Oath Bound (An Unbound Novel)

by Rachel Vincent

  Nineteen

  Kris

  She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever touched, and the saddest person I’d ever met, and I didn’t want to let her go. I couldn’t.

  Afterward, I lay on my side next to her, one hand splayed across her stomach, trying not to think about her scar and what it meant. What he’d taken from her. What no one would ever be able to give her again.

  I hated how helpless—how useless—that scar made me feel. I was supposed to prevent that. I was meant to save Sera’s baby. Her future. I was meant to spare her the grief she was still mired in, and maybe, if I’d actually done that, we would have come together in a moment of triumph, instead of shared grief.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” I stared down at her profile, no more able to look away from her than I was able to stop touching her.

  She turned to look at me, and her eyes were damp. “Only if I get to ask one in return.”

  “You can ask, even if you don’t want to answer my question. And that’s okay, if you don’t want to. I don’t have any right to ask.”

  “Just say it.” A hint of a smile rode the corners of her mouth, but it was forced. It didn’t match the sadness in her eyes. “You’re making it worse, with the buildup.”

  I shouldn’t ask. It was none of my business. But I had to know, for purely selfish reasons.

  “Who is he?” My thumb twitched over her scar on the last word, surely an unconscious, nervous movement.

  Sera frowned, and I saw the moment her confusion cleared. She’d thought I was asking about the killer. Or maybe about the child he’d taken from her. “My baby’s father?” she whispered, and all hints of that earlier smile were gone.

  “Yeah. But you don’t have to...”

  “His name is Ben. But he doesn’t matter. Really,” she said when I started to object. Of course he mattered. He’d lost a child, too. “He didn’t want the baby. He didn’t want me. We weren’t involved, beyond that one time. I don’t even know how to get in touch with him anymore, so maybe this was meant to be.”

  “No,” I said, and she looked so relieved I wanted to kiss her. “This wasn’t meant to be.” I was meant to stop it. I’d failed Sera before I’d even met her.

  “My turn,” she said, and I let her change the subject because we both needed it. “What was it like, being with Noelle? With a Seer?”

  “You really want to know?”

  She nodded. “Okay. Um... Going out with Noelle was like going out with Cassandra. The Cassandra.”

  “From Greek mythology?”

  “Yeah. The one who could see the future, but couldn’t change it.” Only what Noelle and I did together couldn’t really be called dating. There were no true meals, no movies and no Valentines. We stole moments from the real world, and we stole them shamelessly. We tried to pause time and live in a single second forever. In a heartbeat. In a glance. In that quick breath between desperate kisses. And every single one of those stolen moments happened between one o’clock and three o’clock in the morning. In my bed.

  “But it wasn’t all sex,” I said, and Sera almost looked relieved. “Kori thinks it was, but Elle and I also talked.” More accurately, we’d whispered. We’d laughed. We’d teased. And one time, Noelle had cried. “Then, eventually, inevitably, she fell asleep. And that’s when things got weird. Every single time.”

  “She started talking in her sleep?”

  “Yeah. And now that I can look back on it with a little perspective—I’m wiser now, in case you didn’t know—I think that may have been the point for her all along.”

  “But it wasn’t for you?”

  I shook my head. The prophesies weren’t the point for me. Not then. Not until after Elle died, and I started wondering why I’d felt compelled to write down everything she said. “For me, she was the point. Being with her. I know she didn’t love me, but when she came home, she would let me pretend.”

  “Home from where?”

  I shrugged. “Wherever. She always left. But then she always came back, eventually.” I’d never talked to anyone else about Elle. Not like this. Not even Kori. Sera was the last person I’d expected to confide in—telling one girlfriend about a previous girlfriend rarely goes well. Not that either of them had officially accepted the title.

  But that was the thing about talking to Sera—I always wound up saying more than I’d meant to. She charmed it out of me, as if I was a snake in her basket.

  Which sounded kind of dirty, in retrospect.

  “Did she ever say what it was like?” Sera still watched me, from inches away. “Seeing the future?”

