Oath Bound (Unbound) - By Rachel Vincent Page 0,115

get out of here!”

Kori blinked, stunned. Then she glanced at me and backed slowly toward the door.

“If Sera goes in there and her plan falls apart—hell, even if it doesn’t fall apart—they’ll use every weapon at their disposal to break her. And her weak spot is pretty fucking obvious.” Her hand found the doorknob and one foot landed over the threshold in the hall. “She needs to deal with that shit before she goes in there, or they’re going to rip her heart out and serve it on crackers.”

With that, she stomped past Ian into the hall and out of sight.

“I’m sorry,” he said, when she was gone. “She really does mean well. And she speaks from experience you can’t even...” He stopped and studied me for a minute. “Well, maybe you can imagine. Her approach was wrong, but her heart’s in the right place. She really was trying to help.”

I couldn’t quite bring myself to accept his apology, in part because it wasn’t his to give. But his point lingered. And I suspected he was right—they both were. Not that I was eager to go home again. That house was haunted, if not by ghosts, then by memories. By loss. And if I couldn’t face my own memories, how the hell was I supposed to face down Julia Tower?

Seventeen

Kris

“You sure you want to do this now?” I slid the full clip into place in the handle of the .40 Sera had confiscated from Mitch. “You’re entitled to a break, you know.”

The warm, early fall breeze blew a long dark strand of hair across Sera’s forehead. “Screw that.” She pulled a rubber band from her pocket and secured her hair in a casual ponytail at the base of her skull, then laid her palm over the gun I’d set in front of her, barrel aimed down our makeshift firing range—a card table in the backyard, fifty feet from a fresh paper target tacked to an old, dead oak tree. “Sitting around thinking about what can’t be changed won’t help. I need something to do. I need to do this.”

“No one expects you to get over everything you’ve been through just like that.” I pressed the last 9 mm round into the clip for the gun I’d borrowed from my sister.

“Kori does.”

“She doesn’t expect you to get over it. She expects you to deal with it. She’s not over all the shit she’s been through, either.”

“I know.” Sera watched as a brown rabbit hopped from a clump of overgrown bushes toward the woods at the edge of the property. I loved that we were far enough from downtown to have rabbits, at least until we scared them off with gunfire. “She has nightmares. Loud ones.”

“They’re getting better.”

Sera turned away from the tree line to frown at me, squinting into the sun. “That’s better?”

I nodded and picked up an extra clip next to the pistol on the table in front of me. “She hasn’t tried to gut anyone in her sleep in, like, a month.”

She thought I was kidding. I could tell from her exasperated expression. I decided to let her think that. And to warn her away from Kori and Ian’s room after dark.

“So, what happened with Ned the other day?” I said as I pressed the first round into the extra 9 mm clip. “You just freed him, with no clause to make sure he could never hurt you? Why would you do that? Especially after what you’ve already been through?”

She stared at the table, considering for a second before she answered. “It never occurred to me that he’d want to hurt me. I’d just set him free. I thought he’d be happy!”

“I’m sure he was.” I huffed. “He was a happy threat.”

“I’m not...wired that way.” She shrugged. “I don’t look at the rest of the population and see seven billion threats. I can’t live in a world where everyone’s my enemy. For my own sanity, I need to believe the monster who killed my family is just that. A monster. An aberration.”

“He is. But he’s not the only one.”

“I know, but...” She looked up at me, frowning. “I don’t understand how you can stand it, seeing enemies everywhere you look.”

“I don’t see them everywhere, but I am constantly aware that they exist, and that’s particularly true for you. Julia wants you dead, so all her people are your enemies. If Ruben Cavazos finds out who you are and that you’re here, he’ll want you in custody. That means that