Shadow Bound (Unbound) (18 page)

“I think we’re almost there.” I glanced at my hands, suddenly wishing I’d poured some coffee, too, so I’d have something to do with them.

Aaron set his mug down and cleared his throat to catch my attention. When I glanced at him, he frowned, studying me. “No, Ian,” he said, finally.

“No, what?”

“You know what. I know that look.”

“What look?”

“That look that says you’ve found a wounded puppy and you want to nurse it back to health. And keep it, like that dog that got hit in front of your house when we were kids.”

“That wasn’t me, that was Steven.”

“Bullshit. It was you,” Aaron insisted, and I didn’t bother arguing. “Korinne Daniels is no wounded puppy, Ian. She’s a fucking Doberman, and she’ll rip your throat out if she finds out what you’re really doing here.”

I forced a laugh. “I was in the marines, and you don’t think I can take a one-hundred-pound woman in a fight?”

“I think you won’t fight her, because you want to
keep
her, but she is not a fucking puppy, Ian. You can’t have her, you can’t keep her, and you sure as hell can’t let her get in the way of what you’re doing here.”

“I know.” But I also knew that Kori didn’t deserve what was coming. Neither of them did. I scrubbed both hands over my face, yet couldn’t scrub away the guilt.

Aaron set his coffee on the table. “Don’t lose sight of the goal here, Ian.”

“You don’t think I should feel bad about shooting her little sister?”

Aaron eyed me sternly. “Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t overthink it, and do
not
get emotionally involved. You’re here to save your brother’s life, and keep my sister from killing herself by trying to save him. I’m as sorry as I can be for your girlfriend’s impending loss—it’s the same loss you and I are both facing right now—but let’s not forget that this whole thing is Kenley Daniels’s fault in the first place.”

“I know.”

“And it’s not like Korinne is a Girl Scout, either. She’s got blood on her hands.”

“So do I.”

Aaron growled in frustration. “You killed men with guns, to keep them from killing anyone else. She killed people who got into Tower’s way. There’s a big fucking difference, Ian.”

Maybe.

Kori and I had fought in different wars, but I wasn’t naive enough to believe that her life in the syndicate was any less a battle than what I’d seen overseas.

“Look, we can argue about this all day if you want, but that’s not going to change the facts. Kenley Daniels has to die to keep your brother and my sister alive. Where does your loyalty lie, Ian? With your own flesh and blood, and friends you’ve known your whole life? Or with a woman you met yesterday?”

“Here. My loyalty is here. Why else would I be here?” Steven and I had had our problems over the years, but I couldn’t let him die, and that would have been true even if it wasn’t my use of his name that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. He was my brother.

Blood mattered.

“Good. It better stay that way, too,” Aaron said. “I am
not
going to tell my sister that her fiancé’s liberator fell not to a bullet, but to one of cupid’s fucking arrows.” When he caught me staring at his coffee, he stood and pulled another mug from the cabinet. “Please tell me you know you’re being played.”

“I know I’m being played.” But so was she.

“You’re being played like a fucking
harmonica,
Ian.” Aaron dumped sugar into the mug and followed it with creamer he didn’t bother to stir. “She’s getting paid to do what you want done, show you what you want to see and say what you want to hear, but she’d kill you in a heartbeat if Tower told her to. Do whatever you need to do. Fuck her, kill her, stuff her into a crate bound for China, for all I care. Just don’t let her get in the way of the mission.”

Meghan cleared her throat from the doorway, and Aaron’s mouth snapped shut. He set my mug in front of her when she sank into an empty chair at the table.

“Any change?” I asked, eyeing the circles beneath her eyes. Had they grown darker since she left the kitchen?

“His kidneys,” she said, her voice a weak whisper. “He’s better for the moment. Sleeping again.”

Aaron’s hand shot across the table so fast I barely saw him move. He grabbed his sister’s left wrist, and she tried to pull away from him, but obviously lacked the strength. Aaron pushed her sleeve back, and we both groaned at the sight of her arm.

Her skin was pale, nearly translucent, and every vein and artery below her bunched sleeve showed through. But they weren’t blue. They were black. Every single one of them, like they ran with tar, rather than blood.

