Oath Bound

by Rachel Vincent

  “Your only mistake was not knowing enough about the Towers,” I insisted. “And that wasn’t your fault. But if you’d known them better, you’d have known they never do anything for free. Even for family.”

  She nodded pensively. “You’d think I would have picked up on that from the way she and Gwendolyn were arguing when you broke into the house.”

  “You should have seen how pissed off Julia was about that!” Mitch’s eyes shone with malicious amusement from his corner and I wasn’t sure which of us he was talking to. “You’d have loved it. The bitch threw a full-out temper tantrum when you two disappeared through the closet, breaking shit and yelling at people. The rookies were quaking in their boots.”

  I’d bet money they weren’t the only ones.

  “I’m sure she’s regretting that now.” Kori shot a conspiratorial glance at Ian.

  “Why?” I was already irritated that I hadn’t figured it out yet.

  My sister pulled a half-empty bottle of whiskey from the cabinet next to the refrigerator. “Because the best way to bury a rumor is to shut the fuck up about it.”

  “That’s why you believed me when I told you who I was?” Sera frowned at Mitch, fingering the grip of his gun on the tabletop as I began putting the pieces together for myself.

  Mitch nodded. “We all saw how furious the Tower bitch was, and when you told me she wasn’t Jake’s real heir, it just kinda clicked. Nothing in the world would piss her off worse than having her entire kingdom yanked out from under her.”

  “That’s why she wants you dead,” I said, and everyone glanced at me like I’d just figured out why water is wet. “Cut me some slack,” I snapped. “The evil machinations of a usurped mafia queen are a little new to me.”

  “Me, too.” Sera stared at the gun beneath her hand, but her gaze seemed to lose focus.

  “Oh, shit!” I sat up straight as a devastating piece of the puzzle that was the Tower family tree fell into place.

  “What?” Sera said, and they were all staring at me.

  “Julia did it. She put the hit out on your family. Only she wasn’t trying to kill them—she was trying to kill you.”

  “What?” Sera sat straight in her chair, confusion warring with disbelief behind her eyes. “How do you know that?”

  “Because it makes sense,” Kori said, looking impressed by my insight for once, and I could only nod. “Who stands to gain the most from your death?”

  “Lia...” Anger took over Sera’s features as comprehension set in. “She tried to kill me before I even came to her. And when that didn’t work—when she got my family instead—I walked right into her hands!” She closed her eyes and scrubbed her face with both hands. “How could I be so stupid?”

  “You’re not stupid.” I pulled her hand away from her face and held it for one self-indulgent moment. “You just don’t think like a mafia queen. Personally, I think that’s to your credit.”

  “But not to my benefit. If I’d understood what I was walking into, I never would have gone in there in the first place.”

  “So, what? You needed a favor and thought Daddy’s side of the family owed you one?” Kori unscrewed the lid from the whiskey and dropped it on the table, and I couldn’t tell whether she thought Sera was ballsy or stupid. Or both.

  Sera held her gaze. “I wanted justice and she’s the only connection I had who could get it for me. At the time.”

  Mitch snorted. “The Towers aren’t in the justice business. They’re more revenge kind of people. Vengeance, if you’re lucky.”

  Sera’s eyes flashed and I got another glimpse of the hellcat who’d tried to castrate me with a steak knife. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “If you’ve really inherited a piece of the Tower pie, you’ll never have to beg for anything again. Once you get that target off your back.” Mitch leaned his chair back on two legs, balancing with one hand pressed against the wall. “Coincidentally, I happen to be in the market for a new job. Need some Skilled muscle?”

  “I’ve got her covered,” I snapped, and both Sera and Kori glanced at me in surprise. “We,” I clarified, when I’d realized what I’d said, and how they’d probably—rightly—interpret it. “We’ve got her covered.”

