him. Assuming Cavazos doesn’t find him first.”
Mitch squirmed in his chair.
“Okay.” Sera shrugged. “Then I’ll just break his binding.”
“Hell, no.” Mitch stood, as if he actually had somewhere to go. “You may as well pass out guns and paint a target on my back. Didn’t you get the memo pinned to Ned’s chest?” He ran one hand through his hair. “That’s Julia’s way of saying she’ll kill whoever you set free.”
I shrugged. “So run.” I turned back to Sera with a frown. “That’s where we went wrong with Ned—we left him handcuffed to the fridge, like a sitting duck.” Not that ducks had hands. “Of course, if I’d known you’d broken his binding, I would have given the poor guy a running start.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” she insisted, her gaze silently pleading with me to understand. “I thought...” She let her words trail off when she realized Mitch was still listening, but we all knew what she’d thought, and we all understood why. She’d had no reason to trust us not to kill her or use her as a bargaining chip, if and when we found out how valuable she was.
I hated that I’d given her reason to think that.
“It doesn’t matter.” I made a mental note to reassure her of her safety later, away from stranger’s ears. Hopefully in private, where I could tell her other things that still needed to be said.
“Okay.” It was a struggle for me to pull my thoughts back on target. “You cut him loose and we’ll give him a head start. A Traveler can be hundreds of miles away by the time Julia finds out he’s gone.”
Mitch started to object again, and I turned on him, rapidly losing my patience. “You won’t be a priority. She probably won’t even bother looking for you, with us still out here wreaking havoc.”
“Bullshit!” Mitch’s eyes were wide, his nose crinkled in a bizarre display of fear.
“Sit,” Sera said, and he sat reluctantly, then scooted his chair closer to the table and leaned with his elbows on it, watching us all.
“She’ll look for me and she’ll find me, because her other Travelers can move just as fast as I can. And I will be a priority, because Jake taught her how to do business. She has to kill me, or everyone else will think Sera can be their savior. Which is exactly why she’s killed most of the people your dumb-ass sister set free.”
“What?” My stomach sank into my heels, weighing me down. Julia had killed the people Kenley had freed? “Do you know that for a fact? They’re dead?”
“Not all of them.” He turned to Kori, sitting on the edge of his chair as if he still wanted to stand, and his next words carried special, bitter weight. “A couple of them are still in the basement, wishing they were dead. In front of a live studio audience.” Then he turned back to Sera. “She’s going to hunt down everyone you set free until you stop doing it or she gets to you, just like she got to Kenley. And you’re a bigger fool than I can even comprehend if you don’t believe that.”
Sixteen
Sera
“She killed them?” The words echoed in my head long after they’d left my tongue. They resonated in my bones and churned in my stomach, urging my dinner to stage a revolt.
“Only the lucky ones.” Kori took the whiskey bottle back from Ian and sank onto one of the bar stools at the kitchen peninsula.
“You mean we’ve been making it worse?” Kris leaned with his elbows on the table, his arms tense, his brow deeply furrowed. “All that time and effort trying to fix things, and we were really just getting people killed?”
“What the hell were we expecting?” Kori rotated her stool so that she faced us, her grip on the neck of the bottle so tight her fingers had turned white. “That Julia would just pout and shrug, then go on with her life? She can’t afford to let us beat her, and she certainly can’t afford for people to know we beat her. This is our fault.”
“No, it isn’t,” I insisted. “You were doing the only thing you could do. The right thing.” The same thing I’d tried to do for Ned. But then, that hadn’t worked out very well, either.
“Right is irrelevant.” Kori twisted the lid from the bottle again. “It’s just a word. Or do you really believe it’s better to be dead than alive but enslaved?” But before