“You’re killing yourself,” Aaron said through clenched teeth.

Meghan shook her head and pulled her sleeve back into place when he let her go. “I’m saving him.” But she couldn’t hold out much longer, which was exactly what Aaron’s accusatory glare at me said.

He stood and started pulling food from the refrigerator. “You need to call Dad, Meghan. If you don’t, I will.”

“I’ll never forgive you,” she whispered, and he flinched as he piled meat onto a slice of bread. It was the same argument they’d been having for two weeks. Their father was a Healer, too, and he could help her save Steven. He could share the burden. But she wouldn’t call him because of what he’d say, and what he’d do.

Meghan’s father would tell her she was championing a lost cause—no Healer can save someone from death by broken binding, because as soon as she repaired one organ, another began to shut down.

And he would take her away, by force if he had to, to keep her from dying alongside her doomed love. My doomed brother.

“Eat.” Aaron set the sandwich in front of her, then pulled a carton of milk from the fridge. “This is crazy, Meg.”

She ignored him and turned to me as she lifted the sandwich. “What about the binding? Have you at least figured out what that bitch bound him to?”

“I haven’t had a chance to talk to Kenley alone,” I said. “She’s definitely strong enough to do it.” I’d never heard of a Binder using her skill at ten years old, and Kori’s story had scared the shit out of me. “But are you sure she’s the one? I’ve never seen her before, and she didn’t seem to recognize me or my name.”

“It’s her,” Meghan insisted. “That Tracker cost nearly every dime we had saved up, and he swears it was Kenley Daniels. He’s come across her work a lot, with people running from the syndicate. Her blood sealed the binding, and it’s strong. But he can’t tell what kind of binding it is.”

In a way, that was the worst part. Steven was mostly conscious, but usually incoherent from the pain, and even during his rare lucid periods, he hadn’t been able to tell us what binding he’d accepted, and from whom. And there were too many questions the Tracker couldn’t answer.

All we really knew was that it was a name binding, and that meant that whatever had happened was my fault. Steven and I had switched names years ago—when we were still kids—to give ourselves an extra layer of protection. If anyone tried to track my name, they’d find Steven and assume they’d made a mistake.

But the plan we’d concocted in childhood had backfired on us as adults.

At some point—we had no idea when—Kenley Daniels had bound Steven to something using her blood and his real name. But I’d been answering to Steven’s name since we were eighteen years old, which meant she’d actually meant to bind
me.

Steven was inches from death’s doorstep, and it was all my fault.

Mine, and Kenley Daniels’s.

Eleven

Kori

T
hat time when I shadow-walked into my bedroom, I stopped a foot short of smashing my nose on the wall. Two weeks, and I was finally getting the hang of the tight space, which Kenley had used as an office before I’d moved in. Well, before Tower’s men had moved my stuff in, while I was still in the basement. Eventually I’d get my own place. Once I was sure I was going to live long enough to need one.

I felt my way along the wall to the light switch and flipped it up, then peeled my wet pants off, cursing in my head. I wasn’t sure whether profanity in the privacy of my own room—away from Ian’s ears—would violate the terms of our bet or not, but you can’t police someone’s thoughts. That was one of many, many truths I’d learned working for Jake—the only one that brought me any comfort.

Clad in fresh, dry clothes, I crossed the tiny hall—really just a square of floor with four rooms opening into it—and pushed open the bathroom door, where I blinked in surprise and nearly jumped out of my own skin.

A young woman—not my sister—stood in my bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror over the pedestal sink. Her first name was Vanessa, if memory served, but I didn’t know her last name. I only knew she was one of Jake’s unSkilled computer geeks, and that Cam Caballero had been forced to recruit her for Tower after he killed the Binder who’d sealed her in service to Ruben Cavazos a couple of years earlier.

“Hey.” Van turned to smile at me. “I’m done, if you need in here.”

“Why are you in there in the first place?” I demanded. Then I noticed that she was wearing Kenley’s robe. And nothing else, if the lack of clothing lines beneath satin meant anything.

