She blinked at me for several seconds, like she was trying to decide if I was serious. Then she nodded and kissed me, and we slid beneath the covers together. A few minutes later, she fell asleep in my arms again, and this time there were no nightmares. For her. I lay awake for three more hours, trying to figure out how to make my promise a reality. How to help her kill Jake and Jonah, without getting both of us killed in the process.

Her binding had to be broken. All roads led to that one conclusion. And there was only one person in the world who could make that happen.

Kenley Daniels. It all came back to her.

* * *

The next morning, I woke up to find Kori watching me, her fingers curled around mine on the comforter. There was something new in her eyes. Something fragile, but full of promise. After a moment, I realized what I was seeing.

Trust. She was trusting me. She had trusted me, and that couldn’t have been easy, considering what she’d been through. And what I’d come to do. But she didn’t know I’d come to kill her sister, and she wouldn’t know, because I wasn’t going to do it. If I’d had any doubts about that before, they were gone now. I could not betray this fragile new trust.

“Breakfast?” I asked.

She smiled, and my heart beat so hard it bruised the inside of my chest. How could she do that? How could one smile make me ache deep inside, in places I hadn’t even known existed? How could she mean so much to me, in so little time?

“Yeah, but first—” Her sentence ended abruptly as her phone started beeping from somewhere on the floor. Kori popped upright like a jack-in-the-box, fear suddenly as clear in her features as satisfaction had been a moment before. “Shit!” She glanced at the bedside clock, which said it was seven-thirty in the morning, then scrambled off the bed and snatched her jeans from the floor, digging in one pocket in search of her phone. “I have to be in Tower’s office in thirty minutes, or he’ll lock me back up.”

“What?” I rolled onto the floor and flipped up the lid on my suitcase, then snatched a pair of pants from the top of the pile.

“I’m in trouble for not reporting what happened at the park,” she said, stepping into her jeans as I stepped into mine.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because there was fighting, then there was sex, then I told you a whole bunch of other things, and this one just kind of slipped my mind. It’s messy in there, you know.”

“I’m coming with you.” I pulled on my shirt, then sat on the end of the bed to shove my feet into a pair of socks.

“No, I have to go alone.” She buttoned her pants, then took the bra I handed her and I fastened the hooks at her back while she dialed on her phone. “Kenley?” she said, when her sister answered. Kenley said something I couldn’t make out, and Kori nodded. “I know. Twenty-five minutes.” She shoved one arm into her sleeve, then transferred the phone to her other hand and slid the opposite arm in, too. “Is Van with you?” she said, and I buttoned her shirt, so she could hold the phone.

“I don’t want to leave you alone,” Kori said, in response to something else I couldn’t hear, and I saw my opportunity.

“I’ll stay with her,” I said, and Kori looked up at me. And that trust faltered. I could see it. “She can come here, or I’ll go there. Whichever’s easier.”

“I don’t know…” Kori said, and I realized that her devotion to Kenley might be the only thing in the world strong enough to threaten the connection we’d just made.

Good thing I wasn’t planning to kill her sister anymore.

“I swear on my life that I won’t let anything happen to her,” I said.

Kori closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Okay.” She wanted to threaten me. I could almost hear the words she was holding back, and I understood them. She was trusting me with the only thing she had left in the world, other than her heart, and I was hoping she’d trust me with that, too, if I kept Kenley safe from…whatever was threatening her at the moment.

“Kenni, I’m going to drop Ian off on my way to Jake’s.” Another pause, and Kori frowned. “He’s not a babysitter. He’s a friend, and I trust him. Just humor me, okay? We’ll be there in a minute.”

Thanks to the miracle of shadow-walking, she meant that literally.

Kori threw on the rest of her clothes, then we brushed our teeth and I helped wind the scarf around her neck again. Then we stepped from my bathroom into her sister’s apartment.

Kori let go of my hand and a second later, light flared to life overhead, illuminating a cramped room stuffed with a twin bed, desk and dresser. A pile of free weights stood in one corner and a collection of handguns and knives were laid out on a towel stretched over her dresser, next to a squeeze bottle of gun oil sitting on an aluminum case that could only be a gun kit.

“Kenni!” Kori called, and an instant later Kenley Daniels appeared in the tiny hall. The three of us would hardly have fit in the bedroom together. “I have to go. I need you to stay here with Ian. He’ll protect you.”

“From what?” Kenley crossed her arms over her chest and glared openly at me. “There’s a guard right outside the front door.”

“We can’t trust Jake’s men. This is just in case.”

“No way. We can’t trust him, Kori! He’s not bound. You hardly even know him.”

“I know enough,” Kori said, and I realized she was using my words. And that I loved hearing them in her voice. “Just stay with him until I get back.” Then she turned to me, her hand already on the light switch, ready to step into the darkness once again. “If I’m not back in an hour, get her out of here. Same thing goes if anyone comes for her. Kill the bastard and get her as far away as you can.”