  “I only asked her once. She said it was like sitting in this old tire swing in Gran’s backyard. Did you ever swing in one?” I asked, and she nodded. “Remember how you could twist, and twist, and twist, then grab on tight and let the rope unwind? The world would spin around you, and you could only catch glimpses of things flying by? Elle said seeing the future was like that. Scary, and breathless, and never quite enough, but more than anyone could ever truly make sense of.”

  Sera tried to hide a yawn. “Sounds...disorienting.”

  “I’m sure it was.”

  We were quiet after that, and I was starting to think she’d fallen asleep, until she snuggled closer. “Tell me a secret, Kris. You know all of mine.”

  “What do you want to know?” I would tell her anything.

  “I want to know about Micah.”

  I exhaled slowly, breathing through an ache I could never really ease. “Who told you?”

  “Kori told me about the kids. Why didn’t you? Don’t you trust me?”

  “Now? With my life.” I squeezed her hand, trying to demonstrate the truth through touch. “But I couldn’t afford to trust you at first, and since then, there just hasn’t been time, between stealing back your pictures, and looking for Kenley, and getting shot at, and hiding from Julia Tower.”

  “There’s time now,” she whispered. “Tell me about Micah.”

  Another slow breath. Then I launched into a retelling of my biggest shame. “I was nineteen. Gran was getting too old to work, and I thought I was doing the right thing. Helping pay the bills. I took whatever jobs I could find, and I didn’t ask questions. It was easier to pocket an envelope full of cash if I didn’t ask why the jobs were off the record.

  “Micah was the last of those jobs. A thirteen-year-old caught in the middle of a divorce battle. His mother had custody. His dad wanted him back. They told me the mother was abusive. That he’d be better off with his dad, but that Micah couldn’t see that yet, so I had to take him while he was sleeping.

  “I did.” I swallowed a lump the size of a baseball in my throat. “Three days later, I heard Gran cussing at the television. Micah’s picture was on the screen. There was a picture of his parents, too. They weren’t divorced. The dad wasn’t the man who’d hired me.

  “The coroner said Micah died of massive hemorrhaging. He was left on the side of the street. Gran said that was bullshit. She said it was a syndicate object lesson. She said that’s what they did to kids—to anyone—who refused to fall in line. They gave the poor kid conflicting orders and let his body tear itself apart in front of an audience.”

  “Oh...” Sera’s voice carried little sound, but infinite pain.

  “It was my fault. I took him from his bed in the middle of the night and gave him to the mafia.”

  “And now you’re trying to make up for it.” She didn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. She didn’t absolve me of the blame, or belittle my responsibility with platitudes.

  I shook my head. “I can never make up for it. All I can do is try to stop it from happening to someone else. To anyone else.”

  “That’s what you were doing when Kori and Kenley joined the syndicate?”

  My exhalation tasted as bitter as it sounded. “Ironic, huh? In trying to save strangers, I let my own sisters fall.” I closed my eyes. “I believed Kori when she told me she had it under control. She joined the syndic
ate to protect Kenley, who was coerced into joining a few days before. Kori made me promise not to tell my grandmother that they’d joined, and she made me promise to stay away from them. She said she could handle it. That they’d serve their five years, then get out, but that if Tower knew she and Kenni were close to me and Gran, he’d use us against her. And vice versa.”

  “So you stayed away?”

  I nodded. “I stayed away. I thought I’d be making things worse by getting involved. Worse for them, and worse for the kids I was working with. And in the beginning, that was probably true. If I’d known what was going on, I would have joined the syndicate instead of Kori, but she didn’t even tell me until it was too late, and then there was no one else left to take care of Gran. But if I’d... I don’t know. If I’d done things differently, maybe I could have kept Kori out of the basement.”

  Maybe I could have prevented whatever put that haunted look in her eyes and made her scream at night.

  “You couldn’t have stopped it.” Sera was hardly awake, yet she sounded certain. “You can’t stop stuff like that from the outside. Sometimes you can’t even stop it from the inside...”

