and under close watch. The blood farm seemed like the ideal place,” Kori said. “But it’s gone.” The devastation in her voice made my throat ache with every curse I held back. Every angry word I swallowed.

  We’d thought we were close. We’d come determined to take out any- and everyone who stood between us and our baby sister, but there was no one to shoot.