“I do want to fight!” I shouted, fury buzzing beneath my skin like an army of wasps. “But it doesn’t matter. That’s the real problem here, Ian. After everything I’ve shown you and everything you’ve figured out on your own, you still think fighting back is an option. You still think that if I close my eyes and wish hard enough, I’ll suddenly be able to break an oath sealed by one of the strongest—quite possibly the strongest—Binder in the world. But if there was a way out of this, you can bet your fancy rental car that I’d have found it myself. But there isn’t. Kenley and I are stuck exactly where we are, doing exactly what we’re doing, for the next four years.”

Assuming I lived that long.

I exhaled and met his gaze again, digging deep for the anger that fueled my heart like gasoline in an engine, because I’d rather be mad than wallow in the pain my next words would bring. “Now unless you’re actually planning to make me do what Jake told me to do, I’d like to leave. But as much as I hate to say it, I can’t go without your permission.”

He watched me, and emotions flickered over his face too fast for me to identify. But in the end, there was anger. Raw, pure anger of the highest quality. Rage. Ian wasn’t just angry, he was enraged.

I knew exactly how that felt.

“Go home, Kori,” he said through clenched teeth. “I think you should go home. Now.”

I nodded in acknowledgment, because I couldn’t bring myself to thank him for doing the only decent thing. Then I stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut behind me, and too late I realized I should have gone through the shadows in his bathroom. But I wasn’t going back into that hotel room. I couldn’t. Not after that.

For several seconds, I couldn’t move. I could only lean against the wall outside his suite, sucking air in through my throat over and over, only to lose it an instant later. He hated me. Worse, he pitied me. I’d seen it in his eyes. He was disgusted by what Jake had turned me into, and even more disgusted that I’d let it happen.

And the worst part was that I couldn’t argue with a damn thing he’d said. And if he told anyone—if Jake found out what I’d told him—Ian’s recruitment would be reassigned and I would wind up in the basement again.

I couldn’t survive it again. I couldn’t.

You should have just let it happen. I should have just kept my mouth shut and stayed the night, and he’d never have known I was under orders. So what if he thought it meant more than it ever could? So what if letting Jake dictate what I did with my body made me sick to my stomach? So what if just thinking about that brought memories of the basement roaring to the front of my mind, so vivid and horrifying I could smell the sweat and taste my own blood?

I raced for the elevator, but my stomach lurched after less than a minute of staring at my own reflection in its mirrored wall, so I punched buttons until the elevator stopped, then ran down the last four flights of stairs. I burst into the alley behind the building, but I couldn’t make it to the Dumpster. My dinner came back up in the middle of the alley, all over Kenley’s sandals. I vomited until there was nothing left, trying to purge the memories along with the food, but they wouldn’t go. I felt every blow. Relived every humiliation. I saw Jake closing the door on that very first night, leaving me alone with his brother, half-naked and still oozing blood from a gunshot wound.

When the retching finally stopped, I sank onto the concrete with my knees pressed against my chest, curled around the ache deep inside me. But finally I could breathe again. Finally the pain was gone, and in its place was a blessed numbness.

My stomach was as empty as the rest of me. That was the only way I knew how to be.

I closed my eyes and I heard Jake’s words again, echoing from my memory. He’d pronounced my sentence in three words with one hand on the doorknob, a cruel smile on his face.

“Don’t fight back.”

That’s how my hell had begun. And it had yet to end.

Fourteen

Ian

For almost a minute after she left, I stared at the door, willing her to come back, though I had no idea what I’d say if she actually did. How could she let him use her like that? How could she let him just give her to a man she barely knew? What fucking century were we living in?

And the worst part was that she’d thought I’d known. She’d thought I was party to forced prostitution and rape. That I was playing some kind of sadistic game with her, just waiting for the perfect moment to—

I couldn’t think the words, but I couldn’t purge them from my mind, either. I was caught between thinking it and not thinking it, an endless cycle of self-torture that built inside me until rage finally burst out of me like shrapnel from an explosion.

My hand closed around something I didn’t even see and I hurled it without looking. Ceramic crashed into the door and rained shards of broken table lamp on the floor. The crystal shade shattered, reflecting tiny rainbows all over the room, but the cheerful colors only further infuriated me. So I stomped the shards into the floor until I couldn’t see a single color.

Then I sank onto the couch with my head in my hands, trying to draw the chaos in my head into some semblance of order.

The mission was screwed. Steven was screwed. Kori would never trust me enough now to let me anywhere near her sister, and the more I learned about her and her reasons for serving Tower in the first place, the less likely it seemed that she ever would have anyway.

And just as suddenly as that thought occurred to me, I realized I didn’t care. I couldn’t let my brother die, but I couldn’t hurt Kori to save him. She’d been through enough, and even if the grief from losing Kenley didn’t destroy her, being left to bear the brunt of Tower’s rage certainly would.