Oath Bound

  “Why don’t you put the gun down, and we can work this out,” the woman in the scarf said, slowly walking toward me. She looked scared, but calm. Determined.

  “Sera...” Lynn Tower backed away as the woman in the scarf approached.

  Sera. The woman in the yellow scarf.

  “It’s okay,” Sera said, and I backed away from her in shock, one step for each of hers, my gun aimed right at her. But I wouldn’t shoot her. I couldn’t. I needed her, though I wasn’t sure why. Was she supposed to help me get Kenley back? Was she a hostage? An informant? A lieutenant in the Tower army?

  Was that even possible for someone so young?

  “Freeze!” someone shouted, and I looked up to find three of Tower’s guards aiming large guns at me from the center of the foyer.

  My guts twisted into knots while I waited for gunfire, and there was nothing for me to do but hold my aim. This was a fool’s errand from the beginning, but I wasn’t fool enough to let go of my gun.

  “Stop!” Sera yelled, and the men hesitated, confused. “He’s looking for someone. There’s no reason for this to get any bloodier.”

  I recognized her tone. Gentle and patronizing. That was the voice you’d use to talk a man down from a ledge. A crazy man.

  “Shoot him!” Julia yelled from inside her office, heedless of the fact that I was still aiming at Sera, and the men raised their weapons.

  “No!” Sera turned on Julia. “Tell them to drop their weapons. Please!”

  Julia scowled, and her anger was like black clouds rolling over the sun—I felt like I should duck before I got struck by lightning. Julia Tower didn’t take orders—she gave them.

  But then she spoke, clearly enough for everyone to hear. “Put down your guns!”

  The men obeyed instantly—so fast it was almost comical—squatting to set M16s on the ground at their feet, their faces fixed in identical masks of confusion.

  Sera turned back to me. “Give me your gun, and you can go home.”

  Surely she lacked the authority to back up a promise like that. Julia held all the power in Tower’s territory. But if that was true, why had Julia ordered her men to stand down at the request of a woman little more than half her age?

  The girl in the scarf had guts—I had to give her that.

  Or maybe she was just trying to disarm me, so I couldn’t shoot her when they shot me.

  Sera held out her hand for my gun.

  I glanced at the disarmed guards. Then I glanced at Julia and Lynn Tower, watching us both from inside the office, one nervous, one furious. Then I glanced to my right, and saw the open storage closet a few feet away, where a housekeeper had been digging for supplies when I’d come down the stairs waving my gun.

  Instead of giving Sera my pistol, I grabbed her hand and pulled her with me into the closet.

  She screamed, and I threw the door shut.

  “Kill him!” Julia shouted.

  “No!” Lynn screeched.

  I fired twice into the ceiling, killing both the visible and the infrared lights at once. Then, as the first bullets ripped through the closet door, I pulled Sera into the shadows with me.

  I took the woman in the yellow scarf.

  Three

  Sera

  His eyes were a pale bluish gray. They were the first things I noticed after Lynn Tower opened the office door over my aunt’s protest.

  The next thing I noticed was his weapon, and the two men bleeding on the marble tile in the foyer. Bile rose to my throat at the sight of so much blood pooling on the floor, and brutal memories tried to surface, but I shook them off. None of the bystanders were hurt. He’d only shot people who’d aimed guns at him.

  This man may have been a killer, but he was no murderer. The distinction was small, but important.

  The man aiming his gun at me looked furious, pale brows furrowed, jaw clenched, aim unwavering. He was looking for someone—I’d missed the specifics, thanks to the alarm—and was obviously willing to do whatever it took to find...whomever. He looked desperate.

  But not crazy.

  Those blue-gray eyes seemed to see everything all at once—every guard aiming a gun at him, every witness watching, and every possible escape route. He was too calm to be crazy. And if he was sane, he could be reasoned with.

  He had to be reasoned with, because if Julia had him shot and his finger twitched on his own trigger, he’d blow a hole right through me, and no one other than Gwendolyn Tower seemed particularly concerned by that possibility.

  My heart thudding in my ears, I held my hand out for his weapon, demanding focus and calm from myself as I mentally counted the shots I’d heard. But I couldn’t be sure of the number, thanks to the alarm.

  He glanced at my scarf, then at my hand, and for a moment I thought he was actually going to give me his gun.

  Instead, he grabbed my hand and dragged me into a supply closet, nearly hauling me off my feet. Startled, I screamed when he kicked the door shut, but then he raised his gun and shot into the ceiling, once, twice.

  The closet went dark and glass rained down on us from the broken fixtures. Too shocked to speak, I tried to jerk my hand from his grip, but he pulled me again, and I stumbled after him, one step, then two.

  The last thing I heard was gunfire coming from the foyer. They shot at us. They knew I was with him, and they’d fired anyway! On Julia’s command!

  That bitch!

  Then there was silence, except for the sound of my own panicked breathing—too fast and too hard.

  The darkness was absolute, and I couldn’t see a thing. I couldn’t feel a thing, except for his hand tight around mine, and the body heat that told me this room was smaller than the last, and that he was standing much too close.

