Ten
Ian
I don’t know why I asked her that. It wasn’t fair. And it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t going to sign with Tower. Kori and I would never work together.
The damn dare was a mistake, too. If she won, I’d have to present her with a bottle of vodka, right around the time I killed her sister, like some kind of morbid condolence for the crime I’d committed. I’d be lucky if she didn’t beat me to death with it.
What the hell are you doing, Ian?
When Kori was gone, I glanced at my watch, then picked up my cell phone. Aaron answered on the second ring. “Hello?” he croaked into the phone, and springs creaked as he rolled over in bed.
“Get up. I need a lift.”
“Night shift, man. I gotta get more sleep.”
“This is the only chance I’m going to have, and I have to be back in two hours. Get dressed.”
More springs creaked, and Aaron groaned. “Where are you?”
I gave him the hotel’s address and the room number, then hung up. Five minutes later, the bathroom door creaked open and Aaron padded into the living room of my hotel suite in huge, dog-shaped slippers and a pair of navy boxer briefs.
“Where the hell are your pants?”
Aaron shrugged. “You said you were in a hurry, so I rushed right over.”
“Did anyone see you?”
Aaron scowled on his way to the minibar. “Do I look like an idiot?” When I only glanced at his slippers, he rolled his eyes. “Do I normally look like an idiot?” Before I could answer, he knelt in front of the minibar and opened the fridge. “I need a drink.”
I slammed the fridge closed. “You can make coffee when we get there. There’s a robe hanging on the back of the bathroom door.”
Aaron put the robe on, then stepped into the bathroom while I pulled my phone from my pocket and autodialed Meghan’s number. “Ian? Why isn’t it done?” she said into my ear, after only a ring and a half.
My eyes closed. Of course she knew it wasn’t over. She’d be able to feel it when the binding was broken. “Turn off the light. We’re coming over.”
Meghan hung up without a reply, and Aaron turned the bathroom light off as I pushed the door closed. He took my arm, bared by the sleeve I’d rolled up, and a second later we stepped into another bathroom thirty miles away, in the suburbs.
This bathroom felt familiar, even with the lights off. It smelled like fruit-scented shampoo, bleach and the slightly scorched scent of every scrap of blood-soaked material that had ever been burned in the old-fashioned iron tub. When I stepped forward and reached for the light switch, my foot landed on ceramic tile, not as old as the tub, but older than I was, by several years. The tile was yellow, like the wallpaper exposed when I flipped the switch and let the light in.
The floors in the rest of the house were real wood, scarred from use and warped in places from the spills and drips of three generations. Aaron and Meghan had grown up here, as had their mother. This house was as safe a rendezvous point as any other, and a good deal safer than Aaron’s apartment in the city.
Meghan stepped out of a bedroom and into the hall, pulling the door closed behind her. She waved us into the living room without a word, and she didn’t even seem to notice that her brother wasn’t wearing pants.
We followed her down the hall, through the living room, and into the small eat-in kitchen, where Meghan sank into a chair at the table and scrubbed her face with both hands. Long brown hair tumbled over her shoulders, and Aaron paused to set one hand on her head—a wordless, comforting gesture—on his way to the coffeepot.
“How is he?” I asked, and I regretted being the one to break the silence before the words had even fallen from my tongue.
“No better. A little worse, maybe,” Meghan said, and for the first time in more than two weeks, the exhaustion in her voice outweighed the accusation. She couldn’t do this for much longer. Not on her own. But it would be over soon, one way or another. If I couldn’t kill Kenley Daniels and break the binding, he wouldn’t last much longer anyway.
But no one wanted things to end like that, least of all me.
“Can I see him?”
“I don’t want to wake him up. He doesn’t sleep much anymore.” Meghan sighed, and the weight of the world slipped a little on her shoulders. “What happened?” she said, as Aaron filled the pot and poured water into the reservoir. And the accusation that was absent from her voice found its way to her eyes, where it simmered quietly, waiting for the moment to flare into true flames and roast me alive.
