Shadow Bound (Unbound)

by Rachel Vincent

  Unfortunately self-restraint was a poor substitute for gratitude and a love-struck gaze, or whatever Ian expected to see, if Julia was telling the truth. And suddenly I realized she’d known that. Had she set me up to fail, by telling me about Ian’s game, knowing I couldn’t play along if I knew I was playing at all?

  Or was the whole thing a lie intended to make me paranoid and even more shrewish than usual?

  “Well, this isn’t exactly a vacation,” Ian said, answering a question I’d forgotten I asked. “Why? What’s wrong, Kori?”

  “Is there something you want from me that you haven’t gotten?” I demanded softly, holding his gaze. Silently daring him to tell me the truth, if there was anything to be told.

  “Well, yes.” He frowned. “Last I heard, you were still trying to figure that part out.”

  Right. Whatever it was that would make him sign. “And what you need from Jake, it’s not some kind of game, is it? You’re not just playing a game here?”

  Ian pushed his soup bowl toward the middle of the table and leaned closer, his gaze holding mine captive. “No, Kori. I know I joke a lot, and the truth is that I like to see you smile. You don’t do enough of that. But I’m not playing games with your boss. I came here with very serious intent. I swear on my own free will.”

  And that I believed. But whether he’d meant to or not, he’d misunderstood what game I was talking about.

  “What brought this up?” he asked, handing his half-empty bowl to the waiter who already held mine. I hadn’t taken a single bite. “Did Julia say something to you?”

  “We don’t get along,” I admitted. “Which sucks, because Jake listens to her.”

  “Well, I gave her nothing negative to report, so try to forget about her.” He smiled at something over my shoulder. “Your lobster is here.”

  I made it through the rest of the meal without losing either my mind or my temper, mostly because the food—the parts I recognized, anyway—was amazing and when I got back from my own restroom break, Ian had ordered something with vodka in it to replace the second glass of wine I’d turned down.

  I tried to tell myself that he was being nice, not manipulative, but that was hard to believe because in my world the reverse was almost always true. Even a second drink and a huge slice of the most delicious chocolate cake I’d ever tasted weren’t enough to completely settle my nerves. Julia’s interference led me to look for hidden meaning in everything Ian said. She made me overanalyze every smile, every second of eye contact. And she wasn’t finished.

  After dinner, I ducked into the restroom one more time, and when I came out of the stall, she was standing at the row of sinks, watching me in the mirror. “It’ll be tonight,” she said, her mouth hardly moving as she dabbed gloss onto her lower lip. “He sounds like he’s ready to move in for the kill. So to speak.”

  I squirted citrus-scented sanitizer on my hands. “What, you’re psychic now, too?”

  “You don’t have to be psychic to see what’s obvious. When you drop him off, he’ll ask you to stay for drinks. Then he’ll just ask you to stay…”

  She turned to leave, then twisted to glance at me in the mirror one last time, her palm flat on the door. “Don’t make it too easy for him, okay? Even a caged rabbit struggles a little before it’s caught.” Then she pushed the door open and left me staring at my own reflection, breathing too fast, my blood pumping fear and anger through my veins.

  I tried to breathe, like Kenley had shown me. In and out, exhaling all the hate and pain. But this time it didn’t work. This time memories weren’t the problem, so burying them couldn’t help. If Julia was telling the truth, I was trapped as thoroughly now by my own bindings as I’d ever been by the basement walls. And knowing what was coming didn’t make it any easier to deal with.

  You can do this. You have to do this.

  I sucked in one last deep breath, then turned for the door, determined to cling to dignity until the last possible moment. But then the rage inside me crested and a wordless shout of fury erupted from my mouth. I whirled toward the sink and my fist slammed into the glass above it. The mirror shattered and slices of it fell everywhere, breaking into smaller shards in the sink basins and on the floor at my feet. And for about three seconds, I felt better.

  Then I realized I’d just spilled my blood in a public restroom and had no good way to clean it up.

  I snatched a cloth from the stack on the counter and tied it around my cut hand, then picked up the bottle of hand sanitizer and read the contents. Alcohol. I exhaled in relief, then upended the bottle and squirted a glob onto every single drop of blood I could find. I was still on my knees in the mess when the door opened behind me and the hostess came in.

  She gaped at the destruction around me, her mouth open wide enough to catch a whole swarm of flies.

  “The mirror fell right off the wall. Could have killed me,” I said, dropping the nearly empty bottle of sanitizer in the nearest sink. “I might sue.” Then I marched past her and out the front door to the sidewalk, where Ian was waiting for me.