  I opened my mouth to scream again and he dropped my hand. A door opened and he stepped out of what I could now identify as an empty coat closet, his gun aimed at the floor.

  That blue-gray gaze found mine again from a narrow hallway outside the closet. He was staring, as if something about my face made no sense.

  “What the hell just happened?” I demanded, torn between the need to know exactly where I was and reluctance to venture beyond the closet into unknown territory.

  “Traveling. Colloquially known as shadow-walking.”

  “I know what it means. Where are we? Who are you?”

  “I’m the man who just saved your life.” He holstered his gun. “You’re welcome.” Then he turned left and marched down the hall. “You want a drink? I’m having one.”

  “Wait!” I wrapped one hand around the door frame and leaned into the hall as he turned to face me from a living room full of dated furniture. “Are you damaged? You didn’t save my life. You nearly got me killed!”

  He crossed his arms over a well-defined chest put on display by a snug blue T-shirt. “I pulled you out of the line of fire.”

  “I wouldn’t have been in the line of fire, if it weren’t for you. And if it weren’t for me, they would have killed you!”

  “They tried. They shot at us both.” His wary focus narrowed on me until it felt invasive. “Sera, right?” he said, and I declined to answer. “Why were they willing to kill you, Sera?”

  I blinked, scrambling for a response that wouldn’t actually tell him anything about me. “Where are we?” I demanded when I couldn’t come up with any answers of my own. “What am I doing here? Who are you?”

  “Who am I?” Anger hardened his features and furrowed his brows. “Who the hell are you, and where’s Kenley?”

  “Who’s Kenley?”

  His anger visibly swelled in response to my question and he marched toward me, fists clenched at his sides, warning echoing in every step as his heavy boots clomped on the wood floor.

  My heart lurched into my throat. I ba
cked into the closet, peering through deep shadows for something to use as a weapon, but there was nothing. The closet was completely empty.

  He was two steps away when I pulled the door shut, my pulse whooshing in my ears, then held the knob, using all of my weight to keep the door closed. What the hell was I thinking, jumping in the middle of syndicate business? I should have let Julia kill him....

  The man growled, then the door was ripped from my grasp so fast I stumbled into the hall after it. He caught me before I could fall, but I shoved him off so quickly I almost missed the change in his expression.

  “You’re not a Traveler.” He exhaled and the relief lining his features echoed within the sound. “I thought you’d disappeared through the shadows.”

  If I could have, I would have, but even without having grown up in the Skilled subculture, I knew better than to confirm or deny my own abilities.

  I backed away from him, past the open closet door, hands open and ready to grab the first potential weapon I came across. “Let’s try this again. Who are you?”

  Anger resurfaced behind his eyes, but was quickly replaced with confusion. “You really don’t know?”

  “Why should I?”

  He shrugged, and his jacket rose to reveal his holstered gun. “Well, if you work for Julia Tower—”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then what were you doing in her office?”

  “That’s none of your business.” Being related to Jake Tower was dangerous, and having that fact known could be deadly. My mother had made sure I understood that, and Julia had just reinforced that lesson with a lethal spray of bullets.

  His gaze narrowed. “Why would she tell her men to drop their guns at your request?”

  Shit. So much for revealing nothing about myself.

  New plan: reveal as little as possible.

  “Because she wants something from me.”

  “What does she want?”

  She wanted me to sign away my rights to the Tower legacy, not to protect her niece’s and nephew’s interests, but so that the wealth and power would remain under her fist, at least until they came of age. But... “Again, that’s none of your business. Who is—”

  He reached for me, and before I realized he wanted to brush aside a strand of hair caught on my scarf, I knocked his hand away and took another step back. My fists rose automatically. He glanced at me in surprise. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “That’s a true statement.” I was ready to fight.

  He blinked, startled, then looked kind of disappointed. “No, I mean, I don’t want to hurt you. You don’t need to defend yourself from me.”

  “Right. You just shot several people and hauled a strange woman into a strange house against her will. Naturally I should assume you mean me no harm.”

  “Okay, I know how that sounds.” He held both hands up, showing me he was unarmed, yet his gun still peeked out at me from its holster. “But I promise this is not that kind of abduction. If you don’t believe me, look behind you.” He gestured to something over my shoulder, and my need to know what was behind me warred with my need to keep him in sight.

  I turned and pressed my back against the hallway wall so I could see both him and...the old woman asleep in a recliner in the room next to the closet I’d just stepped out of. Her ample chest rose and fell silently. Several melting ice cubes floated in a glass of watered-down tea on the small table next to her.

  “Who’s that?”

  “My grandmother. She’s a pretty deep sleeper, thanks to her medication, but she will wake up if you keep shouting, and I’d appreciate it if you’d let her sleep.”

  “You’re serious?” What kind of armed killer kidnapped strange women and took them home to Grandma? What kind of family was this?

  Although, considering the branch of my own family I’d just met, I didn’t really have room to criticize.

