Oath Bound

  “Do you like mint?” She dumped sugar into the pot, and it took me a second to make the mental jump. We were talking about cocoa again. “I saw some mint extract in the pantry...”

  “Sera. Put down the whisk and talk to me. Please.”

  I didn’t think she’d do it. But then Sera set the whisk in the pan and turned to stare up at me. She looked as if the world had just crumbled beneath her feet and a step in either direction would send her tumbling into that void along with everything else she’d ever cared about. With the life she’d lost when her family was murdered.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” But what I really meant was, Why didn’t you tell me?

  “Why didn’t I tell you?” Her voice was sharp, but her eyes were sad. “Why didn’t I tell the guy who kidnapped me at gunpoint that I saw my parents and sister murdered in our own home?”

  I closed my eyes and made a silent wish that would never come true, and when I opened them again, she’d turned back to the counter, measuring cocoa powder this time with stiff, precise movements. I wanted to touch her so badly my hands actually ached for the feel of her skin, and for just a moment, that ache was enough to overwhelm logic and common sense, both of which were telling me that I couldn’t get involved with Sera.

  Not while she was still grieving.

  Sera was wounded and fragile, beneath a tough, knife-wielding exterior, and while she certainly needed and deserved comfort, she wasn’t in the proper state of mind to make decisions about her personal life. At least, not the kind of decisions intended to last beyond the closure she hoped to find with vigilante justice.

  I didn’t want her to associate me with such a sad, dangerous part of her life, because when she put that all behind her, she’d want to put me behind her, too. I would remind her of the painful past.

  “My biggest regret in the world right now—other than failing Kenley—is how we met.” Too late, I realized that sounded like a confession.

  It was a confession. I was practically admitting that I wanted things from her that I couldn’t have. That she couldn’t afford to give me, with so much grief in her heart.

  Sera dumped cocoa into the sugar and milk mixture and began to stir with the whisk. “You saved my life, remember?”

  “No, I nearly got you killed.” I forced a smile I couldn’t truly feel as I fed her own words back to her. “Remember?”

  “That wasn’t your...” She bit off the end of her sentence and I got the feeling it had veered from her original intent. When she turned to me again, there was something new behind her eyes. Something sad, and strong, and...resigned. “You didn’t fail Kenley. It sounds like she rushed into an unknown situation, and we all know you’d do anything to get her back. And you will get her back. We will. Then we’ll track down the bastard who took everything from me and gut him like the animal he is.”

  “You want him gutted?” I shrugged and half sat on the edge of the table. “I’m better with guns than with knives, but that bastard killed three people in cold blood, right in front of you. I’ll kill him however you want. And yes, you can watch, if you think that’ll help. But I have to tell you, in my experience, that only makes it worse. Violence may balance the scales, but it can’t heal wounds. Only time can do that.”

  “No. Time lets untreated wounds fester.” Sera turned back to the stove and tried to ignite the burner, but the knobs were gone again. “And there were four.”

  “Four what?” I pulled the cookie jar from the top of the fridge and took the lid off, then held it out to her.

  “Four people.” She selected a knob, then slid it into place on the stove. “He killed four people. There was a baby. Well, there would have been a baby. In a few...” Her hand clenched around the stove knob and her words cracked and fell apart. “My sister...”

  “She was pregnant?” Something cold, and dark, and nearly uncontrollable unfurled in the pit of my stomach, and my hands clenched into fists at my sides. What kind of sick bastard kills a pregnant woman?

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Sera lit the burner and adjusted the flame, then stirred the milk in silence while I retreated to my seat at the table, trying to process what I’d just learned. To truly understand the scope of her loss.

  I couldn’t do it. Even when I’d lost my parents, I’d still had my sisters and Gran.

  Sera had been there. She’d seen them die. How the hell had she survived? Had she hidden? That would have been the smart thing to do—surely the only way to preserve her own life. But when had I ever seen her do the cautious thing? When had I seen her try to save herself?

  She’d stepped in front of my gun and demanded I hand it over, before she’d had any reason to know I wouldn’t shoot her. She’d risked being shot to claim her mother’s photo album. She’d attack the man who shot Ian. She’d sprayed bleach in Ned’s face to keep him from shooting me, then dented his skull with a fucking toaster.

  In the two days I’d known her, I’d seen her step into the path of danger more times than I could count on one hand, but I’d never once seen her hide.

  So how the hell had she survived the attack that killed her entire family?

  I didn’t realize the cocoa was done until she set a mug on the table in front of me, then slid into her chair with a mug of her own. There was a yellow, sugar-coated duck floating in my hot chocolate. I picked the mug up and eyed it, then laughed out loud when I recognized the Marshmallow Peep.

  Sera shrugged, and I swear I saw just a hint of a smile. “You’re out of marshmallows. That’s the best I could do.”

  Gran had never once given me marshmallows in my cocoa. Much less fluffy little sugar-coated ducks.

  Sera’s Marshmallow Peep was green, and it left a sparkly spot of sugar on the end of her nose when she sipped from her mug. I wanted to kiss the sugar off her nose, but I was pretty sure that would make her want to stab me again.

