Something clicked behind us just as I found the light, and I was still half-blind when I turned to find Aaron aiming a gun at me from the hall. He exhaled in relief when he recognized me, and his aim shifted to Kori.

“We haven’t met.” Kori half held her sister up with one arm, leaving her left hand free to go for her gun. “I’m Kori Daniels. If you don’t get that gun out of my face, I’m gonna take it, then I’m gonna break your jaw so I can unhinge it and shove your own pistol down your throat. That way the bullet goes through the long way.”

I groaned and gestured for Aaron to holster his gun, but he looked distinctly disinclined. “She believes in making a strong first impression. But she’s here to help. They both are.”

Aaron held his position for another second, then reluctantly lowered his gun and stepped aside, so we could enter. I took Kenley from her sister and carried the Binder in both arms down the hall and into Steven’s room, where he lay on the bed, a skeleton wrapped in skin so thin it looked like it might tear at the slightest pressure.

“Oh, hell,” Kori whispered. “He should be dead.”

“Don’t ever say that again,” Meghan said from her recliner next to the bed. The circles beneath her eyes had darkened and swollen. Her arms were thin and pale, and the veins stood out like dark tree branches, stretching beneath her skin.

Kenley gasped when I set her in a chair on the opposite side of the bed and she got her first look at my brother. “Twins?” she asked, and I nodded, surprised she could see the resemblance in what little was left of him.

“He’s nine minutes my junior.” I knelt next to the bed, searching for something familiar in the living skeleton that used to be my brother. I wanted to take his hand so he’d know I was there, but I was afraid to touch him.

Steven’s eyes rolled beneath his lids, and he groaned in his sleep. Only he wasn’t really sleeping—he was barely clinging to consciousness.

“I don’t know him.” Kenley’s eyes filled with tears and she sounded half-choked by them. “I thought when I saw him I’d remember, but I’ve never seen him before. I didn’t bind him.”

I pulled up a folding chair and sat next to her, while Aaron and Kori hovered near the doorway. “You may not have personally bound him, but your blood and your will sealed the binding.”

Kenley blinked in confusion, but then comprehension surfaced so hard and fast her body actually jerked, like someone had slapped her. She turned to her sister, anger and guilt warring behind her eyes, pain evident in every movement she made. “Nadia? You told him about Nadia?”

Kori shrugged. “I was explaining how we got involved with Jake in the first place.”

“Who’s Nadia?” Aaron asked.

“Her college roommate,” Kori said. “Years ago Kenley gave a sample of her blood to some bitch she had a crush on, who abused the fuckin’ privilege.”

“But Jake fixed all that. None of those bindings are still intact.”

“I don’t care who made the mess and who cleaned it up,” Aaron said from the edge of the room. “His bindings are obviously still intact, and your blood is keeping it that way. So break the fucking seal now, or I’ll end this once and for all.” He drew his gun and pointed it at Kenley’s head, and she gasped.

Kori burst into motion so fast I hardly saw her move. She shoved his gun arm up, startling Aaron, who accidently fired into the ceiling, and the rest of us ducked. Kori threw her knee up and into his groin, and when Aaron fell to his knees, too shocked to make a sound, she took his gun hand in both of hers and twisted viciously. I heard his bone crack from across the room, and I flinched when Aaron howled in pain.

Kori plucked the pistol from his grip, then kicked him in the stomach for good measure.

“You ever point a gun at my sister again, and I’ll strangle you with your own intestines. Got it?”

Aaron moaned from the floor, and Kori must have accepted that as a reply, because she checked the safety on his gun, then kept it, and suddenly I understood where most of her weapons collection had come from.

“Carry on,” she said, waving her empty hand at both Kenley and Steven, but when Meghan stood to help her brother, Kori shook her head and raised the gun again. “Sit. Save your healing juice for my sister. He’ll be fine,” she added, with a contemptuous glance at Aaron, who was still curled up on the floor.

Meghan sank back into her chair reluctantly, and I turned back to Kenley.

“I don’t even know how to start,” she said. “Breaking Kori’s seal was hard, but at least I knew what I was doing. I don’t know what Steven was bound to, so I don’t know what to remove my will from.”

“Okay…” Kori came close, obviously thinking, and I didn’t miss the glance she threw at the alarm clock next to the bed. Vanessa’s time was slipping away, along with Steven’s. “Whatever this binding is, he only breached it a couple of weeks ago, right?” she said, and I deferred to Meghan. I wasn’t even in the country when the whole thing started. I’d been gone for nearly seven years.

“Um, yeah.” Meghan sniffled. “I’ll never forget because it was the night he proposed. We had a wonderful dinner, then there was the question, and the ring…” She held her hand out and studied the diamond on her left ring finger. “Half an hour later, he got a migraine, and we had to leave in the middle of dessert.”