  He shrugged again and shoved his hands into his pockets, trying to look harmless; but even with his grandmother asleep in the next room, that was impossible to believe. He’d taken down at least four of my aunt’s guards in just a couple of minutes, and his aim at me had never wavered, even with half a dozen guns pointed at him. The man had nerves of steel. He may have been many things—including a devoted grandson—but harmless was not one of them.

  Yet he hadn’t laid a hand on me.

  “Why am I here? Who are you?” Why would he shoot to wound men who would readily have killed him? Why would he kidnap me at gunpoint, then claim to have no violent motive? Why would he think I knew his name, then refuse to give it to me?

  Normally I’d assume I understood the destructive, violent nature of a home invasion. I’d become an unwilling expert on the subject when I’d lost my entire family a few months before, and getting caught in the middle of this one should have sent me over the edge.

  But the Tower estate was no ordinary home, and the man in front of me was no ordinary invader. He hadn’t broken in to kill someone, he’d broken in to find someone, and I was inexplicably fixated on the differences between his crime and the one that had shattered my entire reality.

  Or maybe I just really needed those differences to exist. Maybe I needed him to have a good reason for what he’d done—what he was still doing—because I hadn’t seen one damn thing in the world worth living for since I’d become an orphan and an only child, well into adulthood.

  This man, whoever he was, had something worth living for. Something worth fighting for. Something worth dying for. And I really wanted to know what that was.

  “Who were you looking for?” My voice was barely a whisper, but he heard me. In fact, he seemed to hear the need behind the question.

  For several seconds he only watched me. Studying me, as if he was trying to decide whether or not he could trust me—an irony, considering that he’d just dragged me through the shadows. Finally he exhaled slowly and met my gaze with a heavy one of his own. “Julia Tower took my little sister, so I broke into the Tower residence to get her back.”

  I closed my eyes and an ache radiated from the center of my chest as my own sister’s smile haunted my memory. My next inhalation hurt. I’d never seen his sister and I still didn’t even know his name, but I understood his pain. I would do anything to get Nadia back, if that were possible, but...

  “You broke into the Tower estate.” It sounded just as crazy when I said it as when he’d said it. “There are easier ways to kill yourself, you know.” Yet hadn’t I done the same thing—minus all the gunfire?

  Another shrug from the man with no name. “I figured that was the last thing they’d expect, thus the thing they’d be least prepared to defend against. Turns out I was right.”

  “No, you were lucky.” As was I, but I’d known going in that they’d want to talk to me.

  He scowled. “I make my own luck.”

  “You nearly made yourself a used-bullet receptacle. When did your sister go missing?” Please, please don’t let his sister be an actual child. Surely he was too old for that. But then again, I’d just met two young siblings of my own...

  “She didn’t just ‘go missing.’” He leaned with one shoulder against the wall, two feet from the end of the hallway. “Someone pulled her through the shadows a few minutes before I...met you.”

  “Well, then it couldn’t have been Julia. She’s—” At the last second I realized she wouldn’t want me telling strangers what her Skill was. Not that I cared what she wanted, but pissing her off wouldn’t make her any easier to deal with. “She’s not a shadow-walker. Anyway, I was with her when your sister disappeared. It wasn’t Julia.”

  “It wasn’t her personally,” he agreed. “She doesn’t do her own dirty work. But my sister was taken on her orders, and Julia knows where she is.”

  There wasn’t a single glimmer of doubt in him. Not in his unfli
nching gaze, his steady voice or the confidence in every word he spoke. And when I considered the bullets flying through that storage closet and Julia’s apparent willingness to slaughter me in cold blood to keep me from inheriting her fortune, it wasn’t hard for me to believe my aunt capable of abduction.

  But then, obviously so was the man who’d kidnapped me.

  Anger flamed up my spine with the sudden realization of where I fit into his storm-the-castle routine. “So, what, when you couldn’t find your sister, you took me instead? What am I? A hostage?”

  “No, I...” His cheeks flushed, and for the first time since he’d dragged me through the shadows, he seemed unsure of what to say. “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “It’s complicated?” Unless he’d just discovered he’d inherited millions in ill-gotten gains from a crime-boss father he’d never met, making him the target of a crime-boss aunt he wished he’d never met, he couldn’t possibly understand the meaning of the word complicated. Not the way I understood it, anyway.

  “Look, I’m the last person Julia Tower would be willing to trade your sister for.” Though she might strike a bargain for my corpse—not that I had any intention of admitting that to a man desperate to rescue his sibling. “So, I need you to take me back. But I swear if I hear anything about your sister, I’ll let you know what building you should break into next. So why don’t you just give me your name and number, and I’ll—”

  “Sera, I can’t take you back there.” He held my gaze, and his statement had the grave finality of some indisputable truth. “They tried to kill you.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest, reeling from the irony. “You can’t let someone else kill me, but you’re fine with the fact that you kidnapped me?” What kind of weird-ass moral code was he following?

  “I didn’t really kidnap you.” He glanced over my shoulder into the bedroom where his grandmother was now snoring loudly in her recliner. “I just...removed you from a dangerous situation. You’re welcome.” He mustered up a grin, obviously trying to diffuse my mounting anger and frustration, but it didn’t work.