  As she fell asleep on my arm, I realized she was talking about herself. She’d tried to save her sister. She’d tried to stop it from the inside, and instead, she’d lost everything.

  I wanted to give her something.

  I waited nearly an hour until she rolled over on her own because I didn’t want to wake her up. But as soon as she was on the other side of the mattress—all but one small foot, resting against my shin—I snuck out of bed and turned off the lamp, then stepped into my jeans and crept downstairs, this new need still only half-formed.

  On the bottom step, I groaned when I saw the light shining in the kitchen. Shit. I’d hoped to keep this new detail of my relationship with Sera private, at least until I knew how much she wanted everyone else to know.

  Also, I’d wanted privacy for my new errand. But that wasn’t gonna happen.

  Gran never woke up in the middle of the night, unless she was...confused—or someone turned on the TV—and I really didn’t feel like pretending I was still a twenty-year-old college dropout. Not with Sera still sleeping without me in the bed that could hopefully now be described as “ours.”

  “Gran?” The living room floorboards creaked beneath my bare feet.

  “It’s just me,” Ian said, and I was relieved for a second. Until I realized that unlike Gran, he probably wouldn’t forget me sneaking out of Sera’s room in the middle of the night.

  Ian sat alone at the table, tapping on Vanessa’s laptop keys with two fingers. I crossed to the cabinet over the sink and took out a bottle of whiskey—the only alcohol in the house—and a short glass, then sat down next to him.

  “Kori will skin you alive if you drink the last of her whiskey.”

  “I’ll blame it on you.” I unscrewed the lid, and his brows rose. “Fine. I’ll pick up more tomorrow. I need to take Sera shopping anyway.”

  Ian eyed me over the open laptop with a quiet smile. “So...you and Sera?”

  I swallowed a groan as I poured two inches into my glass. “Please tell me no one else heard...”

  “The walls are thin.” Which I knew all too well. “But Van only went up to bed ten minutes ago, and Kori sleeps more soundly than I do—until the nightmares.”

  “Are they getting any better?” Kori’s nightmares made me feel useless, because I couldn’t fix her any easier than I could fix Sera.

  Ian nodded. “Slowly.”

  “What’s with the computer? You finally joining the twenty-first century?”

  “Kicking and screaming.” He sighed. “I’d much rather read a newspaper, but they’re in short supply around here, so I’m stuck using this thing. Van showed me how to use a search engine, but all I’m getting are pop-up ads and the same ten results, every time I click ‘go.’” He turned the computer around and demonstrated.

  I laughed. “Click on ‘next page’ for the rest of the results. There are more than ten thousand of them, but you just keep refreshing that first page full.”

  Ian took the laptop back and frowned. “Oh. Thanks.”

  “Shopping for an apartment? Are you leaving us?”

  “It’s for me and Kori. For after we get Kenley back and things settle down.”

  “You think she’ll want to stay in the city once all this is over?”

  “I think she’d be bored in the Outback, and I’m not leaving here without her.” He glanced at my show of skepticism and exhaled slowly. “We’re going to end it, Kris,” he confessed at last. “Not just Julia and the Tower syndicate. Cavazos, too. Kori can’t go on with her life knowing that other people are still suffering the same things she went through. This won’t be over for her until they all fall down. And if they don’t...well, she’ll die trying to make it happen. We both will.”

  “And after we take down Cavazos?” Because they weren’t doing it without me.

  “Then we’ll head to the West Coast and fight the good fight with a view of the ocean.” Ian shrugged. “At least that’ll keep us busy.”

  That it would. And they wouldn’t be alone.

  “So, what’s with the nightcap?” Ian closed the laptop with a soft click. “Post-coital regret?”

  “Not even kinda.” I would never regret a single moment I’d spent with Sera. Except for kidnapping her. “I just need to think.”

  “Do you find that easier, staring at the bottom of a bottle?”

  “Not always.” I sipped from my glass, relishing the mild burn.

  He pushed the computer toward the middle of the table. “You’re more like Kori than you know.”

