Oath Bound (Unbound) - By Rachel Vincent Page 0,45

without a word.

I started to follow—if they were gonna argue about me, I had a right to hear—but Vanessa put a hand on my arm. “I wouldn’t,” she said.

“Well, I would. They don’t need a private powwow to decide what to do with me, because it’s not their decision. I’m leaving.”

“No, you aren’t,” Hadley said from the living room, and Vanessa tried to hide a smile.

“The hell I’m not. Unless personal liberty was suspended while I wasn’t watching, you can’t hold me here against my will.”

Vanessa laughed, and I turned to glare at her. “I’m sorry.” She made an obvious struggle to banish her smile. “It’s just painfully obvious that you’ve never spent any time in a Skilled syndicate. Or even near one.” Van turned to Ian. “She’s no threat. She’s more clueless than we ever were.”

I frowned, one hand on the back of the chair I’d just vacated. “I feel like I should be offended by that, but you seem to be the only one seeing reason. Kind of.”

“Sera,” Ian said, and I turned to look at him, surprised all over again by the quiet dignity he embodied, in contrast to Kris and Kori, and the explosive nature of their sibling relationship. “I know you have no reason to trust me yet, but please believe me when I tell you that no one in the city has less desire to hold you prisoner than Kori.”

There was more to that, but I knew better than to ask. “What about Kris?”

“Kris is acting weird,” Anne admitted, pouring coffee from the pot into a clean mug. “He usually returns people to wherever they belong. You may be the first he’s kept.”

Before I could figure out what to say to that, Gran sank into the chair Kori had vacated, wiping her hands on a dish towel, and smiled up at me. “Hello, hon,” she said as if she’d just noticed me for the first time. “Are you a friend of Nikki’s?”

“Who’s Nikki?” How many more people could they possibly fit into the House of Crazy?

Ian sat in Kris’s chair. “Nikki was her daughter. Kori, Kenley and Kris’s mother.” He turned to her. “Gran, Nikki died a long time ago. Remember? And you raised her children?”

“Yes, of course I know that,” she snapped, though the confusion never cleared from her eyes. “Kenley gets straight A’s. Kori gets suspended.”

“What about Kris?” I wasn’t sure why I cared, and I only realized after the fact that I was probably contributing to her confusion.

“Kris is a good boy. Spends too much time in his room alone, though. Gonna give himself carpal tunnel, and I don’t mean from typing.”

Ian tried to hide a chuckle, but I laughed out loud. I couldn’t help it. And I really hoped she was remembering the past, rather than the present.

The past. I sat up straight, surprised by the sudden realization that Gran wasn’t living in some fantasy world, she was living in her own past, when her daughter was alive. So, who were the kids she’d mentioned when I’d first met her? If Nikki was real, surely they were real, too. Did Kris, Kori and Kenley have other siblings they hadn’t mentioned? Cousins? Could I piece together an understanding of their lives by filling in the blanks in their grandmother’s memory?

As bad as I felt for Gran and her dementia, it was good to know I wasn’t the only one unsure of who I really was and what I was doing in that house. I was starting to believe the Daniels family and their friends were almost as messed up as I was.

Six

Kris

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Kori shoved pale blond hair back from her face as I closed my bedroom door behind us. “She’s not a threat. We have to let her go.”

“Not yet. She may know something about Kenley.”

“She doesn’t.” My sister sank onto the end of my unmade bed, her eyes even darker than usual with exhaustion. And fear for Kenley. And probably anger at me. “Sera was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that got her kidnapped by some jackass who follows his dick as if it points true north.”

“It’s not like that—”

Kori rolled her eyes. “Don’t even try it. I see the way you look at her, but you can’t keep her just because you want her, and the longer you try, the more she’ll hate you.”

“I’m not looking at her in any particular way.” I wasn’t going to deny that