Kenley’s bedroom door opened behind me, and I turned to find my little sister staring at me, legs bare beneath one of the long T-shirts she usually slept in. “I thought you’d be out all day,” she said by way of explanation, and for a moment, neither of them moved. Obviously waiting for my reaction.

“So did I.” I squeezed past Vanessa to get into the bathroom. “And I would have been if some clumsy—” I stopped just in time and turned to Kenley with a frown. “Hey, if I accepted a dare to stop cussing for the next twenty-four hours, does that mean I can’t cuss at all, or just when I’m with the person who dared me?”

Kenley grinned for several seconds when she realized I wasn’t going to make a big deal about catching her in postcoital glow with her new friend. Then what I’d said sank in. “You agreed to stop cursing?” Suddenly she looked concerned. “What were the terms?”

“No terms. It’s not a contract…it’s just a stupid dare.” I ran water into the bathroom cup, then drained it in several gulps.

“Who dared you?” Van asked as they both followed me into the living room.

“It was Holt, wasn’t it?” Kenley said on her way into the kitchen as I pulled open the front closet and squatted in search of a dry pair of boots. “Why would you take that dare? How many times do I have to tell you that ‘Na na na boo-boo’ is not proper motivation for engaging in self-destructive behavior?”

“Where was that voice of reason half an hour ago?” I turned with my second-favorite pair of boots in hand to find Van and Kenley both blushing furiously, which explained exactly where they’d been half an hour ago. “I withdraw the question.”

“We were gonna make waffles. You want some?” Van asked, pulling a box of Bisquick from the cabinet over the toaster. And that’s when I realized this wasn’t her first visit.
I
didn’t even know where we kept the Bisquick.

“Waffles at two in the afternoon?”

Van shrugged. “It’s Saturday,” she said, like that should be explanation enough.

“Thanks, but I have to go meet Jake.”

“That should make this whole ‘no cussing’ thing interesting,” Kenley said, pulling a carton of eggs from the fridge. “At least it’s just a dare, and not a sealed oath.”

I stepped into my first boot. “What, you don’t think I can do it?”

My sister looked up at me from across the counter. “I think profanity is your native language. That makes it a hard habit to break.”

I thought about that as I brushed my hair and teeth. And I decided she was right.

I started to tell Kenley and Van that I was leaving, but sudden suspicious silence from the kitchen made my pulse spike in warning and drew me forward before I remembered that I was unarmed. But instead of an intruder, I found only my sister and her girlfriend, leaning against the counter in front of the steaming, hissing waffle iron, holding hands and just staring at each other.

It was so sweet I couldn’t stand to watch. So I backed up without drawing their attention and closed myself into my room again with the light off. A second later, I stepped into Jake’s darkroom. I hadn’t been there in two months, but I’d been hundreds of times in the past six years, and it still felt exactly the same. A little bigger than most of the darkrooms at his various other facilities, and a little colder. And as dark as a void, like space with no stars.

I started forward, my hand outstretched, and three steps later, my fingertips bumped the switch on the wall, next to the door. Light flared to life overhead and I squinted while my eyes adjusted. Then I pressed a button on the small full-color display set flush with the wall next to the door. Static appeared on the screen, and a moment later a familiar face replaced it.

“Kori?” Danny Larimore stared out at me from the screen. “What the hell are you doing? There’s a big red sign next to the monitor in here that says your darkroom privileges have been revoked. It’s laminated and everything.”

Which was why I didn’t have the key card that would have gotten me access to the rest of the house without having to deal with someone in the security room. “I know, but I have to talk to Jake. Buzz him if you need to. Tell him it’s about Ian Holt. He’ll tell you to let me in.”

“If this backfires and he decides to shoot the messenger, I’m comin’ in there to kick your ass.”

“Whatever.” I could take Larimore even unarmed. “Just buzz him.”

The screen lapsed into static again, and I filled the silence by running through the list of reasons I wouldn’t recruit Ian, if I had any choice. Then I started on the number of ways I could kill Jake Tower—if that wouldn’t be the worst strategic mistake in history.

