Oath Bound (Unbound) - By Rachel Vincent Page 0,14

as I clicked off the safety.

Olivia shouted harder, shaking her head, her face red with the effort, but Wallace didn’t look worried. He wasn’t prepared to actually shoot Olivia, because he didn’t think I’d pull the trigger. He kept not-thinking that until the moment I shot him in the forehead, and his brains sprayed the wall at his back.

The first thing I heard was the thunk of his body hitting the floor.

Olivia gasped, and the sound was as sharp as a scream after such heavy, unnatural silence. She scrambled away from the dead man and stood, gaping at me. “You could have hit me, you asshole!”

“Give me a little credit, Liv.” I hadn’t missed anything I’d aimed at in the past decade. “Kori learned to shoot from me. Remember?”

“Kenley?” Liv grabbed a dusty white doily from the nearest end table and pressed it to her bleeding forehead.

“They got her. Dragged her out through the shadows, right in front of me.” My baby sister was gone, and I felt her absence like a gaping hole in my own heart. I’d lost her, but I would damn well get her back. “Was it the Tower bitch?”

“That’s my guess.” She stomped into the kitchen and started rooting around under the sink, presumably looking for bleach, or something else that would destroy the blood she’d spilled to keep it from being used against her.

I popped the clip from the grip of my gun and replaced the spent round with an extra from my pocket. Something told me I was going to need them all. “Where would they take her?”

“No idea. Cam might know. Or Kori.” Because they’d both served in the Tower syndicate.

Olivia already had her phone out, but she looked up when I pulled the drapes closed in the living room, blood boiling in my veins. “Where are you going?” she demanded a second before I would have stepped into the darkness.

“To get Kenley.” I wasn’t sure what the Towers had done to Kori when she was locked up, but I could not let that happen to Kenni. “Tell the others I’ll be right back.” Then I stepped into the shadows, leaving Olivia gaping at the space I’d just vacated.

A single step later, my foot hit the floor in Jake Tower’s darkroom. Only now it was Julia Tower’s darkroom. I’d never been there before—the one time I’d been in Tower’s house, I’d come in through the basement, after Kori shot a hole in the infrared grid built into the ceiling—but I’d mentally scouted it out a million times in the past six years. Every time I’d briefly considered simply charging into the heart of Tower’s empire and demanding my sisters’ freedom.

I’d never been stupid enough to actually go through with such an asinine plan.

Until now.

For the span of four heartbeats, I stood alone in the enemy’s darkroom, breathing. Thinking. Steeling myself. If I pressed the intercom button, the man in the security control room would see me with the infrared camera mounted in one corner of the ceiling. Then he’d press a button, and toxic gas would be pumped in through one of the vents overhead. I’d die in a pool of my own blood. Or vomit. Or both.

So instead, I felt for the light switch by the door—thank you, Kori, for the inside information—and flipped it up. Light flooded the tiny room from a fluorescent strip overhead.

The monitor built into the wall buzzed to life and a man’s face appeared on the screen, frowning at me.

I shot the monitor.

I shot the camera in the corner of the ceiling.

Then I turned away from the door without compromising my aim and shot the door lock—absent knob—once, twice. On the third try, as the hiss of air overhead told me my extermination had begun, the lock exploded and shrapnel sprayed my jacket, but the lack of pain told me none of the metal pieces had penetrated the leather. The door swung open two inches.

The alarm sounded as I stepped into the hall, scraping the insides of my skull raw while I tried to remember everything Kori had ever told me about the layout of Tower’s house.

Second floor. Employee’s wing. To the left are unused bedrooms and the path to the family wing.

I turned left, just as two men rounded the corner toward me, guns drawn. I squeezed off two shots, and both men went down with blood roses blooming on their abdomens. I could have shot again, but they were no threat, bleeding on the