Kori met my gaze, her eyes swimming in guilt. “I never wanted this assignment. Not even for a single second. But I’ve never wanted it less than I do right now. I don’t want to be the thing that ties you to Jake. I don’t want to be the reason you sign away your free will. And I really don’t want to be the person who makes you look like the sun just set and it’ll never rise again.”

My chest ached. “This isn’t your fault, Kori.” But I couldn’t truly absolve her of her guilt without admitting my own, and I couldn’t do that while she was still bound to Tower. “Besides, the dark is my natural habitat, remember? Who cares if the sun never rises again? We’ll thrive in the dark together.”

“No one thrives in the syndicate. No one worth knowing, anyway.” Her eyes flashed with anger, and my pulse raced in response. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to kiss her again, and find out if anger made her as passionate as fear did. I wanted to snatch her away from the world and keep her for myself, so no one could ever put out the fire she breathed with every thought that sparked in her brain and every word that left her mouth. “He’ll change you. He’ll make you do things. Hurt people.”

And finally I understood. “You’re not responsible for what Tower makes you do. He is.”

“You don’t know—”

“Yes, I do,” I insisted softly, wishing the coffee table wasn’t between us. “I know he’s used you as a weapon, but even when you’re the gun, he’s still the one pulling the trigger. The blood is on his hands.”

“I’ve done horrible things, Ian. You may have heard, but you don’t really know. You can’t really understand. And I can’t forget.” Her voice cracked, but no tears came, and again I was floored by how incredibly strong she was. How determined to hold everything together, when her world was clearly falling apart beneath her feet.

I loved that she was so strong. But I hated that she had to be.

“What if we left?” I said. “What if we just go get Kenley and you take us as far as you can go? And farther still, from there? We could do it.” I’d lived off the grid for the past seven years. “I could keep us safe.”

She shook her head slowly, and that blaze of anger in her eyes evened into wistful frustration. “Even if defaulting on our contracts wouldn’t kill me and Kenley—and it would—he’d find us. He knows our real names. Part of them, anyway. And if he couldn’t find us, he’d go after my brother. My grandmother. Kenley’s girlfriend.”

My brow rose a little at that unexpected bit of information, but she was still talking, constructing verbal obstacles to every exit strategy I could possibly have come up with.

“Whoever you have, Jake’ll find them, too. And they don’t have to be bound to him to suffer at his hands. Or his surrogate hands.”

I thought about Steven, and Meghan, and Aaron. I thought about everyone I wouldn’t want to see hurt, any more than they already had been. But above all of them—above everyone I’d ever shared a cup of coffee or a kind word with—it all came down to one thing.

“You,” I whispered, staring down at her. I hadn’t realized how empty my life was, so far from everyone I’d ever loved—until I met her. “I care about you, Kori.”

She blinked up at me, her eyes sad, and more scared than I’d ever seen them. “Then that’s how he’ll get you.”

Twenty-One

Kori

Ian was up to something. I could tell from the way he kept glancing at me out of the corner of his eye as he stacked dirty plates beneath a silver room service tray cover.

“Don’t tell me,” I said from the couch. I was trying desperately to hang on to the rare, vague sense of contentment I got from watching him clean up, like we were some normal couple staying in a hotel on vacation. Like our lives weren’t both at serious risk. But that look in his eyes was making me nervous.

“Don’t tell you what?”

“Whatever you’re planning. If you tell me, I’ll have to tell Jake. So don’t tell me. And stop plotting.”

“Even if I’m plotting to whisk you away to some isolated homestead in the middle of the Australian outback, where we can forever live in peace and privacy, far from the meddling hands of both egomaniacal mob bosses and the IRS?”

He said it like it might actually be possible.

“Especially if that’s the plan.”

Ian rounded the couch toward me. I should have backed away, but I couldn’t do it. I let him sit and wrap his arms around me and I cursed myself silently when my hands slid over his stomach and around his back, feeling hard planes and solid ridges. I couldn’t help that, either. I wanted to touch him. I wanted to be touched by him.

And that thought terrified me.

He kissed me, and I kissed him back, and for that minute, with his arms around me, the taste of him on my lips, I forgot all the reasons this was a very bad idea.

I forgot that I was dooming him to serve a human monster. I forgot that my life and my sister’s well-being depended on his compliance. I forgot about everything except how good he felt, and how much I liked the version of myself I saw reflected in his eyes.

Then he pulled away with a satisfied moan, his eyes still closed, and reality came crashing down around me again, the pain sharper, the aching hopelessness deeper than ever after the brief distraction.

“You know we can’t do this,” I whispered, clutching his shirt in both fists, my forehead resting on his collarbone. I wanted to hold him, but I needed to push him away, because the longer this went on, the harder it would be for both of us, when Jake ripped him from my grasp.