“He told me to do whatever you want. He said if I wasn’t the best you’ve ever had…” But I couldn’t finish that sentence. I couldn’t admit the consequences to him. Not with him looking at me like that. Not with disgust dripping from his words, revulsion written in every line on his face.
It was obvious what he thought of me now. I may as well have a red chain link tattooed on my arm.
“That soulless son of a bitch.” He stared at the floor, fists opening and closing. Then he looked up at me with something new shining through the surface of his obvious anger. Was that…disappointment?
And suddenly I understood that I wasn’t the only one hurt by this. If Ian’s jokes, and obvious desire, and genuine conversation weren’t part of some game he was playing, then…he’d meant them. He’d meant it all. And somehow that realization cut even deeper than the latest knife Jake had shoved into my back.
“So, this isn’t real?” Ian demanded, anger edging out whatever pain I’d glimpsed from him. “Dinner? Telling me about your family? Was any of that true? Did any of that mean anything to you?”
I inhaled deeply. Slowly. I could admit that in spite of my orders and my own common sense, everything I’d said and done with him was real. That I liked him, and that’s why I’d tried to paint an accurate picture of life in the syndicate, even as I roped him tighter with Jake’s noose. But that wouldn’t be fair to either of us. We couldn’t be together, ever, even if Jake hadn’t ruined anything we could have had by ordering me to sleep with Ian. Julia had been right about that much. Once Ian officially joined the syndicate, he would quickly outrank me. And even if my lower standing didn’t put him off, association with me would do him no favors.
So I put on my work face. My stone-cold-bitch face. Because he was hurting just like I was hurting, and this time, the truth would only make that worse.
“This is a job. You are a job. Nothing more.” It was the most difficult lie I’d ever had to tell. And it wasn’t over. “After you, there will be another job. I don’t know what that job will be, since I’m clearly the world’s worst recruiter. But whatever that next job is, I’ll do it. Just like I’m doing this one. So…” I swallowed and met his gaze, refusing to let mine falter. I could do this. I had no choice. “So just tell me what you want me to do—what it’ll take to get you to sign with Jake—and I’ll do it.”
“I don’t believe you.” He said it softly, but his words were drenched in anger. I closed my eyes, desperately wishing I’d heard him wrong. Wishing I hadn’t seen the pain in his eyes. The denial. “I don’t believe you, Kori. The reason you’re a horrible recruiter is that you’re bad at selling something you don’t believe in, and you don’t believe in what you’re saying right now.”
“Yes, I do.” I turned and reached for the tiny bottle again, but he was there in an instant, pulling it out of my grip.
“No, you don’t. I can tell when you’re lying, and you’re doing it now.”
“Don’t pretend you know me,” I snapped, reaching for the bottle, but he tucked it behind his back. “We just met. You don’t know anything about me.”
“The hell I don’t. I know you love your sister more than you love yourself. I know you hate Jake Tower, even if you can’t ever say that out loud. I know that you cuss like a fish swims, but you haven’t spoken a single profanity in the last seven hours, and as near as I can tell, the only thing stopping you is the fact that you gave your word. I know that he makes you do things that rot your soul, and that you do them because you have to, but that you’ll never really forgive yourself.”
I stared at him, stunned, knowing I should argue. Knowing that for both of our sakes, I should have the courage to lie and tell him he was wrong. That he didn’t know me and he never would. But words had deserted me, for maybe the second time in my entire life.
“And I know they did horrible things to you. Things you never talk about. I know they tried to break you, but they failed, and that’s why Jake talks about you like you’re trash, when we all three know that’s not true. I think he hates you because even though he tried his best, he couldn’t break you. Which means he won’t ever really own you, no matter what he tattoos on your arm or anywhere else.”
His face blurred right in front of me, and it took me several seconds to realize why. To realize there were tears standing in my eyes and that I couldn’t get rid of them without letting them fall.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. He does own me.” And he would, as long as he owned Kenley.
“No one owns you, Kori. People like you can’t be owned. Putting chain links on your arm is like putting a lion in a cage. He may be locked up, but he’ll always be wild, and he’ll eat his handler the first chance he gets. You’re that lion, Kori, and I see you watching. Waiting for your moment. And it will come.”
“No, it won’t, because it’s not just me in that cage, Ian. Kenley’s there with me, and she can’t bite.”
He blinked, and something passed over his expression too fast for me to understand. Something complicated and…conflicted. Then he shook that thought off, whatever it was, and captured my gaze again. “So you bite for her, too. You fight for the people you love, no matter what.”