  Mitch shrugged and set his chair down, then launched into a pitch too polished to be spontaneous, eyeing Sera across the table. “What do you want me to do then? Personal chauffeur? No car needed. The dark is my highway, anywhere you want to go. Or maybe you’d like a more personal kind of service?” His brows rose and his gaze raked over her with the innuendo, and I wanted to beat him until his blood stained my cuticles and soaked into Cavazos’s expensive carpet.

  “Ew, no!” Sera said, and I almost laughed at Mitch’s insulted expression.

  “Like I said, we’ve got her covered,” I insisted, and then they were all staring at me again, and it took me a second to realize what I’d just said. “Not like that. This isn’t that kind of...” Damn it. I snatched the bottle of whiskey from Kori and started over, while Ian made no effort to hide a grin. “I mean we’ve already got two Travelers, and Sera doesn’t need you. For anything.” I tipped the bottle up and took two swigs, hoping they’d all think it was the alcohol that made my cheeks burn.

  “Succinctly put,” Ian said, and his delivery was so deadpan I almost missed the sarcasm.

  “But accurate.” Kori took the bottle back and turned to Sera. “So, what do you want to do with him? And make it quick. This is a very temporary hideout.”

  Sera glanced at Mitch in confusion. “What do you mean? Why do I have to do anything with him?”

  My sister frowned at me, then at Ian, and I realized that Sera truly understood even less about syndicate life than I did. “It’s like teaching a chimp to play poker,” Kori mumbled, then took a swig from the bottle while Sera bristled. “You own him.” Kori wiped her lips with the back of one hand.

  “I what?” If Sera’s eyes got any wider, they’d take over her whole face.

  “You own him. Metaphorically.” I reached down for the leg of her chair and turned her to face me. “Mitch’s binding is like a dog’s leash. You’re holding it. Ergo, you effectively own him.”

  “Mitch is a dog?”

  Kori laughed and nearly choked on another mouthful of liquor. “According to a couple of his exes, yes. But the point is that you can’t just drop the leash.” She frowned, then amended. “Well, you can, but if you just walk away from him, you’re responsible for whatever damage he does, or whatever damage is done to him.”

  “I don’t understand.” Sera’s foot tapped rapidly under the table, as if her nerves knew Morse code.

  Kori tilted the bottle up again in my peripheral vision and I turned to grab it, then slid it across the table toward Ian. “Do something with that, will you?”

  He shrugged, then took a hit for himself.

  Great. If my sister had a superpower, it would be the ability to drive those around her to drink—at superspeeds.

  I slid the whiskey lid across the table toward Ian, then turned to Sera. “Okay. Think about it like this—if a dog attacks someone, who do they hold responsible?”

  “The owner...” Sera’s voice trailed off at the end of the word, and I could practically see comprehension surface behind her eyes. “But that’s not fair. He’s a person, not a dog.” She glanced at Mitch, who was watching our exchange with his arms crossed over his chest, waiting to see how this would play out. “He makes decisions based on thought, not instinct. He has upper-level reasoning—relatively speaking.” Mitch scowled, and Ian chuckled. “He has logic and free will!”

  “But he doesn’t. Not really,” Kori insisted. “His will is yours, and if he hurts someone because you didn’t tell him not to, whether you’re legally responsible or not, I have a feeling you’ll have a hard time dealing with the guilt of not having p
revented it.”

  My sister’s words struck close to home, and I realized that Sera and I were in a similar position. Sort of.

  “Which is why I told him not to hurt anyone,” Sera said.

  “But that’s a problem all its own,” I said. “For instance, under that order, he can’t defend himself or anyone else without your say so. So if we leave him here, he’ll be dead in...what?” I glanced at Ian for a second opinion. “An hour?”

  He nodded.

  “Maybe less,” I added. “Julia’s extra pissy since your fortuitous arrival. Which means she’s probably trigger-happy. Metaphorically speaking.” Had Julia Tower ever even held a gun?

  “Don’t assume she can’t shoot just because you’ve never seen her do it,” Ian warned. “That woman holds her cards close to her chest.”

  Kori snorted. “Hell, they’re practically in her bra.”

