Oath Bound (An Unbound Novel) by Rachel Vincent Page B

and when I tried to pull free, his grip on my arm tightened. “Just FYI, this is not the easy way.”
    He pulled me into the living room. When I refused to sit on the couch, he gave my left shoulder a small shove, and I fell onto the center cushion, my hands trapped behind me.
    He sat on the coffee table facing me, at eye-height again, and that’s when I saw where he was bleeding. My blade had sliced across his right forearm in two different places.
    “Has anyone ever told you you’re a total pain in the ass?” He rolled back his sleeve and flinched with one look at the long, shallow cuts. “I’m sorry about the zip tie. I don’t usually tie women up, but I don’t know what else to do with you.”
    “Don’t apologize because I’m a woman. Apologize because you’re an asshole!” I shouted.
    His grandmother laughed out loud from the kitchen doorway, holding her still-steaming mug of coffee. “I like her, Kris. I doubt Vanessa will, though.”
    Who the hell was Vanessa?
    Kris’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t even glance at his grandmother. “Just so we’re clear, the zip tie isn’t the only equipment at my disposal. I’m also fully prepared to tape your mouth shut.”
    In reply, I leaned back on the couch and kicked him off the coffee table.

Four
    Kris
    T he closet door opened down the hall as I was rinsing my cuts in the bathroom. I went for my gun out of habit, trailing water across the floor and blood across my arm.
    “Kris?” Kori called, and I slid my gun back into its holster and stepped out of the bathroom with a clean white towel pressed to my arm. “What happened? Liv said you went after Kenley, but she lost your scent.”
    She meant my psychic scent—the personal energy signature given off by my blood, which blood Trackers, like Olivia and Cam, could use to find people.
    “No surprise there. The Towers’ nanny is a Jammer, right?” Being near a Jammer is like being in a psychic dead zone—you can’t be tracked, either by name or by blood. That’s a benefit those who can afford it will gladly pay for, but it comes with a couple of obvious disadvantages, as well.
    “You went to Jake’s house?” She lifted the towel from my arm and her pale brows furrowed over eyes as deep a brown as our mother’s had been. “What the hell were you thinking? It’s a miracle you walked out of there with only—”
    “Hey!” Sera shouted from Gran’s bedroom—the only one on the first floor.
    I groaned. There was no good way to tell Kori about our new guest, but letting Sera deliver the news herself was number one on a long list of bad ways to get the job done.
    Kori’s focus shifted from my wounds to the closed bedroom door. She dropped the rag into place on my arm and her hand found the grip of the gun holstered beneath her jacket. “Who the fuck is that?”
    Gran chuckled from the living room, where she was sipping iced tea in front of the muted television. She’d refused to help me with Sera on the grounds that I deserved whatever I got for bringing a stranger back to our hideout, even though she only remembered who we were hiding from about half the time.
    “Hey!” Sera shouted again, while I actively regretted not gagging her when I’d had the chance. “Whoever’s out there, if you’re even marginally sane, please consider calling the police. But if you’re as psychologically damaged as Kris and his grandmother, then by all means, carry on with whatever the descendants of Norman Bates do for fun on the weekend. I’m sure I’ll still be here whenever you get around to stabbing me and laughing maniacally over my cooling corpse.”
    “That’s Sera.” I pressed the rag tighter against the cuts on my arm. “She’s rational and calm, and just generally pleasant to be around. I think you’re gonna like her.”
    “I like her!” Gran called over the wooden creak of her rocker.
    Kori took a single, cautious step back and slowly pushed the bedroom door open.
    Sera sat in Gran’s