  “What is that?” She stared at my notebook, open on the table in front of me. “Poetry?” Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Do you write poetry?”

  “Your skepticism stings.” But her interest felt like a ray of sunshine on an overcast day and the moment I saw it, I craved more. “Why is it so unbelievable that I might write poetry?”

  “It doesn’t really fit with your...image.”

  “My image?” I closed the notebook and folded my hands over it, watching her expectantly. “I gotta hear this. What is my image?”

  “Well, admittedly, my perspective is colored by my initial impression of you as a homicidal kidnapper who screwed all the doors and windows shut to keep his grandmother prisoner in her own house...”

  “That’s not what I did. This isn’t her house, and she’s not prisoner.” But Sera wasn’t listening.

  “...but you’ve kind of got this badass-next-door routine going on, with the blue eyes and the clean-cut thing you have going on here—” she waved one hand vaguely at my face and hair, and suddenly I regretted shaving that morning “—and the guns, and the whole ‘you want me to kill him or let him live?’ thing.”

  I scowled and picked up my mug. “That’s not me. I’m not clean-cut, and I don’t sound like that.”

  “Yes, you are, and you do. Stop pouting.” She tried to hide a grin by sipping from her cocoa. “And if you ‘forget’ you don’t belong in the center bedroom one more time, I’m going to have you declared legally brain dead.”

  “I’m brain dead?” I set my mug down and scowled at her, and she nodded, chuckling now.

  “Though that appears to be a selective defect. I haven’t seen you forget a single meal, yet you can’t seem to remember where you sleep at night.”

  “This, coming from the woman who tried to give a gun to Ned-the-guard, so he could relieve us of the burden of drawing regular breaths in a body free from extraneous holes.”

  “That’s n
ot what I...” She frowned and abandoned the rest of her sentence. “Let me see this poetry.” Sera reached for the notebook, but I pulled it out of her grasp.

  “It’s not poetry,” I admitted reluctantly. I didn’t want her to be right about the brain-dead badass thing. “I’m not sure I’d even recognize poetry if I saw it, outside of Dr. Seuss.”

  She was still smiling, and I considered that a bit of a victory. “So, what is it? A journal?”

  “Kind of.”

  “You’re not writing in it.” She made a show of studying the tabletop. “I don’t see a pen. So you were just sitting here reading your own journal?” When I didn’t answer immediately, her brows furrowed. “That’s not yours, is it? You’re reading someone else’s journal. Is it Kori’s? What are you, nine?” She reached for the notebook and I tried to pull it away again, but that time I was too slow. Or maybe I didn’t believe she’d really take it.

  I was wrong, and she was fast.

  “Wait, Sera...” I held one hand out to her, then realized I had no idea what to do with it. “I feel like we’ve made serious strides in the you-not-wanting-to-castrate-me-with-a-kitchen-knife department, and I’d hate to ruin all that by having to actually take that away from you. But I will if I have to. It’s not Kori’s journal. It’s mine. It’s just...not about me.”

  “Why would you keep a journal about someone else? Are you some kind of creepy stalker?” she said, and I wasn’t sure whether or not that was a joke. She didn’t seem very sure, either. “Is that about the last woman you kidnapped and locked up?”

  “Give it back. Please.”

  When I didn’t smile and showed no sign of relenting, she hesitated for one more second, studying my eyes, probably for some hint of violent tendencies. Other than the ones she’d already seen from me. Then she set the notebook on the table and slid it toward me.

  But things were different now. Half an hour earlier, she’d trusted me enough to tell me that she’d seen her family murdered, and now that trust was gone. Suspicion swam in her eyes like tears that would never fall. Distrust was obvious in the straight line her lips had been pressed into and in the firm set of her jaw.

  I could tell her the truth, or I could lose her confidence. Which might mean losing her as a Jammer. But as reluctant as I was to admit it, the possibility of losing her Skill wasn’t what bothered me.

  What bothered me was the thought of losing her trust. Of never again seeing her laugh with me, because she couldn’t lower her guard long enough to see the humor in what I’d meant to say, when it came out all wrong. I wanted to see her smile again. I wanted to make her smile, and as soon as I’d had that thought, I had to shut it down, because somehow I’d slipped right back into the delusion that she might become interested in more than just my trigger finger.

  But she wouldn’t. Even if she thought she could, she was wrong. I knew that because I’d been in her position, unable to truly move forward with life—or give any new relationship a chance—while I was still mourning Noelle.

  Sera wasn’t here because she was beautiful, or smart, or brave. She wasn’t here because I wanted her here. Or because I wanted to help her. Or because seeing her in the morning made me smile, in spite of the fear and anger practically stagnating in our locked-tight house. Sera was with us because she could somehow help us—because Noelle had known that—and that was all.

  The sooner I got that through my baddass-next-door brain, the better off we’d both be.

  But I still couldn’t stand the thought of her hating me.

  “Okay. Sera, wait,” I said, and she sat again, reluctantly, and sipped from her mug. “I’ll tell you about the journal. But you’re gonna think I’m crazy.”