  “But my point is that if she finds him, she’ll kill him. Assuming Cavazos doesn’t find him first.”

  Mitch squirmed in his chair.

  “Okay.” Sera shrugged. “Then I’ll just break his binding.”

  “Hell, no.” Mitch stood, as if he actually had somewhere to go. “You may as well pass out guns and paint a target on my back. Didn’t you get the memo pinned to Ned’s chest?” He ran one hand through his hair. “That’s Julia’s way of saying she’ll kill whoever you set free.”

  I shrugged. “So run.” I turned back to Sera with a frown. “That’s where we went wrong with Ned—we left him handcuffed to the fridge, like a sitting duck.” Not that ducks had hands. “Of course, if I’d known you’d broken his binding, I would have given the poor guy a running start.”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” she insisted, her gaze silently pleading with me to understand. “I thought...” She let her words trail off when she realized Mitch was still listening, but we all knew what she’d thought, and we all understood why. She’d had no reason to trust us not to kill her or use her as a bargaining chip, if and when we found out how valuable she was.

  I hated that I’d given her reason to think that.

  “It doesn’t matter.” I made a mental note to reassure her of her safety later, away from stranger’s ears. Hopefully in private, where I could tell her other things that still needed to be said.

  “Okay.” It was a struggle for me to pull my thoughts back on target. “You cut him loose and we’ll give him a head start. A Traveler can be hundreds of miles away by the time Julia finds out he’s gone.”

  Mitch started to object again, and I turned on him, rapidly losing my patience. “You won’t be a priority. She probably won’t even bother looking for you, with us still out here wreaking havoc.”

  “Bullshit!” Mitch’s eyes were wide, his nose crinkled in a bizarre display of fear.

  “Sit,” Sera said, and he sat reluctantly, then scooted his chair closer to the table and leaned with his elbows on it, watching us all.

  “She’ll look for me and she’ll find me, because her other Travelers can move just as fast as I can. And I will be a priority, because Jake taught her how to do business. She has to kill me, or everyone else will think Sera can be their savior. Which is exactly why she’s killed most of the people your dumb-ass sister set free.”

  “What?” My stomach sank into my heels, weighing me down. Julia had killed the people Kenley had freed? “Do you know that for a fact? They’re dead?”

  “Not all of them.” He turned to Kori, sitting on the edge of his chair as if he still wanted to stand, and his next words carried special, bitter weight. “A couple of them are still in the basement, wishing they were dead. In front of a live studio audience.” Then he turned back to Sera. “She’s going to hunt down everyone you set free until you stop doing it or she gets to you, just like she got to Kenley. And you’re a bigger fool than I can even comprehend if you don’t believe that.”

  Sixteen

  Sera

  “She killed them?” The words echoed in my head long after they’d left my tongue. They resonated in my bones and churned in my stomach, urging my dinner to stage a revolt.

  “Only the lucky ones.” Kori took the whiskey bottle back from Ian and sank onto one of the bar stools at the kitchen peninsula.

  “You mean we’ve been making it worse?” Kris leaned with his elbows on the table, his arms tense, his brow deeply furrowed. “All that time and effort trying to fix things, and we were really just getting people killed?”

  “What the hell were we expecting?” Kori rotated her stool so that she faced us, her grip on the neck of the bottle so tight her fingers had turned white. “That Julia would just pout and shrug, then go on with her life? She can’t afford to let us beat her, and she certainly can’t afford for people to know we beat her. This is our fault.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I insisted. “You were doing the only thing you could do. The right thing.” The same thing I’d tried to do for Ned. But then, that hadn’t worked out very well, either.

  “Right is irrelevant.” Kori twisted the lid from the bottle again. “It’s just a word. Or do you really believe it’s better to be dead than alive but enslaved?” But before I could answer, she stared down at the bottle in her hands and seemed to be reassessing her own question. “We should have just killed them ourselves.” She took a long swig. Then one more. “It would have been a mercy.”

  Anger blazed in my chest like heartburn. “How the hell is death a mercy?” My parents wouldn’t have considered their deaths a mercy. Neither would my sister. And losing them was about as far from merciful as an act can be.