I was up to boiling him alive in the blood of his own murder victims when Larimore appeared on-screen again. “He’s sending someone to escort you to his office.”

“I know the way.”

“And he knows
you.
Sit tight.” Then the screen went blank again, and again I was alone with my thoughts—a situation I found increasingly less comfortable with every occurrence.

A couple of minutes later, the door swung open into the hall, and David scowled at me, a strip of medical tape over his broken nose, dark bruises circling both eyes.

Great.

I stepped into the hall and the door swung closed behind me. David crossed both thick arms over his chest. “Make one suspicious movement, and I have permission to drop you where you stand.”

“I think we both know how well that worked out last time.” I turned to the right and headed for the staircase. “How pissed was Jake about you lying down on the job?”

David growled, and when I reached the top step, his footsteps stopped behind me. “You know, I could just kick you down the stairs and say you fell.”

I shrugged and turned to face him, careful not to grip the railing, which would make me look scared. “You could. And even if I don’t manage to take you down with me, I’d be dead at worst, hurt and pissed at the least. Either way, that leaves you to explain to Jake that with me out of the picture, he’s lost all the headway I’ve made recruiting Ian Holt. And you know how Jake deals with bad news.”

With that, I made myself walk down the stairs, trying not to look like I was worried about being shoved with every step. Because I knew from experience that logic doesn’t always trump anger and humiliation, and I’d fed David heaping helpings of both.

In the foyer, he grabbed my arm and pulled me close. “You look like you might be about to run off,” he said, and I realized this was a power play. He wanted to be seen hauling me through the house like he’d caught me making trouble. I wanted to laugh. His little show wouldn’t make the damage to his face look any better.

Jake’s office was just off the foyer, and when we got there, before David could knock on the double glass doors, I spun and pulled my arm from his grasp, then punched him in the nose. Again.

David howled, and blood poured from his face. Again. While a couple of housekeepers came running with disposable towels and bleach, I knocked on the door and waited for a response. When Jake called for me to come in, I pulled open both doors and stepped inside, while behind me, two women in simple black uniforms tried to staunch the flow of blood from David’s nose.

“What happened to your escort?” Jake asked as I pushed the door closed behind me.

“Ran into something.” I dropped into one of the chairs in front of his desk. “I bet he’d be a real hazard on white carpet.”

“Would your fist happen to be what he ran into?”

“Could be.” I pretended to examine the blood on my hand. “My knuckles are suddenly sore.”

Jake chuckled, and I exhaled silently in relief. “I always could count on you to test the weak points in my security.” He handed me a wet wipe from the carton on his desk and I scrubbed the blood from my knuckles, then tossed the tissue into the gas fireplace, where he incinerated it with one press of a remote control button.

There would be no consequence for busting David’s nose. No consequence for me, anyway, because Jake was in a good mood. Or because he was already pissed at David. Or maybe because his horoscope said he’d find humor in unexpected places today.

As for David… He’d been taken down two days in a row by an unarmed women five inches shorter and eighty pounds lighter. That meant he wasn’t pulling his weight. I wouldn’t be surprised if he found himself on much lighter duty in the very near future.

Jake leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “I assume you’re here to report that Holt is eating out of your hands?”

I shrugged. “Well, he hasn’t bitten off my fingers yet, so it’s looking pretty good.”

“Does he like you?”

“Yeah, I think he does. But I’m actually here to report something else. Cavazos made a play for him this morning. Two low-level musclemen in broad daylight. It was insulting.”

Jake frowned. “On the west side?”

I nodded. “Less than half a mile from the hotel.”

“Casualties?”

“None. Like I said, they were in over their heads. It looks like they found out where he was staying and waited for him to show up on the street. They may even be recon guys who just saw an opportunity and grabbed it. Cavazos will try again, though, and the next team will be more competent. I need a weapon, Jake.”

“No, you don’t. Cavazos won’t send anyone he can’t afford to lose past the river, so just stay out of the east side.” Jake’s brows rose in challenge. “Or should I assign David to protect you?”

“I don’t know, he’s kind of delicate,” I said. “I’d hate for him to get hurt again.”