  “I already think you’re crazy.” It sounded like she was joking, but her smile was still absent, so I couldn’t tell for sure.

  “I used to kind of...be with this girl. She was a Seer. And she talked in her sleep.”

  “Okay.” She shrugged. “My ex snored. What does that have to do with your journal?”

  I pushed my gun and half-empty mug aside to make room for the notebook on the table between us. “She was a Seer, Sera. She could see the future. Bits of it, anyway. And sometimes the things she said in her sleep were...prophesy. Or whatever you call it.”

  Her brows rose. “How do you know?”

  “Because some of them came true. So I started...um...writing them down.” I pushed the notebook toward her and when she glanced at me in question, I nodded, giving her permission to peek.

  Sera opened the front cover and stared at the name written at the top of the page. Noelle Maddox. “Is that the Noelle? Hadley’s real mother?”

  I nodded.

  “Does that mean that you’re... That Hadley is...”

  “Mine?” I said, and she nodded. “No. There has been some question about her paternity, but I’m not among the possibilities. We weren’t together when she got pregnant.”

  “So, Elle was with you and with Olivia’s boss? Cavazos?”

  “Yeah, but again, not at the same time. It’s kind of...confusing.”

  “No kidding.” Sera’s finger slid from Noelle’s name to the date written on the first line. “That was twelve years ago.”

  “Yeah. Shortly after the first time we...got together.”

  “So, you slept with a Seer? And took notes?” She flipped through the notebook, and her eyes widened. “A lot of notes. Which would imply a lot of...sleeping.”

  “Yeah.” Sometimes Elle and I had had sleepovers even when she and Kori weren’t on speaking terms.

  I drank from my mug again, trying to decide how I felt about Sera reading from Noelle’s journal. Not that she was actually reading it, unless she was some kind of super-freak speed-reader. She seemed more interested in the number of passages.

  So I tried to decide how I felt about Sera being interested in the number of Noelle’s night-mumblings I’d recorded. And maybe the frequency. Fortunately, she couldn’t judge duration or skill unless she really could read between the lines.

  “Why would you take notes?” She looked up from the notebook with her hand spread across the open page.

  “Why wouldn’t I take notes? It was like looking into the future through a telescope, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity, even if the lens was out of focus and I couldn’t actually aim it at anything.” I fingered the sharp end of the spiral notebook binding. “Since then, I’ve tried to figure some of them out, but...”

  “But it reads like nonsense?” And this time she really was reading. Skimming, at least.

  “Yeah. Until something happens, and suddenly one or two of those will make sense. In retrospect, they seem so obvious, but on the front end, it’s like reading a foreign language, without a Noelle-to-Kristopher dictionary.”

  She didn’t look up from the page. “Sounds frustrating.”

  “You have no idea.” I took a deep breath, trying to figure out how to say what needed to be said without freaking her out any more than necessary. “You’re in there, Sera.”

  “What?” She looked up from the passage she’d been reading to frown at me.

  “You’re in there.” I took the notebook from her and flipped through the pages, looking for one specific line among hundreds. It was one I knew well, because it was one of few that seemed to give me instructions, rather than random snatches from a conversation I’d never actually been a part of. And finally I found it.

  I spun the notebook around on the table, my finger over the date on the entry in question. “See?”

  “‘Take the girl in the yellow scarf,’” she read. Then she looked up at me with wide, frightened eyes, her fingers hovering around her collarbone, as if she still wore that scarf. “That’s me? That’s why you kidnapped me? Because of my scarf?”

  “I didn’t kidnap you,” I insisted,
and she started to argue, but I spoke over her. “Okay, technically, maybe I kidnapped you, but that’s not the point. I didn’t take you because of the scarf—that’s just how I knew who you were. I took you because you’re important.”

  “Important how?” Her voice sounded hollow. Skeptical. “Important to what? To whom?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, and she looked so disappointed I wanted to take it back. But I couldn’t claim to have all the answers. “I hope you’re supposed to help us get Kenley back, or hide us while we get her back, but I doubt even Noelle knew for sure. Either way, though, you’re important enough to have been in one of her predictions years ago. Important enough for her to tell me to take you.” And that was the crux of the matter. The part I hadn’t been able to truly vocalize until that moment.

  Until I’d found Sera—until I’d seen her scarf and known exactly what to do—I’d never been truly sure that Noelle’s messages were meant for me. I’d always kind of thought, in the back of my mind, that I was just the random bastard lucky enough to be in bed with her when she started talking in her sleep. But Sera was proof to the contrary.

  Noelle had told me to take her—the girl with the yellow scarf. That prophesy was meant for me. Only for me. None of her other potential bed partners—and I wasn’t naive enough to think there hadn’t been several—was anywhere near Sera the day she had her yellow scarf on and needed to be removed from a dangerous situation.

  Those predictions were intended for my ears. I was meant to act on them.

  Yet I’d been failing in that respect for years. How many people had been hurt or killed because I was too stupid to interpret the prophesies?