Oath Bound (Unbound) - By Rachel Vincent Page 0,133

minutes.

I jogged up three flights of stairs and made a mental note to stop ignoring cardio in favor of weight training—sometimes, even a Traveler has to run. And if Sera decided she wasn’t done with me after one night, cardiovascular stamina would certainly come in handy.

I paused on the landing to catch my breath. And double-check my clip. Fully loaded, with one round in the chamber. Then I found the door to apartment 4C, halfway down the hall.

If I’d ever been there before, or was more than passingly familiar with the area, I could have Traveled right into the apartment itself, assuming the Curtis brothers had left any of their lights off. But since I wasn’t, and this was an important job, I’d decided to play it safe and check the place out before popping in unannounced.

From the hall, I could hear no sound coming from 4C, but then, most of the building’s residents were probably still sleeping. So I closed my eyes and felt for a dark pocket within.

The whole damn place was dark. So dark I knew the Curtises were either completely unSkilled, or not at home.

I closed my eyes and shadow-walked into the living room. A single step later, my shin smashed into something hard, and I cursed in the darkness. Then cursed silently over my own stupidity.

Something clicked, and a single bright light flared to life, momentarily blinding me. Something moved on my left, but I couldn’t focus on it.

I pulled my gun, blinking furiously, but couldn’t see to aim. “Who’s there?”

“Who do you think?” an unfamiliar voice asked. And as my eyes began to adjust, a man came into focus on the floor, his head slumped forward, sitting in a puddle of his own blood.

Chase Alexander Curtis sat next to him, bound and gagged with duct tape—the dead man could only be his brother. I raised my aim to his chest, and his eyes widened in fear. Desperate, inarticulate sounds came from behind his gag. The smiling man was no longer smiling.

Unfortunately, his terror wasn’t directed at me. Curtis was looking over my shoulder.

Chill bumps popped up on my arms and dread churned in my stomach. But before I could turn to see what he was so scared of, pain slammed into my skull, and the room spun around me. I fought the loss of consciousness, but darkness surrounded me from the periphery, a betrayal by the very element I was born to embrace.

The last thing I saw before my eyes closed against my will was the woman’s hand that plucked my gun from my grip.

Twenty

Sera

The ringing of a cell phone woke me up, and it took me a second to realize I wasn’t hearing my own ringtone. And one more second to remember I no longer had a cell phone. After that, everything else came crashing in, and for a moment, my loss—that fresh remembrance of it—was too thick to breathe through. As it was most mornings.

When I’d pushed it all back again, back into memory, where the pain was manageable, I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp, but Kris’s phone stopped ringing before I could answer it. The screen showed one missed call, from Anne.

Kris. He’d been in my bed. Or rather, I was in his.

I twisted, but I knew from the lack of warmth on my left side that he was gone before my gaze ever fell on the empty half of the bed. Still, the memory of the night before surged through me—shared grief, comfort through touch, and a mutual pleasure so perfect that in that instant, nothing else had existed. No pain. No fear. No memories. There’d been nothing but the two of us, and in that moment, I’d been sure we could actually be together. That maybe we were supposed to be together.

But now he was gone, and the bed was cold.

I glanced at the alarm clock and groaned over the numbers—it was barely five in the morning—then stretched to turn the lamp off again, when what I really wanted to do was pull on a bare minimum of clothing and tiptoe downstairs to curl up on the couch with Kris. But if he’d gone downstairs, he’d gone downstairs for a reason.

So I burrowed farther into the covers and closed my eyes. But sleep didn’t return.

Kris’s phone rang again, less than two minutes after the first missed call. I picked it up and scowled when I read Anne’s name on the screen again. Why was she calling