Clad in fresh, dry clothes, I crossed the tiny hall—really just a square of floor with four rooms opening into it—and pushed open the bathroom door, where I blinked in surprise and nearly jumped out of my own skin.

A young woman—not my sister—stood in my bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror over the pedestal sink. Her first name was Vanessa, if memory served, but I didn’t know her last name. I only knew she was one of Jake’s unSkilled computer geeks, and that Cam Caballero had been forced to recruit her for Tower after he killed the Binder who’d sealed her in service to Ruben Cavazos a couple of years earlier.

“Hey.” Van turned to smile at me. “I’m done, if you need in here.”

“Why are you in there in the first place?” I demanded. Then I noticed that she was wearing Kenley’s robe. And nothing else, if the lack of clothing lines beneath satin meant anything.

Kenley’s bedroom door opened behind me, and I turned to find my little sister staring at me, legs bare beneath one of the long T-shirts she usually slept in. “I thought you’d be out all day,” she said by way of explanation, and for a moment, neither of them moved. Obviously waiting for my reaction.

“So did I.” I squeezed past Vanessa to get into the bathroom. “And I would have been if some clumsy—” I stopped just in time and turned to Kenley with a frown. “Hey, if I accepted a dare to stop cussing for the next twenty-four hours, does that mean I can’t cuss at all, or just when I’m with the person who dared me?”

Kenley grinned for several seconds when she realized I wasn’t going to make a big deal about catching her in postcoital glow with her new friend. Then what I’d said sank in. “You agreed to stop cursing?” Suddenly she looked concerned. “What were the terms?”

“No terms. It’s not a contract…it’s just a stupid dare.” I ran water into the bathroom cup, then drained it in several gulps.

“Who dared you?” Van asked as they both followed me into the living room.

“It was Holt, wasn’t it?” Kenley said on her way into the kitchen as I pulled open the front closet and squatted in search of a dry pair of boots. “Why would you take that dare? How many times do I have to tell you that ‘Na na na boo-boo’ is not proper motivation for engaging in self-destructive behavior?”

“Where was that voice of reason half an hour ago?” I turned with my second-favorite pair of boots in hand to find Van and Kenley both blushing furiously, which explained exactly where they’d been half an hour ago. “I withdraw the question.”

“We were gonna make waffles. You want some?” Van asked, pulling a box of Bisquick from the cabinet over the toaster. And that’s when I realized this wasn’t her first visit. I didn’t even know where we kept the Bisquick.

“Waffles at two in the afternoon?”

Van shrugged. “It’s Saturday,” she said, like that should be explanation enough.

“Thanks, but I have to go meet Jake.”

“That should make this whole ‘no cussing’ thing interesting,” Kenley said, pulling a carton of eggs from the fridge. “At least it’s just a dare, and not a sealed oath.”

I stepped into my first boot. “What, you don’t think I can do it?”

My sister looked up at me from across the counter. “I think profanity is your native language. That makes it a hard habit to break.”

I thought about that as I brushed my hair and teeth. And I decided she was right.

I started to tell Kenley and Van that I was leaving, but sudden suspicious silence from the kitchen made my pulse spike in warning and drew me forward before I remembered that I was unarmed. But instead of an intruder, I found only my sister and her girlfriend, leaning against the counter in front of the steaming, hissing waffle iron, holding hands and just staring at each other.

It was so sweet I couldn’t stand to watch. So I backed up without drawing their attention and closed myself into my room again with the light off. A second later, I stepped into Jake’s darkroom. I hadn’t been there in two months, but I’d been hundreds of times in the past six years, and it still felt exactly the same. A little bigger than most of the darkrooms at his various other facilities, and a little colder. And as dark as a void, like space with no stars.

I started forward, my hand outstretched, and three steps later, my fingertips bumped the switch on the wall, next to the door. Light flared to life overhead and I squinted while my eyes adjusted. Then I pressed a button on the small full-color display set flush with the wall next to the door. Static appeared on the screen, and a moment later a familiar face replaced it.

“Kori?” Danny Larimore stared out at me from the screen. “What the hell are you doing? There’s a big red sign next to the monitor in here that says your darkroom privileges have been revoked. It’s laminated and everything.”

Which was why I didn’t have the key card that would have gotten me access to the rest of the house without having to deal with someone in the security room. “I know, but I have to talk to Jake. Buzz him if you need to. Tell him it’s about Ian Holt. He’ll tell you to let me in.”

“If this backfires and he decides to shoot the messenger, I’m comin’ in there to kick your ass.”

“Whatever.” I could take Larimore even unarmed. “Just buzz him.”

The screen lapsed into static again, and I filled the silence by running through the list of reasons I wouldn’t recruit Ian, if I had any choice. Then I started on the number of ways I could kill Jake Tower—if that wouldn’t be the worst strategic mistake in history.