I sank onto the chair opposite her and rubbed one hand over my head, trying to decide where to start. A minute later, the scent of coffee drew my thoughts into some semblance of focus. “Remember my brilliant plan to get Kenley Daniels assigned as my tour guide-slash-recruiter for the duration of my visit?”
“I take it that plan’s proven less than brilliant in hindsight?” Aaron took a mug down from the cabinet and leaned against the countertop as the machine spit the first drops of coffee into the carafe.
“I stand by the simple brilliance of the plan. The flaw is in the execution. Kenley has an older sister who fits the same general physical description.” Though the more I got to know Kori, the less she looked like her sister, at least to me.
Aaron turned with the pot in hand. “Korinne Daniels is Kenley’s sister?”
“Who’s Korinne Daniels?” Meghan said, glancing from her brother to me, then back.
“Tower’s guard dog bitch. But she’s dead.” Aaron glanced at me with both brows raised. “Didn’t we already determine that? Every source we spoke to said the same thing.”
I shrugged. “She’s a little less dead than the rumors indicated.”
“You got the wrong sister?” Meghan demanded, and I nodded.
“The same thing happened to Jacob in the Old Testament,” Aaron said. “He worked seven years to earn Rachel’s hand in marriage and got her sister Leah instead. That poor fool then worked another seven years just to earn Rachel as his second wife. If you think about it like that, you got a bargain.”
“This isn’t the Old Testament, Aaron,” Meghan snapped.
Aaron poked the pause button on the coffeepot and filled his mug without turning. “All that means is that Ian’s not gonna get to bed both sisters.”
Her fist clenched around the edge of the table. “This isn’t funny!”
“Maybe not ‘ha, ha’ funny, but we’re in some pretty deep shit here, sis, and if we lose our sense of humor, what do we have left?” Aaron said as he poured dried creamer into his cup.
“Nothing.” Meghan folded her hands on the tabletop, but she couldn’t keep them from twisting, as if her fingers were trying to tear each other apart. “I’ll have nothing left, without Steven.”
Aaron frowned over the implication that he meant nothing to his sister, but we both knew that wasn’t what she’d intended. She was too tired to think clearly.
A moan echoed from behind the bedroom door Meghan had closed, and I stood, but her hand landed on my arm. Her fingers were cold, her skin was pale, and her eyes were damp, but she never hesitated. “Let me.”
I started to argue, but Aaron shook his head at me over her shoulder, and I sank back into my chair as she crossed the living room toward the hall again. “She needs to do this,” he whispered, once his sister was out of sight.
“If Steven wakes up to find her dead of exhaustion, he’ll kill us both,” I said, and Aaron gave a bitter laugh, no doubt picturing Steven just as I was. Healthy, happy, in good humor, and willing to slay any dragon for Meghan.
“It’s your job to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Aaron said, sinking into his sister’s chair with one dog-slippered foot crossed over the opposite knee, the hotel robe gaping over his thin chest. “So what’s this Leah like? Is she going to be a problem?”
“Her name is Kori. She’s smart, but she doesn’t know it. She’s funny, but I don’t think she knows that, either.” I shrugged, trying not to see her in my mind, a little frightened to realize I could picture her with almost perfect recall, down to the freckle on her left cheek, about an inch in front of her ear. “She’s a little thin, but she makes one hell of a temptation. Which is exactly what Tower’s paying her to be.” The carrot dangled in front of the ass, guiding him toward the farmer ready to put him to work.
Naturally I was the ass.
“Well, that’s more than I asked for.” Aaron’s brows rose, like he’d heard more than what I’d actually said. “Can you use her?”
“Do I have any other choice? I’m almost twenty hours into this mission and the only time I’ve even been in the same room with the target is when I shook her hand at that damned party, in front of two hundred other people.”
Aaron shrugged and sipped from his cup, then swore beneath his breath when he burned his mouth. “That’s an easy fix. Just tell Leah—”
“It’s Kori,” I corrected again, leaning back in my chair.
“Fine. Tell Kori that you want to meet some of your future associates. Have her get a group together. If she’s any kind of sister at all, she’ll invite Kenley, and you can get her alone and put a bullet in her head. Problem solved.” He leaned back in the chair, cradling his coffee and looking quite satisfied with himself.
