Oath Bound (Unbound) - By Rachel Vincent Page 0,79
dark skin.
“He’ll live.” Kori closed her laptop without turning it off, then leaned back in the desk chair. “Gran got him all patched up and gave him something for the pain.”
“I hope you double-checked the dosage.” Gran only remembered what decade she was living in about half the time, and as much help as she was as a triage nurse—with forty years’ real-world experience—on her bad days, she was as likely to overdose you as underdose you.
“I did.” Kori waved one hand at the closed laptop. “Thank goodness for the internet, slow though the connection is. I wanted to call Meghan.” Ian’s sister-in-law was a Healer. “But he wouldn’t let me. He says he can’t drag Steve and Meg into any more danger, at least until his brother’s fully healed.”
“I can respect that.” And Kori could, too. I could tell from how she was just frustrated, rather than actually angry. Ian’s brother had hovered on the edge of death for weeks, resisting a binding that had been sealed using Kenley’s blood without her knowledge. A few months earlier, Ian had been willing to kill Kenni to break the binding and save his brother. But then he met Kori, and now he was practically family. The brother I’d never had. He’d fought for my sisters when I couldn’t be there.
I owed him more than I could ever possibly repay.
“Has Van had any luck ID-ing Sera’s family?”
Kori shook her head. “I don’t think she’s actually looking anymore. Since the two of you came back with that scrap of intel, she’s been exhausting every resource trying to figure out what warehouse Julia moved the blood farm into.”
“At least that’s keeping her mind occupied.” Which was more than I’d managed for myself. “Try to get some sleep, Kor. We’ll find Kenni tomorrow.” Or die trying.
On my way down the hall, I stopped in front of the door to my former room out of habit and had one hand on the doorknob before I remembered it wasn’t my room anymore. I stood there for a minute, thinking about Sera, and how much we still didn’t know about her. About how badly I wanted to trust her. How badly I wanted her to trust me. But in the two days since we’d met, I’d nearly gotten her killed several times—it was a miracle she didn’t run when she saw me coming.
But then, I had yet to see her run from anything.
She could have taken the coward’s way out tonight. She could have told me to shoot Ned the guard, which would have kept her off of Julia’s radar. Or, as close to off the radar as possible, for someone who’d survived being shot at by Tower’s goons three times in less than two days.
Instead, she’d let Ned live and exposed herself as our ally, damning her to be hunted alongside us.
Why would she do that? We would have helped her hunt the bastard who’d killed her family either way.
When I finally lay down on the couch with the pillow I’d stolen from my own bed while she was in the shower, I couldn’t get Sera out of my mind. Every time I closed my eyes, she was there, but the mental picture was never what I expected. Instead of a self-indulgent memory of her standing naked at the foot of my bed, I kept seeing her as she’d looked the day we met, in Tower’s foyer, when her reckless bravery had nearly gotten us both killed.
After an hour and a half of staring at the muted television—any noise from the TV was guaranteed to wake Gran, even though she would have slept through World War III itself—I gave up and headed into the kitchen to nuke a cup of hot chocolate.
Armed with my steaming mug, I sat at the table with Elle’s notebook and started flipping through the pages again, looking for new meaning in old words. Hoping that Ned’s sliver of information would fit in with something I’d long ago forgotten I’d ever written.
“That stuff is crap in a mug,” Sera said, and I thought I’d imagined her voice—wishful thinking—until I looked up to find her standing in the kitchen doorway, in Kori’s robe.
“We have to get you some new clothes.” I flipped the notebook shut. “Preferably something neither of my sisters ever wore.”
“Why?” She glanced down at the robe, which hung open to reveal a snug tank top and shorts so short I didn’t want to know which sister they belonged to. “Kori wants