  “No offense, Sera, but you have no idea what you’re talking about. That’s what makes you dangerous.” Kori’s gaze pinned me like an insect tacked open for display. I felt as though she could see what was inside me. And she didn’t look impressed. “You have more Skills than anyone I’ve ever met, but you don’t know how to use them. You have power Julia Tower would slaughter half the planet to keep for herself, but you don’t know how to control it. And you brought all that to our doorstep. Like she needed another reason to hunt us down.”

  Kris stood and tried to take the bottle from her, but she pulled it out of his reach and swigged again. “Kori, back off. None of this is her fault.”

  “When has that ever mattered?” she demanded, and when Ian stood for the bottle, she actually let him have it. But her frustration didn’t fade. “The whole damn thing was Jake’s fault, and he lived like a fucking king. Now Julia’s taken over where he left off, and if she’s suffering guilt or grief, she’s hiding it really well.” She turned to me then, while we all stared at her. “That’s what you don’t understand, Sera, seeing as how you just fell off the family tree into a pile of money and power. The Tower birthright isn’t just fortune and clout. No matter how you use it, it’s an obligation. A responsibility you can’t shirk. If you abuse it, like Julia, people will die. If you waste it—if you hide out with us and do nothing—people will die, because Julia will kill them.”

  “Kori, that’s enough.” Kris glanced at Mitch, to make sure he wasn’t trying to pull something while they were all distracted, then turned back to his sister. “Picking a fight with your allies isn’t going to help.”

  “You think I’m hiding?” I could feel my cheeks burn. But wasn’t she right? Wasn’t I hiding from Julia with them, even as I hid them from Julia?

  Kori pushed Kris out of her way and took two steps toward the table. “I think that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

  “That’s not fair.” Kris’s jaw clenched in anger at his own sister, and something in my chest tightened. Then warmed. “Sera didn’t ask for this. You said it yourself, Kor, she fell into this mess. Not everyone eats and breathes revolution, you know.”

  He was trying to help. I knew that, and it was so sweet, and I was certainly grateful,
but somehow his words chafed even worse than his sister’s.

  I stood and pushed my chair back, but when Mitch tried to stand, I shook my head, and he sank back into his seat with a scowl. “Is that what you all think?” I glanced from face to face, wordlessly demanding the truth. “That I’m some helpless, useless little twit who can’t protect herself or her family, or enact her own justice?”

  Kris shook his head and Ian frowned, but Kori only pressed her lips together and crossed her arms over her chest.

  That was what they thought. And why shouldn’t they? I’d lived when my entire family died because I’d hidden. I was still hiding.

  “That’s what Julia Tower’s counting on,” Kris said softly, and Kori and Ian nodded in agreement.

  “Well, then, she’s wrong. And she’s going to figure that out the hard way.” Kris smiled, but everyone else flinched when I held Mitch’s gun up to get a better look at it. A better feel for it. “If you guys can teach me how to use this and show me what I don’t yet know about my own Skills, I think we can bring the fight to her. And along the way, we can release every Tower employee we come across, until there are too many for her to hunt down.”

  “Won’t work,” Mitch said, and I ignored him.

  “Won’t matter,” Kori added. “If Julia isn’t already binding more to herself directly—making Kenley’s bindings obsolete—she will be soon.”

  “You can’t release them all, Sera,” Kris insisted. “You can’t even let her think you’re going to release them all, because then she’ll have no reason to keep Kenley alive.”

  For a moment, there was only a fragile quiet, as what he’d said sank in.

  “Fuck me.” Kori was the first to break the silence, raking one hand through her pale hair. “We’re screwed either way.”

  “No, we’re not.” I had an idea, but if I was going to live long enough to put it to use, I’d have to get smart. I’d have to let them teach me. Kori was right—I didn’t know how to use the bindings I’d inherited, and until I learned the ins and outs of direct orders and loopholes, those bindings would do me no good.