  “I’m older,” I insisted. “Which means she’s more like me.”

  “You both have big hearts. The only difference is that she hides hers behind guns and a foul mouth, and you hide yours behind guns and a smile. So...where’s the smile?”

  “I must have left it in bed.”

  “Sera’s?”

  I took another sip. “You all seem to be forgetting that it’s actually my bed.”

  “Not when she’s in it,” he said, and I had to concede the point.

  I drained my glass, then set it down and studied him critically for a moment. “I need to talk about what just happened with Sera. You game?”

  Ian chuckled. “Of course. Should I reciprocate, to cement our friendship?”

  I flinched. “Please don’t do that.”

  That time he laughed. “I promise that was an empty threat.” He poured another inch into my glass. “So. What’s up with you and Sera?”

  “Everything. Up there, we just—”

  He put one hand flat on the table between us, and the gesture felt very much like a stop sign. “I know what you did. No need to elaborate.”

  “Not that. Well, there was that, too.” I frowned, wondering if I should start over. “But this isn’t about sex. Before that, she showed me something. She let me in.”

  “Still sounds like we’re talking about sex...”

  “Well, we’re not. I owe her, Ian.”

  Ian frowned and crossed both arms over his chest. “Was she that much better than you in bed?”

  “Ha, ha,” I said when his grin told me he was kidding. “She likes me, Ian. I think she likes me a lot, and I don’t want that to change.”

  “What makes you think it will?”

  How could it not, once she found out that I’d failed to stop what happened to her?

  “I was supposed to do something, a while back.” I took another sip from my glass, then started over from the beginning. A beginning I hadn’t even realized our story—mine and Sera’s—had until that moment. “For years, I’ve been wondering about Noelle. About why she picked me. My bed. My ears. My pencil. I’ve always felt like there must have been a reason, but I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t make any of the lines make sense, and I couldn’t stop anything they warned me about. I couldn’t even understand the warnings.”

&
nbsp; “And now?”

  “Now...” I frowned and looked up from the table to meet his gaze. “I know this sounds crazy, but I think it was about Sera all along.”

  His dark brows rose. “You think Noelle slept with you off and on for six years because of Sera?”

  I shrugged. “Well, I hope she had a more personal motivation for the sex part of the equation, but I think she stayed and talked in her sleep with me because of Sera. Her name’s all through that journal, Ian. Noelle warned me over and over, and I couldn’t see it. I was supposed to stop him. I was supposed to protect her and her family. I was supposed to save her baby, and her body, and her future.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded, just to underline my certainty. “Maybe Elle knew I’d wind up with Sera. Maybe she didn’t. But she knew I was supposed to be there three months ago when that bastard shoved a knife through her belly and through her baby.” I drained my glass while he stared at me. “The problem is that I didn’t know.”

  “I take it Sera doesn’t know, either?”

  “No. I’m going to tell her. I have to tell her. But first I need to give her something. I need to show her how sorry I am. I need to make her believe that I’ll never let something like that happen to her ever again. I want her to know that I can protect her, and that I’m so fucking sorry I wasn’t there when she needed me.”

  “Kris, you didn’t even know her.”

  “But I was supposed to know her. I was supposed to protect her.” I picked up my glass again, but it was empty. “Ian, I think I love her.”

  He blinked. “Are you serious?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know how to tell.”

  “Okay, so what do you know?”

  “I know that she’s like a light in the dark, and I’m a bug drawn to her flame. She’s more sad, and beautiful, and determined than anyone I’ve ever met. She’s like...a human superlative. She’s the most...everything.”

  Ian’s brows rose, and I knew what he was thinking. “I sound like a sap, don’t I? I’m not, though. I’m not blind, or deaf, or stupid. I know she’s not perfect. She yells at me, and hell, she tried to stab me. She kicked me out of my own room, and nearly made me break my nose on the closet door. And she lied to us all about being Jake Tower’s kid. Sometimes I’m not sure whether I should kill her or kiss her. Is that crazy?”