  He took one look at the cloth around my hand and lifted one brow. “Do I even want to know?”

  “Probably not.” I lead the way into the alley again without offering further explanation.

  “Do you find trouble everywhere you go?”

  “Sometimes it finds me.”

  I took him back to the hotel and he called downstairs for a first-aid kit, then refused help on my behalf from the man who brought it up. I cleaned and bandaged my cuts in the bathroom, then I stoppered the sink and dumped the bleach from Ian’s travel kit—no Skilled person travels without bleach-solution in a spray bottle, even if it has to go in the checked luggage—over the cloth stained with my blood. Bleach would destroy the blood enough to keep it from being used against me.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” Ian asked, glancing at my bandaged hand from the doorway.

  “No.” I didn’t want to tell him anything until I knew whether or not Julia was lying.

  “Kori, I can see that something’s wrong.”

  “I’m fine.” And maybe if I said it enough, we’d both eventually believe me.

  In the front room, I glanced around at the view, and the couches, and the huge television, and the bottle of champagne sitting in a bucket of ice on a tall table against one wall—it had obviously been sent up moments before we’d arrived. This hotel suite probably cost more than I made in a month.

  No one had ever wanted me as badly as Jake wanted Ian. But I knew better than anyone that the more Jake gave, the more he’d expect in return.

  Angry, I marched across the room and plucked the small, embossed envelope from the tray the champagne sat on, trying to guess whether it had been sent by Jake or by Julia. But before I could take the card from the envelope, Ian gently pulled it from my hand. I looked up at him and immediately wished I hadn’t. There was something there. Something in his eyes when he looked at me. Something important, but I didn’t know how to interpret it. I’d lost all perspective.

  Julia had stolen my perspective.

  Ian looked worried—nervous—but I couldn’t tell if that was because he genuinely cared that something was bothering me, or because his game wasn’t working out the way he’d planned.

  He stared into my eyes, and my palms started to sweat. My head felt like it was floating above my body, not truly attached. I couldn’t make sense of what I was feeling. Everything was all tangled up in a knot so complicated I couldn’t follow the threads. And I had no hope of untangling them.

  He wanted me. I could see that in his eyes. In the way he stood close, but not quite touching me. In the way he kept glancing at my lips, like he wanted to kiss me.

  Some part of me wanted to kiss him, and that scared me so badly I couldn’t breathe. I needed to back away. To put some space between us. But that same part of me remembered what things were like before the basement. Before every touch bruised and every mouth bit.

  Ian didn’t look ang
ry. He didn’t look nasty or cruel. He wasn’t stalking or skulking. He just looked…interested.

  If we’d met somewhere else.

  If my life and Kenley’s well-being weren’t in Ian’s hands.

  If I were someone else, and he were someone else.

  If the moment hadn’t been manufactured by Jake Tower.

  If any one of those things had been true, I might have wanted more than a kiss from Ian. I might have wanted to be with him. For a night. For a week. Maybe for more.

  But this was… I couldn’t do it. Not like this. Not when I had no choice. I couldn’t breathe past the bitter lump in my throat or make my head stop spinning. I couldn’t mute the voice in my head—my voice—shouting for me to run. Fight. Leave, before he said something neither of us could go back from.

  “So, you all set?” I asked, and even to my own ears, my voice sounded brittle, like it might break any moment. Like I might break with it.

  “Stay and have a drink with me.” Ian waved one hand at a minibar. “No champagne, I swear.”

  I opened my mouth to say no thanks, and that’s when the rest of me discovered what my brain had already known, at least in theory. I couldn’t say no. Even trying to say it sent pain shooting through my temple, half blinding me. My hands started to shake. Jake had told me to do whatever Ian wanted me to do, and Ian wanted me to stay for a drink.

  Just like Julia had said he would.

  Ian was playing a game—I was his game. And I was going to lose.

  With that realization, I knew what I had to do.

  Turn it off. Turn everything off. Whatever happens, happens. But I didn’t have to feel it. I didn’t have to truly be there. No matter what Jake made me do or say, he couldn’t shove his greedy fingers into my head. He couldn’t control my mind, or where I sent it.

  No one could.

  “Fine. Just one,” I said finally, and my hands stopped shaking. My voice felt empty, like the prerecorded message on my voice mail.

  Ian pulled the bottle of champagne from the bucket and scooped ice out with a plastic cup. I flinched when the cubes clinked into two glasses. I sat on the edge of the leather couch with my hands clasped in my lap while he pulled tiny bottles from the minibar. A minute later, he turned around with two drinks and gave me one as he sank onto the couch next to me. “What should we toast to?” he asked, holding his glass up between us.