I shook my head, and to my horror, those tears fell. “I can’t.” I hadn’t cried in the basement. I’d screamed. I’d even begged. But I’d never cried. Yet here I was in no danger whatsoever, and I couldn’t stop the burning in my eyes, the hot trails down my cheeks. “I can’t.”
“So you’re just going to give up? You’re just going to do whatever he tells you to do? Let him pass you around to all his friends like a lit joint, until you’re all used up and worthless?”
A sharp bolt of anger shot through me and I swiped tears from my face with both hands. “That’s not… This is the first time. It’s not a regular thing.”
“And you really believe it won’t be?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I hadn’t thought beyond getting through this one job, because there was a significant chance that wouldn’t actually happen, and if I was dead, I wouldn’t have to worry about the next assignment.
Ian studied my face, looking for something, and when he didn’t find it, he set the small bottle on top of the minibar. “So, if I’d asked you to stay the night, you would have done it? Not because you wanted to, but because he told you to?”
I sucked in a breath so deep my chest ached. “I wouldn’t have had any choice.”
“And last night, after the party? After knowing me less than eight hours? Would you have slept with me then?”
I could only nod miserably.
“And if I was a real asshole who hurt you and called you names? Would you be allowed to stop me?”
“Stop it. You already know the answer.”
“Yeah, I know it. I’m waiting for you to hear yourself say something awful enough to make you want to fight back.”
“I do want to fight!” I shouted, fury buzzing beneath my skin like an army of wasps. “But it doesn’t matter. That’s the real problem here, Ian. After everything I’ve shown you and everything you’ve figured out on your own, you still think fighting back is an option. You still think that if I close my eyes and wish hard enough, I’ll suddenly be able to break an oath sealed by one of the strongest—quite possibly the strongest—Binder in the world. But if there was a way out of this, you can bet your fancy rental car that I’d have found it myself. But there isn’t. Kenley and I are stuck exactly where we are, doing exactly what we’re doing, for the next four years.”
Assuming I lived that long.
I exhaled and met his gaze again, digging deep for the anger that fueled my heart like gasoline in an engine, because I’d rather be mad than wallow in the pain my next words would bring. “Now unless you’re actually planning to make me do what Jake told me to do, I’d like to leave. But as much as I hate to say it, I can’t go without your permission.”
He watched me, and emotions flickered over his face too fast fo
r me to identify. But in the end, there was anger. Raw, pure anger of the highest quality. Rage. Ian wasn’t just angry, he was enraged.
I knew exactly how that felt.
“Go home, Kori,” he said through clenched teeth. “I think you should go home. Now.”
I nodded in acknowledgment, because I couldn’t bring myself to thank him for doing the only decent thing. Then I stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut behind me, and too late I realized I should have gone through the shadows in his bathroom. But I wasn’t going back into that hotel room. I couldn’t. Not after that.
For several seconds, I couldn’t move. I could only lean against the wall outside his suite, sucking air in through my throat over and over, only to lose it an instant later. He hated me. Worse, he pitied me. I’d seen it in his eyes. He was disgusted by what Jake had turned me into, and even more disgusted that I’d let it happen.
And the worst part was that I couldn’t argue with a damn thing he’d said. And if he told anyone—if Jake found out what I’d told him—Ian’s recruitment would be reassigned and I would wind up in the basement again.
I couldn’t survive it again. I couldn’t.
You should have just let it happen. I should have just kept my mouth shut and stayed the night, and he’d never have known I was under orders. So what if he thought it meant more than it ever could? So what if letting Jake dictate what I did with my body made me sick to my stomach? So what if just thinking about that brought memories of the basement roaring to the front of my mind, so vivid and horrifying I could smell the sweat and taste my own blood?
I raced for the elevator, but my stomach lurched after less than a minute of staring at my own reflection in its mirrored wall, so I punched buttons until the elevator stopped, then ran down the last four flights of stairs. I burst into the alley behind the building, but I couldn’t make it to the Dumpster. My dinner came back up in the middle of the alley, all over Kenley’s sandals. I vomited until there was nothing left, trying to purge the memories along with the food, but they wouldn’t go. I felt every blow. Relived every humiliation. I saw Jake closing the door on that very first night, leaving me alone with his brother, half-naked and still oozing blood from a gunshot wound.
When the retching finally stopped, I sank onto the concrete with my knees pressed against my chest, curled around the ache deep inside me. But finally I could breathe again. Finally the pain was gone, and in its place was a blessed numbness.
My stomach was as empty as the rest of me. That was the only way I knew how to be.
I closed my eyes and I heard Jake’s words again, echoing from my memory. He’d pronounced my sentence in three words with one hand on the doorknob, a cruel smile on his face.
