“I don’t know.”

“No lies, Mitch,” Sera said, and he turned to glare at her.

“I’m not lying. After what happened to Ned, do you think Julia’s likely to hand out classified information to every peon with a gun?”

“Speaking of guns, why haven’t you used yours?” I glanced pointedly at his pistol, still in Sera’s unsure grip. “And why are you taking orders from her?”

He deferred to Sera with a single glance and she cleared her throat nervously. “I...um...might have...inherited his binding. Kind of.”

“You kind of inherited his binding?” Ian’s voice echoed my own confusion.

“From Julia?” Kori frowned. “Does that mean she’s dead?”

They were all missing the most obvious piece of the puzzle—how Sera could have inherited anything from Julia Tower—but she answered before I could ask.

“Not that I know of.” Sera cleared her throat again and her hand clenched the edge of the grimy pedestal-style sink she leaned against. “I didn’t inherit from Julia. If I understand correctly, the bindings were never really hers in the first place. I inherited from Jake.”

“Wait, bindings? Plural?” Ian’s hand hovered over the butt of his holstered weapon, as if it was the only thing he was really sure of at the moment. I knew exactly how that felt. “Not just this one?”

“It’s...all of them.” Sera shrugged again, and her obvious confusion said she didn’t understand much more than we did. “Kind of.”

“Kind of?” Kori frowned.

“Julia still holds most of them. For the moment.”

“How?” I lowered my aim—my arm was aching—but not my guard. “How the hell could you inherit anything from Jake Tower?” But as soon as I’d asked the question, the answer seemed obvious, and for the second it took to sink in, the world seemed to grind to a halt all around me.

“Holy shit!” Kori actually staggered backward and stepped on Ian’s foot. “He’s your dad. Jake Tower was your fucking dad.”

“No...” I said, but no one was listening. I’d heard it. I understood it. But I couldn’t make sense of it. Sera was beautiful, and smart, and she loved and missed her family more than anything else in the world. She couldn’t even be related to Jake Tower, much less sired by him, because the Towers were a nest of snakes willing to bite one another’s heads off if that’s what it took to climb to the top of the heap.

And every time one of us had said something along those lines—that Tower’s family tree was rotten to its core—we’d inadvertently been insulting Sera. Implying that she was rotten, as well, by virtue of a shared root system.

No wonder she couldn’t trust us with her secrets. I wouldn’t be surprised if she hated us.

“He was my father,” Sera corrected Kori, and I noted that Mitch didn’t look surprised. “He was never my dad. I never even met him, but after hearing about him from you guys, I can honestly swear to you that I’m nothing like him. Nothing like him.”

Her tense tone and wide eyes seemed to be hinting at something beyond her actual words—something she evidently didn’t want Mitch to hear—but it wasn’t until she glanced at my gun again that I understood.

She thought I was going to shoot her, if not right then and there, then eventually. She truly thought my hatred of all things Tower extended to her.

I flipped the safety switch on my pistol, and she exhaled softly in relief. But her frame remained stiff and her focus kept flitting between me, Kori and Ian as she spoke. She was on alert.

She didn’t trust us.

“I don’t think Jake even knew I existed,” Sera continued.

“He didn’t.” Kori looked stunned. Astonished. Her mind had been blown. “There’s no way in hell that he would have let anyone else raise you if he’d known you existed. Even if there was no emotional attachment whatsoever, you’re too valuable an asset to be wandering around out there, unprotected and uninstalled in the Tower machine.” She glanced at the ground, then up at Sera again, her eyes even wider now. “This kind of makes sense. Kinda. I mean, it’s crazy, but in a totally logical way.”

“Not following you, Kor...” I said, and I obviously wasn’t the only one.

My sister rolled her eyes at me. “Jake Tower was a Jammer.”

Mitch’s eyes widened. “That’s classified information.”

Kori shrugged. “It was. When he was alive and I was bound to him. Neither of which still applies.”

“But Tower hired Jammers,” I pointed out. “Anne said he hired one of the best in the country as his kids’ nanny.” So they couldn’t be tracked and targeted by his enemies, which were numerous.

“Camouflage,” Kori said. “That, and a backup system, for when he’s not home. His theory was that the less people know about you, the less vulnerable you are. It works the same with names, obviously.”

“What’s your other skill?” Mitch asked Sera, as if they were the only two in the room. No one answered.

“We need to get out of here. When Julia’s Trackers realize they can’t pick up Mitch and his partner, they’ll be on us like flies on a corpse.”

Yet even with Mitch nominally under Sera’s control, I didn’t trust him, and I certainly wasn’t going to take him with us to one of our usual meeting places, so he could later report to Julia, either under orders—if he was somehow faking loyalty to Sera—or for pay. But we couldn’t leave him there; we weren’t done with him yet.