Oath Bound
Page 55

“I’m sure she’s okay,” Sera whispered, and I looked up to find her watching me with big, worried eyes, her beautiful mouth turned down in what I first mistook for sympathy. But it was more than that. Deeper. I was seeing empathy. Sera had already been where Kori and I were, and her sister hadn’t been okay.
I was so tense I could hardly breathe as Ian called up a small, precise cone of darkness. A second later, he, Kori and that darkness were all gone.
Sera and I waited, listening anxiously for the thud of impact or the thwup of a silenced gun. But the only sound was the click of the door lock as it disengaged. Kori pulled the door open with a scowl, then ushered us inside.
“What happened?”
In answer, she gestured toward the room they’d just broken into, which was empty except for a single long table scattered with loose sheets of paper. There were no employees. No other furniture. And no Kenley.
I was willing to bet that the papers they’d left behind held no useful information at all.
A glass panel in one wall overlooked another, much larger, even emptier space.
“This was the observation room.” Then Kori pointed through the window, and I peered into the empty space, wondering if our sister had ever been there. Or had we been barking up the wrong tree from the beginning? “That’s where they kept the vegetables.”
“Vegetables?” Sera stared through the window, gripping the edge of the table so tightly her knuckles had gone white. “Why do I get the feeling you don’t mean roots and tubers?”
“She’s talking about human vegetables.” The words hurt to say. They hurt even worse to think about as my gaze caught on a length of medical tubing abandoned on the floor in the next room. “Only Tower wasn’t growing them. He was bleeding them.”
“Bleeding?” Sera’s voice was brittle, as though it might actually break. “I’m not sure I want to know what that means.”
“Jake collected people whose Skills he wanted and kept them in medically induced comas so he could take blood from them as often as possible, without actually killing them.”
Sera blinked at me. “He collected...people?”
“And bled them.” Kori pulled a string next to the windowsill and blinds dropped to cover the window, as if that could actually erase the memory of what she’d once seen through it. What I’d imagined. “Then he sold their blood as transfusions, intended to give the receiver temporary Skills. At significant cost.”
I sank onto the edge of the table, struggling to breathe through my own disappointment. “Or for an equivalent investment of information.”
Sera trailed her fingers down the closed blinds. The metallic rattle was loud after the eerie silence of the deserted building. “Information?”
“Tower also collected names and blood samples from anyone he might one day want to manipulate. Or blackmail. Or profit from.”
Sera looked sick. Pale. Disgusted. And a little...guilty? Why would she feel guilty? I was the one who’d lost Kenley. “Is there any crime Jake Tower didn’t commit as a matter of course?”
Kori shrugged. “I never saw him jaywalk.”
“So, why did you think Kenley would be here?” Sera picked up a sheet of paper, glanced at it, then dropped it on the table.
“Because Julia would have to keep her nearby and under close watch. The blood farm seemed like the ideal place,” Kori said. “But it’s gone.” The devastation in her voice made my throat ache with every curse I held back. Every angry word I swallowed.
We’d thought we were close. We’d come determined to take out any- and everyone who stood between us and our baby sister, but there was no one to shoot.
Worse, there was no one to rescue.
“She moved the whole operation.” Kori stared at the covered window in shock, and I realized she wasn’t just stating the obvious. She was trying to process the obvious. Our failure. I’d been there over and over in the past six years, since Noelle died and my sisters were both conscripted into the Tower syndicate.
It never got any easier.
“We shouldn’t be surprised,” Ian said. “Julia’s no idiot.” He’d warned us from the beginning that Kenley might not be there. That the entire operation might have been moved, or she might have shut it down. But we’d had to try, and in my heart, I’d believed we’d find her.
I’d needed to find her.
“Okay, so let’s find out where she moved them. There has to be something....” Kori picked up a sheet of paper from the table, scanned it, then tossed it aside and picked up another. She went through page after page, but most were blank and none of them held anything of meaning for her. The documents they’d left behind would only be useful as paper airplanes. A whole squadron of them.
“Kori,” I said when she got to the end of the pages and started again, squatting to examine them on the floor. She didn’t even acknowledge me.
“Kori.” I knelt and put a hand on her shoulder, but she flinched and pulled away from me, and another crack widened in my heart. She didn’t seem to recognize me. She seemed...scared of me.
I’d never seen Kori scared of anything.
I stood and gave her some space, because I didn’t know what else to do, and Ian stepped into my place. He knelt in front of Kori and put one dark hand on the paper she was still clutching.
“Kori.” He didn’t try to touch her. He just waited for her to realize he was there. “Korinne. Look at me.”