“Don’t fight back.”
That’s how my hell had begun. And it had yet to end.
Fourteen
Ian
For almost a minute after she left, I stared at the door, willing her to come back, though I had no idea what I’d say if she actually did. How could she let him use her like that? How could she let him just give her to a man she barely knew? What fucking century were we living in?
And the worst part was that she’d thought I’d known. She’d thought I was party to forced prostitution and rape. That I was playing some kind of sadistic game with her, just waiting for the perfect moment to—
I couldn’t think the words, but I couldn’t purge them from my mind, either. I was caught between thinking it and not thinking it, an endless cycle of self-torture that built inside me until rage finally burst out of me like shrapnel from an explosion.
My hand closed around something I didn’t even see and I hurled it without looking. Ceramic crashed into the door and rained shards of broken table lamp on the floor. The crystal shade shattered, reflecting tiny rainbows all over the room, but the cheerful colors only further infuriated me. So I stomped the shards into the floor until I couldn’t see a single color.
Then I sank onto the couch with my head in my hands, trying to draw the chaos in my head into some semblance of order.
The mission was screwed. Steven was screwed. Kori would never trust me enough now to let me anywhere near her sister, and the more I learned about her and her reasons for serving Tower in the first place, the less likely it seemed that she ever would have anyway.
And just as suddenly as that thought occurred to me, I realized I didn’t care. I couldn’t let my brother die, but I couldn’t hurt Kori to save him. She’d been through enough, and even if the grief from losing Kenley didn’t destroy her, being left to bear the brunt of Tower’s rage certainly would.
With sudden insight, I understood what I should have known all along. If I killed Tower’s Binder and toppled his empire, he’d kill Kori for letting it happen. And I wasn’t naive enough to think her death would be either quick or painless.
I dug my phone from my pocket and my fingers pressed buttons automatically. Aaron worked the night shift, but he answered on the third ring. “Is it done?”
“I can’t do it, Aaron.” I let my head fall against the back of the couch, one hand over my eyes to cut the glare from the light overhead. “I can’t kill her.”
“Fuck.” For a moment, there was only silence, except for the distant sound of heavy machinery running in the background. Then Aaron groaned. “I’m coming over.”
Several seconds later he walked out of the darkened bathroom in stained jeans and a T-shirt stamped with his company logo. He took a glance around, then headed straight for the open minibar, where Kori’s half-empty bottle still sat. “So what’s with all the drama?” He sniffed her minibottle, then drained it. “Go ahead and air your girly feelings so I can laugh at them, then kick your ass back into the game.”
“This isn’t a game. I can’t do it.”
“Which part?” He grabbed another tiny bottle, then dropped into an armchair and stared at me over the coffee table. “The part where you get wined and dined and put up in a fancy hotel room while Steven and Meghan are slowly dying in a great deal of pain? Or the part where you get to spend all week with a beautiful woman at your beck and call, while I work my ass off in a factory to keep all three of us fed and clothed while they can’t work? Because in case you can’t tell from the ripe scent of man-sweat I’m rubbing into your chair, in the real world, this doesn’t qualify as a hardship.” He spread both arms to indicate the luxury Tower had thrown at me.
“Tower is psychotic. He’s fucked her up beyond what I can explain, and I can’t kill her sister after everything she’s already been through.”
“So we’re talking about the sister, not the target?” he said, and I nodded. “What’s she been through?”
“She won’t tell me. But it’s bad. They talk about her like she’s a piece of trash he just hasn’t gotten around to throwing out yet. And he’s using her like human currency.”
“Meaning…?”
“He told her to sleep with me.”
Aaron shrugged and cracked open the minibottle. “I’m still waiting for the psychotic part.”
“Aaron, he fucking gave her to me, like she’s some thing he can use however he wants. Like she’s part of the signing bonus. How would you like to see your sister treated like that?”
Aaron leaned forward in his chair and tossed the bottle cap onto the coffee table, where it slid across the surface and clattered to the floor. “My sister is in no danger of being treated like a slave or a whore because she wasn’t stupid enough to sign away her free will in exchange for paycheck and a tattoo.”
“Kori only joined to protect her sister, and she signed on as security. She never agreed to be used like this.”
Aaron drained his minibottle and stretched to set it on the end table. “She had to know it was a possibility, and you knew what this would be like. You know he has whores as well as assassins and you know damn well that one’s just as dangerous as the other. But you swore to my sister that you would save them both. Now you’re backing out because you’re too sensitiv
e to call a whore a whore?”
Shadow Bound (Unbound) Page 21