An unexpected flash of anger licked the base of my spine. He wouldn’t be so indifferent if we were discussing shooting his sister.
“Yeah, that might work,” I snapped. “If not for the fact that Kenley is under twenty-four-hour guard, to prevent exactly the kind of idiotic plan you just rattled off. I might be able to put a bullet in her, but not without taking a few myself.”
Dying for the cause was the worst-case scenario, and things hadn’t gotten quite that bad yet.
“Oh, right. You wanted to survive.” Aaron shrugged and blew over the top of his mug. “So what are you going to do?”
“The fastest, easiest solution I’ve come up with is to get Kori to bring her sister along on a tour of Jake’s side of town. Surely Tower will let her come without her usual bodyguard, since Kori has security experience and more motivation than anyone to make sure Kenley is safe.”
But when I thought about that for too long, I started feeling nauseated. This wasn’t some armed, hostile insurgent or terrorist. We were talking about killing someone’s little sister.
Kori’s little sister.
That part shouldn’t have bothered me any more than the rest, but it did. In fact, the more time I spent with her, the more the whole thing bothered me. But if I didn’t kill Kenley, Steven would die, and if she refused to give up on him, Meghan would die with him.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to shoot her in her sleep?”
“Yeah. If I knew where she slept. But that’s the bit of classified information Kori is least likely to give up.”
“Maybe so, but she’s not going to let you near her sister—even in broad daylight—until she trusts you completely. Can you make that happen?”
“I think we’re almost there.” I glanced at my hands, suddenly wishing I’d poured some coffee, too, so I’d have something to do with them.
Aaron set his mug down and cleared his throat to catch my attention. When I glanced at him, he frowned, studying me. “No, Ian,” he said, finally.
“No, what?”
“You know what. I know that look.”
“What look?”
“That look that says you’ve found a wounded puppy and you want to nurse it back to health. And keep it, like that dog that got hit in front of your house when we were kids.”
“That wasn’t me, that was Steven.”
“Bullshit. It was you,” Aaron insisted, and I didn’t bother arguing. “Korinne Daniels is no wounded puppy, Ian. She’s a fucking Doberman, and she’ll rip your throat out if she finds out what you’re really doing here.”
I forced a laugh. “I was in the marines, and you don’t think I can take a one-hundred-pound woman in a fight?”
“I think you won’t fight her, because you want to keep her, but she is not a fucking puppy, Ian. You can’t have her, you can’t keep her, and you sure as hell can’t let her get in the way of what you’re doing here.”
“I know.” But I also knew that Kori didn’t deserve what was coming. Neither of them did. I scrubbed both hands over my face, yet couldn’t scrub away the guilt.
Aaron set his coffee on the table. “Don’t lose sight of the goal here, Ian.”
“You don’t think I should feel bad about shooting her little sister?”
Aaron eyed me sternly. “Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t overthink it, and do not get emotionally involved. You’re here to save your brother’s life, and keep my sister from killing herself by trying to save him. I’m as sorry as I can be for your girlfriend’s impending loss—it’s the same loss you and I are both facing right now—but let’s not forget that this whole thing is Kenley Daniels’s fault in the first place.”
“I know.”
“And it’s not like Korinne is a Girl Scout, either. She’s got blood on her hands.”
“So do I.”
Aaron growled in frustration. “You killed men with guns, to keep them from killing anyone else. She killed people who got into Tower’s way. There’s a big fucking difference, Ian.”
Maybe.
Kori and I had fought in different wars, but I wasn’t naive enough to believe that her life in the syndicate was any less a battle than what I’d seen overseas.
“Look, we can argue about this all day if you want, but that’s not going to change the facts. Kenley Daniels has to die to keep your brother and my sister alive. Where does your loyalty lie, Ian? With your own flesh and blood, and friends you’ve known your whole life? Or with a woman you met yesterday?”
“Here. My loyalty is here. Why else would I be here?” Steven and I had had our problems over the years, but I couldn’t let him die, and that would have been true even if it wasn’t my use of his name that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. He was my brother.