  “Whatever you want.” That was the game, right? The winner gets whatever he wants?

  My glass smelled like vodka, a clean scent. Astringent. If I drank enough of it, could it make me clean on the inside? Could it wash the blood from my hands? Bleach the stains from my soul? If I started drinking right that moment and didn’t stop until it was over, maybe I wouldn’t remember anything in the morning. And if I didn’t remember what had happened, I could tell myself nothing had happened.

  A lie is always easier to believe if there’s no evidence against it.

  “Oh, come on. There must be something you want to toast. Dinner on someone else’s dime? Low heels?” Ian glanced at my sandals. “Borrowed blouses?” He touched the short, flared sleeve of Kenley’s shirt, and my hand clenched around the glass. He wasn’t going to let me check out. Ian wanted to hear the wind-up doll speak.

  “To free will,” I said finally, looking right into his eyes.

  He laughed, like I’d made a joke, and chills broke out on both my arms. “To free will,” he repeated. “That most fabled of civil rights. May we all one day truly understand what we’ve lost.” He bumped his glass against mine with a clink, and my stomach clenched around my lobster dinner.

  “You don’t know what real loss is,” I said through clenched teeth, refusing to drink. He couldn’t possibly.

  Ian’s smile died and he lowered his glass, frowning at me over it. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means exactly what I said. You don’t know a thing about loss. If you did, you wouldn’t be sitting here in a suite paid for by a man who’s just waiting to teach you what that word really means.”

  His gaze hardened and he set his drink on the coffee table. “You’re not the only one who’s ever lost someone, you know.”

  “This isn’t about dead parents,” I snapped.

  “Then what is it about? What did I say wrong this time?”

  “Nothing. I wish you would say it. I wish you’d quit with the drinks, and the chitchat, and the deep eye contact. This doesn’t have to be so much work. I’m a sure thing, Ian. No seduction required. Didn’t you get the memo?” I turned my drink up and drained it in several long gulps, and when I finally set the glass down, he was frowning at me, his expression stuck somewhere between confusion and exasperation.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  I needed another drink. If he was playing the game Julia said he was playing, I’d just ruined the illusion of the hunt. And possibly tied a noose around my own neck.

  “Nothing. I just… I’m sorry.” I stood and headed for the minibar. “I just can’t pretend anymore. Playing your game is one thing, but pretending it isn’t a game is too much.”

  “What game, Kori?” The couch creaked at my back as he stood, but there were no footsteps.

  “You. Me. Recruitment. Fringe benefits.” I plucked another tiny bottle from the minibar and cracked the lid without even glancing at the label. Then I turned and met his gaze from across the room. “I’m what you asked for. I can’t say no. So I wish you’d quit trying to make this feel like something it isn’t and just tell me what you want me to do, so I can get it over with.”

  His eyes widened. Then his dark eyebrows sank low over green eyes and his hands curled into fists at his sides. I knew that look. Hell, I’d perfected that look. He was going to hit something.

  Me? Was he going to hit me, because I’d ruined whatever fantasy he was playing out in his head? And if so, how many punches could I throw before the resistance pain kicked in again? Would this be like it was with Jonah, brutal and violent? Or would this be a civilized conquest, grown-ups playing pretend, polite until the last stroke?

  In the basement, I’d been trapped by dead shadows and crippled by direct orders. Mentally fighting hands and teeth I couldn’t see, crushed by weight I couldn’t bear, pinned, humiliated, hurt. Wishing for death, but too scared to reach for it.

  Would I have the guts to end it this time? To fight back until I couldn’t move, drawing death closer with every punch I threw, in spite of the pain…

  “Kori, what are you saying? Whatever I tell you to do, you have to do?”

  I rolled my eyes and drained half the tiny bottle, wincing at the burn. “You knew that. You’ve known it all along.”

  “No, I… I hadn’t thought about it like that. I hadn’t realized…” He closed his eyes and sank onto the couch, his head in both hands. Then his hands fell away and his head snapped up. His gaze met mine and held it. And I realized I believed him.

  Ian truly hadn’t known. There was no game, except the one Julia was playing.

  His forehead wrinkled, and each breath he released sounded angry. “Tower told you to…?”

  My stomach tried to revolt, and I held down my dinner with nothing but willpower. If he hadn’t known what I’d been ordered to do, then he hadn’t thought of me as a whore. Until now.