Oath Bound. Rachel Vincent
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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 floor, and I’d probably need all my ammo.
To the right, the stairs lead to the foyer, my sister said in my memory.
I turned right and jogged down the stairs while the alarm repeatedly skewered my brain, and I took out two more guards on my way down. I’d aimed to disable, not kill, but I had no time to check my accuracy. By the time I hit the floor, doors were flying open. People were pouring into the two-story foyer.
My heart thumping in my ears, and on the lookout for more guards, I scanned the shocked, growing crowd, but didn’t find the face I was looking for. Julia’s.
“Everyone over there!” I shouted over the alarm, directing Tower’s confused employees away from the front door, toward the atrium at the center of the house, its entrance nestled between the two mirror-image staircases.
Startled men and women in suits followed my directions, but most of them didn’t look truly scared. They saw guns on a daily basis, and once the rest of the security team arrived, I would be both outnumbered and outgunned.
“Where’s Julia Tower?” I demanded. No one answered, but several people glanced at a frosted-glass door to my left. The only one that hadn’t opened when the alarm went off.
I backed toward the closed door, adrenaline pumping through my veins, still aiming at the small crowd, but before I could reach for the knob, the door swung open on its own.
Inside, three women stared out at me in various stages of shock, fear and anger. I recognized Lynn Tower immediately, her hand still on the doorknob, and I dismissed her almost as quickly. She wasn’t a threat, nor would she have the information I needed.
Julia stood behind the desk, telephone in hand, halfway to her ear.
I aimed at her, and she froze.
“Where’s my sister?” I shouted, still competing with the alarm, but Julia only smiled. She knew I couldn’t kill her until I had the information I’d come for.
Then the third woman turned in front of the desk to look at me, blocking my aim at Julia. Her eyes were wide and green, her features delicate. She held her hands out at her sides, showing me she was unarmed.
“What’s the problem?” She rounded the chair slowly to stand in front of me and the yellow scarf draped loosely over her shoulders caught my gaze and refused to let go. “Who are you looking for?”
I could hardly hear her over the alarm, and my brain didn’t process a single thing she’d said, because in my mind, I heard another voice, speaking to me from my own past.
Take the woman in the yellow scarf.
Someone, somewhere pressed a button, and the alarm died, though it still echoed deep inside my head.
“Why don’t you put the gun down, and we can work this out,” the woman in the scarf said, slowly walking toward me. She looked scared, but calm. Determined.
“Sera …” Lynn Tower backed away as the woman in the scarf approached.
Sera. The woman in the yellow scarf.
“It’s okay,” Sera said, and I backed away from her in shock, one step for each of hers, my gun aimed right at her. But I wouldn’t shoot her. I couldn’t. I needed her, though I wasn’t sure why. Was she supposed to help me get Kenley back? Was she a hostage? An informant? A lieutenant in the Tower army?
Was that even possible for someone so young?
“Freeze!” someone shouted, and I looked up to find three of Tower’s guards aiming large guns at me from the center of the foyer.
My guts twisted into knots while I waited for gunfire, and there was nothing for me to do but hold my aim. This was a fool’s errand from the beginning, but I wasn’t fool enough to let go of my gun.
“Stop!”