“You call this nice?” I snapped.
He stared at me for a second, apparently gauging the sincerity of my question, while his grandmother shook her head slowly at the table. My naïveté was evidently confounding.
“This is the kid-glove treatment,” Kris said. “There are people out there who would have cut your clothes off the first time you refused.”
“My shirt,” I corrected, and he shook his head.
“The left arm is the most common place people are marked, but it’s not the only place.”
Chills raced up my spine, then down into my hands, which began to shake. I glanced at his grandmother for confirmation, and she nodded solemnly.
Kris’s gaze narrowed on me again, and he seemed to be studying me from a new perspective. “What the hell are you doing here, Sera? Girls like you don’t belong in the city.”
“No one belongs here,” Gran said, and I let her answer stand for me.
“Now, I’m going to let you go, and you’re going to turn around and pull your left arm out of your shirt and show it to me. You can keep everything else covered, but your left arm is non-negotiable. Got it?”
“How am I supposed to prove I’m not marked anywhere else? I’m not taking anything off.”
“No need.” Gran chuckled into her coffee, and I couldn’t believe the change in her from a few minutes earlier. “A whore would never be so hard to undress.”
“Whore?” I blinked at Kris in incomprehension.
“Cavazos marks his prostitutes with a red ring on the inner thigh.” He chuckled a little at my shocked expression. “Don’t worry. I’ve never met anyone less likely to bear a red mark in my life.”
I wasn’t sure whether or not that was a compliment.
“I’m going to let go and back up, and you’re going to show me your arm. Ready?”
“If I do, you’ll open the front door?”
He frowned. “No, but showing me your arm will put you one step closer to that. Here goes …”
He let go of my right hand and removed his left arm from my shoulders. Then he backed up several steps, still watching me.
My heart thumped in my ears as I turned slowly, reluctant to put him at my back, even with his grandmother in the room. My focus raked the counter next to the fridge in search of a weapon. But there was nothing within easy reach.
I would have shown him my arm, if that would have gotten me released. But since it wouldn’t, I couldn’t see the point in capitulating. In letting him think I could be pushed around.
Instead of pulling my arm free from my sleeve, I spun and launched myself at Kris. I rammed him in the chest with my shoulder, just like my dad had taught me when I was twelve.
Air burst from his lungs and he stumbled backward into the table, which slid across the floor and into the far wall without even spilling his grandmother’s coffee.
Gran cackled as he tried to stand, holding his spine where it had hit the table, and I ran for freedom. I had both hands wrapped around the window frame when he grabbed my arms from behind.
I lost my balance when he jerked my arms behind me and would have fallen headfirst out the window if he hadn’t hauled me back in, pinning my wrists in one of his hands.
“Let go!” I twisted and kicked backward, but a second later something cold and hard wrapped around my wrists. A soft zipping sound froze me in place, and the plastic around my wrists got tighter. “Are you serious? A zip tie?” Why would he even have those if he wasn’t planning to take a hostage?
He spun me around to face him again, anger drawn in every line of his face, 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
The 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