Blood Bound Read Free Page A

always help one another, whenever they were asked,” she continued, as I fell through the rabbit hole, flailing for something solid to grab on to. “They signed their names, and—”
    “And they stamped their thumbprints in blood.” I pushed open the bathroom door to find Annika Lawson watching me, green eyes holding my gaze with the weight of shared youth and the long-since frayed knots of friendship. “That’s where those stupid little girls went wrong,” I said. “They disrespected the power of names and blood.”
    And look where it got us—my entire life ruled by one careless promise the year I was twelve.
    “We didn’t disrespect the power, Liv.” Her gaze was steady, holding me accountable for every truth I’d ever tried to hide—that much hadn’t changed, even after six years apart. “We just didn’t understand it.”
    Because no one had told us. We didn’t know we were Skilled, because our parents thought they were protecting us with ignorance. Insulating us from the dangers of our own genetic inheritance.
    In the first years after the revelation, people sometimes disappeared. Government experiments or eager private industry research, no one knew for sure, but the disappearances terrified already worried parents into a perilous silence. They could never have known that Kori’s little sister was a Binder, or that at ten years old, she’d be strong enough to tie us to one another for the rest of our lives.
    “Well, the power understood us. ” And our ignorance didn’t make that binding any less real. Or any easier to undo. We’d bound ourselves together so tightly that as we grew up, the bonds chafed, wearing away at our friendship until nothing was left but resentment and anger.
    I pulled the bathroom door closed and sank into my desk chair, fending off a battery of memories I’d thought buried. It felt weird to see Anne in my office, out of place in my adult life when she’d been a central figure of my youth. Part of me wanted to hug her and get caught up over drinks, but the stronger part of me remembered what went down that night six years ago, the last time we’d all four been together.
    A reunion wasn’t gonna happen. Ever. And not just because Elle was dead and Kori was MIA. Anne had disappeared when I’d needed a friend. I could have tracked her, but why, when a dozen unanswered calls and messages said she didn’t want to talk to me? So I’d struck out on my own, and never once looked back at the past. Until now.
    “What are you doing here? Is a third ghost from my past going to show up and take me to my own grave?” But that possibility struck a little too close to home, and I had to shrug it off.
    She sank onto the couch and her composure cracked, then fell away, revealing raw pain and bitter anger, and suddenly I wanted to hurt whoever’d hurt her. In spite of what she’d done to me—what we’d all done to one another—I wanted to protect her, like Kori and I had looked out for her as kids, and that impulse ran deeper than the oath connecting us. Older. All the way back to the day Anne and I had first met, before Kori and Elle even moved to town.
    But it wasn’t that simple. I knew what she was going to say, even though it shouldn’t have been possible.
    “I need you, Liv. Will you help me?”
    No! Shock sputtered within me, synapses misfiring in my brain as I tried to make sense of what she’d just said. Of what she shouldn’t have been able to say.
    “How did you…?” But my voice faded into silence as the answer to my own question became obvious. “You burned it. You burned the second oath.” Damn it! “We swore, Anne. We swore to let it stand.”
    In spite of unshed tears shining in her eyes, Anne’s gaze held no hint of shame or regret. “You’re the only one who can help me with this and I couldn’t even ask you with the second oath binding me.”
    “That’s why we signed it!” I leaned forward with my arms crossed on the desktop, and my chair