“Sorry about that. Can’t be helped. Do it. Now.”

His hand shook, hovering in the air between his forehead and the fork on his lap, and I watched, fascinated, as he silently weighed his options.

Then I heard faint footsteps in the hall, and my pulse raced so fast I got dizzy for a second. “Sera? You okay?”

“Yeah. Fine,” I called through the door. Then I turned back to Ned. “I don’t have time for you to think this through. Stab yourself in the fucking arm. Now!”

Ned groaned in pain, but his hand picked up the fork, squeezing it so tight his skin turned white from the pressure.

“Do it!” I repeated in a fierce whisper.

“Aaahh!” he shouted, resisting mentally, even as his body obeyed. Even as he stabbed himself in the arm, halfway between his elbow and the wrist lashed to the refrigerator door handle.

The fork stuck in his skin, standing up like a tower in the middle of his arm, blood welling slowly around the four buried tines.

“Sera!” Kris’s footsteps grew faster and louder. “Sera!”

“I’m fine!” I shouted, staring in fascination as dark drops of blood dribbled down the side of Ned’s arm and onto his pants. His breathing was ragged. Uneven. But that had to be from his efforts to resist—the fork hadn’t penetrated deeply enough to do any real damage.

“Fucking bitch!” he growled through clenched teeth, and I almost shouted in triumph. He clearly hadn’t wanted to stab himself. Which meant he’d had no choice. Which meant that his binding had transferred from Julia to me. “You are one of them.”

I blinked at him in surprise. Then in horror. I wasn’t one of them. Not in the way that he meant it.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, my words running together in my haste to say what had to be said before Kris got there. “Don’t tell anyone what I’ve told you. Ever. Other than that, you are a free man. I release you from your binding.”

Ned’s eyes widened and he craned his neck, trying to see something on his arm, and as Kris threw the door open behind me, I saw what Ned couldn’t. The marks on his arm had faded to a muted gray.

Shit! Kris would see. I lurched forward and pulled the flap of his sleeve over the mark as Kris’s arm wrapped around my waist and hauled me away from Ned.

“Are you trying to give him back his gun?” Kris demanded, setting me on my feet out of the guard’s reach, which is when I realized I still held the pistol. And that Ned had been reaching for it with his left hand when Kris pulled me out of reach.

The ungrateful bastard was going to shoot me! After I set him free!

But then, I had made him stab his own arm, then freed him of any restriction from hurting me. Maybe I hadn’t thought that one through very well...

“What the hell happened?” Kris stared at the fork in Ned’s arm.

“Ask your bitch,” Ned snapped, and I was relieved to see that he was evidently still bound to silence, even though his employment binding had been broken.

Kris glanced at me, muttering something about how I wasn’t anyone’s bitch. Which almost made me smile. But I could only shrug in answer. “I don’t know. He found a fork, and before I could take it away from him, he just...stabbed himself in the arm. It was weird.”

Kris frowned as though he didn’t believe me—go figure—but it took most of my concentration to keep from grinning in return. I’d done it. I’d figured it out. Now, if I could figure out how to do the same thing I’d done to Ned, only on a large scale, I could single-handedly put that bitch Julia Tower out of business for good.

Twelve

Kris

“How is he?” I leaned against the door frame in the threshold of Kori and Ian’s room. Ian was asleep on the bed, shirtless, the thick bandage on his shoulder pale against his dark skin.

“He’ll live.” Kori closed her laptop without turning it off, then leaned back in the desk chair. “Gran got him all patched up and gave him something for the pain.”

“I hope you double-checked the dosage.” Gran only remembered what decade she was living in about half the time, and as much help as she was as a triage nurse—with forty years’ real-world experience—on her bad days, she was as likely to overdose you as underdose you.

“I did.” Kori waved one hand at the closed laptop. “Thank goodness for the internet, slow though the connection is. I wanted to call Meghan.” Ian’s sister-in-law was a Healer. “But he wouldn’t let me. He says he can’t drag Steve and Meg into any more danger, at least until his brother’s fully healed.”

“I can respect that.” And Kori could, too. I could tell from how she was just frustrated, rather than actually angry. Ian’s brother had hovered on the edge of death for weeks, resisting a binding that had been sealed using Kenley’s blood without her knowledge. A few months earlier, Ian had been willing to kill Kenni to break the binding and save his brother. But then he met Kori, and now he was practically family. The brother I’d never had. He’d fought for my sisters when I couldn’t be there.

I owed him more than I could ever possibly repay.

“Has Van had any luck ID-ing Sera’s family?”

Kori shook her head. “I don’t think she’s actually looking anymore. Since the two of you came back with that scrap of intel, she’s been exhausting every resource trying to figure out what warehouse Julia moved the blood farm into.”