Oath Bound
Page 102

“You couldn’t have stopped it.” Sera was hardly awake, yet she sounded certain. “You can’t stop stuff like that from the outside. Sometimes you can’t even stop it from the inside...”
As she fell asleep on my arm, I realized she was talking about herself. She’d tried to save her sister. She’d tried to stop it from the inside, and instead, she’d lost everything.
I wanted to give her something.
I waited nearly an hour until she rolled over on her own because I didn’t want to wake her up. But as soon as she was on the other side of the mattress—all but one small foot, resting against my shin—I snuck out of bed and turned off the lamp, then stepped into my jeans and crept downstairs, this new need still only half-formed.
On the bottom step, I groaned when I saw the light shining in the kitchen. Shit. I’d hoped to keep this new detail of my relationship with Sera private, at least until I knew how much she wanted everyone else to know.
Also, I’d wanted privacy for my new errand. But that wasn’t gonna happen.
Gran never woke up in the middle of the night, unless she was...confused—or someone turned on the TV—and I really didn’t feel like pretending I was still a twenty-year-old college dropout. Not with Sera still sleeping without me in the bed that could hopefully now be described as “ours.”
“Gran?” The living room floorboards creaked beneath my bare feet.
“It’s just me,” Ian said, and I was relieved for a second. Until I realized that unlike Gran, he probably wouldn’t forget me sneaking out of Sera’s room in the middle of the night.
Ian sat alone at the table, tapping on Vanessa’s laptop keys with two fingers. I crossed to the cabinet over the sink and took out a bottle of whiskey—the only alcohol in the house—and a short glass, then sat down next to him.
“Kori will skin you alive if you drink the last of her whiskey.”
“I’ll blame it on you.” I unscrewed the lid, and his brows rose. “Fine. I’ll pick up more tomorrow. I need to take Sera shopping anyway.”
Ian eyed me over the open laptop with a quiet smile. “So...you and Sera?”
I swallowed a groan as I poured two inches into my glass. “Please tell me no one else heard...”
“The walls are thin.” Which I knew all too well. “But Van only went up to bed ten minutes ago, and Kori sleeps more soundly than I do—until the nightmares.”
“Are they getting any better?” Kori’s nightmares made me feel useless, because I couldn’t fix her any easier than I could fix Sera.
Ian nodded. “Slowly.”
“What’s with the computer? You finally joining the twenty-first century?”
“Kicking and screaming.” He sighed. “I’d much rather read a newspaper, but they’re in short supply around here, so I’m stuck using this thing. Van showed me how to use a search engine, but all I’m getting are pop-up ads and the same ten results, every time I click ‘go.’” He turned the computer around and demonstrated.
I laughed. “Click on ‘next page’ for the rest of the results. There are more than ten thousand of them, but you just keep refreshing that first page full.”
Ian took the laptop back and frowned. “Oh. Thanks.”
“Shopping for an apartment? Are you leaving us?”
“It’s for me and Kori. For after we get Kenley back and things settle down.”
“You think she’ll want to stay in the city once all this is over?”
“I think she’d be bored in the Outback, and I’m not leaving here without her.” He glanced at my show of skepticism and exhaled slowly. “We’re going to end it, Kris,” he confessed at last. “Not just Julia and the Tower syndicate. Cavazos, too. Kori can’t go on with her life knowing that other people are still suffering the same things she went through. This won’t be over for her until they all fall down. And if they don’t...well, she’ll die trying to make it happen. We both will.”
“And after we take down Cavazos?” Because they weren’t doing it without me.
“Then we’ll head to the West Coast and fight the good fight with a view of the ocean.” Ian shrugged. “At least that’ll keep us busy.”
That it would. And they wouldn’t be alone.
“So, what’s with the nightcap?” Ian closed the laptop with a soft click. “Post-coital regret?”
“Not even kinda.” I would never regret a single moment I’d spent with Sera. Except for kidnapping her. “I just need to think.”
“Do you find that easier, staring at the bottom of a bottle?”
“Not always.” I sipped from my glass, relishing the mild burn.
He pushed the computer toward the middle of the table. “You’re more like Kori than you know.”
“I’m older,” I insisted. “Which means she’s more like me.”
“You both have big hearts. The only difference is that she hides hers behind guns and a foul mouth, and you hide yours behind guns and a smile. So...where’s the smile?”
“I must have left it in bed.”
“Sera’s?”
I took another sip. “You all seem to be forgetting that it’s actually my bed.”
“Not when she’s in it,” he said, and I had to concede the point.
I drained my glass, then set it down and studied him critically for a moment. “I need to talk about what just happened with Sera. You game?”