Blood mattered.
“Good. It better stay that way, too,” Aaron said. “I am not going to tell my sister that her fiancé’s liberator fell not to a bullet, but to one of cupid’s fucking arrows.” When he caught me staring at his coffee, he stood and pulled another mug from the cabinet. “Please tell me you know you’re being played.”
“I know I’m being played.” But so was she.
“You’re being played like a fucking harmonica, Ian.” Aaron dumped sugar into the mug and followed it with creamer he didn’t bother to stir. “She’s getting paid to do what you want done, show you what you want to see and say what you want to hear, but she’d kill you in a heartbeat if Tower told her to. Do whatever you need to do. Fuck her, kill her, stuff her into a crate bound for China, for all I care. Just don’t let her get in the way of the mission.”
Meghan cleared her throat from the doorway, and Aaron’s mouth snapped shut. He set my mug in front of her when she sank into an empty chair at the table.
“Any change?” I asked, eyeing the circles beneath her eyes. Had they grown darker since she left the kitchen?
“His kidneys,” she said, her voice a weak whisper. “He’s better for the moment. Sleeping again.”
Aaron’s hand shot across the table so fast I barely saw him move. He grabbed his sister’s left wrist, and she tried to pull away from him, but obviously lacked the strength. Aaron pushed her sleeve back, and we both groaned at the sight of her arm.
Her skin was pale, nearly translucent, and every vein and artery below her bunched sleeve showed through. But they weren’t blue. They were black. Every single one of them, like they ran with tar, rather than blood.
“You’re killing yourself,” Aaron said through clenched teeth.
Meghan shook her head and pulled her sleeve back into place when he let her go. “I’m saving him.” But she couldn’t hold out much longer, which was exactly what Aaron’s accusatory glare at me said.
He stood and started pulling food from the refrigerator. “You need to call Dad, Meghan. If you don’t, I will.”
“I’ll never forgive you,” she whispered, and he flinched as he piled meat onto a slice of bread. It was the same argument they’d been having for two weeks. Their father was a Healer, too, and he could help her save Steven. He could share the burden. But she wouldn’t call him because of what he’d say, and what he’d do.
Meghan’s father would tell her she was championing a lost cause—no Healer can save someone from death by broken binding, because as soon as she repaired one organ, another began to shut down.
And he would take her away, by force if he had to, to keep her from dying alongside her doomed love. My doomed brother.
“Eat.” Aaron set the sandwich in front of her, then pulled a carton of milk from the fridge. “This is crazy, Meg.”
She ignored him and turned to me as she lifted the sandwich. “What about the binding? Have you at least figured out what that bitch bound him to?”
“I haven’t had a chance to talk to Kenley alone,” I said. “She’s definitely strong enough to do it.” I’d never heard of a Binder using her skill at ten years old, and Kori’s story had scared the shit out of me. “But are you sure she’s the one? I’ve never seen her before, and she didn’t seem to recognize me or my name.”
“It’s her,” Meghan insisted. “That Tracker cost nearly every dime we had saved up, and he swears it was Kenley Daniels. He’s come across her work a lot, with people running from the syndicate. Her blood sealed the binding, and it’s strong. But he can’t tell what kind of binding it is.”
In a way, that was the worst part. Steven was mostly conscious, but usually incoherent from the pain, and even during his rare lucid periods, he hadn’t been able to tell us what binding he’d accepted, and from whom. And there were too many questions the Tracker couldn’t answer.
All we really knew was that it was a name binding, and that meant that whatever had happened was my fault. Steven and I had switched names years ago—when we were still kids—to give ourselves an extra layer of protection. If anyone tried to track my name, they’d find Steven and assume they’d made a mistake.
But the plan we’d concocted in childhood had backfired on us as adults.
At some point—we had no idea when—Kenley Daniels had bound Steven to something using her blood and his real name. But I’d been answering to Steven’s name since we were eighteen years old, which meant she’d actually meant to bind me.
Steven was inches from death’s doorstep, and it was all my fault.
Mine, and Kenley Daniels’s.