Praise for the novels of New York Times bestselling author
RACHEL VINCENT
I liked the character and loved the action. I look forward to reading the next book in the series.
Charlaine Harris
Vincent is a welcome addition to the genre!
Kelley Armstrong
Compelling and edgy, dark and evocative, Stray is a must read! I loved it from beginning to end. Gena Showalter
I had trouble putting this book down. Every time I said I was going to read just one more chapter, Id find myself three chapters later.
Bitten by Books on Stray
Vincent continues to impress with the freshness of her approach and voice. Action and intrigue abound.
RT Book Reviews
Find out more about Rachel Vincent by visiting
mirabooks.co.uk/rachelvincent
and read Rachels blog at urbanfantasy.blogspot.com
Also available fromRachel Vincent
The Shifters series STRAY ROGUE PRIDE PREY SHIFT ALPHA
Soul Screamers series MY SOUL TO TAKE MY SOUL TO SAVE MY SOUL TO KEEP MY SOUL TO STEAL IF I DIE
And look for the thrilling third instalment in
Rachels new Unbound series
OATH BOUND
coming soon
Shadow Bound
Rachel Vincent
www.mirabooks.co.uk
This one is dedicated to my editor, Mary-Theresa
Hussey, who seems to see what I envision for a story
even before Im able to make that clear in the
manuscript. This book was tough. Shadow Bound is the most difficult book Ive ever written and there were days when living in Koris head put me in a very scary place. My editor reminded me that shadows cannot exist without the sun. Kori needed balance. She needed Ian. And Mary-Theresa helped me find the man Ian needed to be, both for Kori and for their story.
I learned a lot with this book. Thank you.
Acknowledgments
Thanks, as always, to my critique partner, Rinda Elliott, the first to read everything I write. Thanks most of all for your willingness to tell me when I suck. The truth is greatly appreciated.
Thanks to #1, my husband, for endless patience. This book and the subsequent revisions took up a crazy three and a half months of our lives and I may not have been the most pleasant person during that time.
A huge thank-you to the MIRA Art department for the SHADOW BOUND cover art. The models are perfect. The colors are beautiful. The tone is dead-on. I love it.
And, of course, thanks to all the readers willing to give this dark and twisted world a chance. I promise, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
One
Kori
If you live in the dark long enough, you start to forget what light looks like. What it feels like. You may remember it in an academic sense. Illumination. A possible source of heat. But after a while those abstract memories are all you have left, and theyre worth less than the memory of water to a man dying of thirst.
I didnt know how long Id been in the dark. Long enough for most of the pain to fade into dull aches, though the latest batch of bruises would still have been visible, if anything had been visible. Long enough that I couldnt remember what shade of gray the walls were. Long enough that when the light came on without warning, it blinded me, even through my closed eyelids.
Id lost all sense of time. I didnt know when Id last showered, or eaten, or needed the toilet in the corner of my cell. I didnt know when Id last heard a human voice, but I remembered the last voice Id heard, and I knew what the sudden light meant.
Light meant a visitor.
And visitors meant pain.
The door creaked open, and my pulse leaped painfullyfear like a bolt of lightning straight to my heart. I clung to that one erratic heartbeat, riding the flow of adrenaline because I hadnt felt anything but the ache of my own wounds in days.
If not for the pain, I couldnt have sworn I was still alive.
Kori Daniels, rise and shine. Milligan was on duty, which meant it was daytimeoutside, anyway. In the basement, it was always night. There were no exterior windows, and no light until someone flipped a switch.
The dark and I used to be friends. No, lovers. When I was alone, I walked around naked just to feel it on my skin, cool and calm, and more intimate than any hand that had ever touched me. The dark was alive, and it was seductive. We used to slide in and out of one another, the shadows and I, always touching, caressing. Sometimes I couldnt tell where the dark ended and I began, and at some point Id decided that division didnt really exist. I was the dark, and the dark was me.
But the darkness in the basement was different. It was false. Broken. Weakened by infrared lights I couldnt see, but I could feel blazing down on me. Caging me. Draining me. The shadows were dead, and touching them was like touching the stiff limbs of a lovers corpse.
Kori, Milligan said again, and I struggled to focus on him. On my own name.
The guard shift change had become the ticking of my mental clockthe only method I had of measuring time. But my clock skipped beats. Hell, sometimes it skipped entire days. If there was a pattern to the granting of meals, and showers, and company, I hadnt figured it out. They came when they came. But mostly, they didnt.
I didnt sit up when Milligan came in. I didnt even open my eyes, because I didnt have to. I hadnt sworn an oath to him, and I hadnt been ordered to obey him, so participation was at my discretion. And I wasnt feeling very discretionary.
I rolled onto my stomach on my mattress, eyes still squeezed shut, trying not to imagine how I must look after all this time. Skinny, bruised, tangled and dirty. Clad only in the same underwear Id been wearing for days, at least, because humiliation was a large part of my sentence and I hadnt been granted the privilege of real clothing. My period hadnt come, which meant I wasnt imagining not being fed regularly, and water came rarely enough that Id decided I wasnt being kept alive, so much as I was being slowly killed.
Id been a bad, bad girl.
Kori, did you hear me? Milligan asked.
Id had no problem with him on the outside. Hed respected me. At least, hed respected the fact that the boss valued me. Milligan had never gotten grabby and hed only leered when he thought I wasnt looking. That was practically chivalry, on the west side of the city.
Now, I hated him. Milligan hadnt put me in the basement, in that rotten fucking cell of a room. But hed kept me there, and that was enough. If I got the chanceif I ever got out and regained my strengthId put a bullet in him. Id have to, just to show Jake Tower that I was down, but not out. Beaten, but not broken.
Milligan would be expecting it, just like I would, in his position.
The door creaked open wider and I buried my face in the crook of my arm, nose pressed into the dirty mattress, braced for whatever would come. Prepared to turn myself off and make the world go away. That was the only way to survive in the basement. Convince yourself that whatever they do to you doesnt matter. And really, it doesnt. How can it, if you cant stop it and no one else wants to? So I dug down deep, to a place where there was no pain and no thought. Not my happy place. Thinking of a happy placeany happy placeonly reminded me that I wasnt really there. That I never would be again.
I went to my empty place.
Towers on his way, Milligan said. I think youre getting out.
My heart leaped into my throat, but I didnt move. Surely Id only heard what I wanted to hear. If I wasnt careful, I sometimes imagined things, and theres nothing more dangerous in the dark than unwarranted hope.
Kori? he said, and that time my eyes opened. Youre getting out today.
I sat up slowly, blinking furiously in the light, wincing over the residual pain from the gunshot wound in my shoulder. Id heard him, but it took forever for the words to sink in, and even once they had, I didnt let myself believe it. It could be a trick. Jonah TowerJakes brotherhad told me I was getting out before, but he only said it so he could watch me suffer when I realized it wasnt true.
If youre lying, Ill fucking kill you, I croaked, my mouth and throat so dry my tongue felt like it had corners.
Im not Milligan glanced down a hallway I couldnt see as a set of firm, even footsteps echoed toward us. Here he comes.
I swallowed a sob. Id expected to die alone in this false dark. In these dead shadows.
Milligan stepped back, and Jake Tower replaced him in the doorway, a steel-spined symbol of power and authority in his white button-up shirt and suit jacket, sans tie. I hated myself for how relieved I was to see him, when he was the one whod locked me up. I hated his clean clothes, and combed hair, and tanned skin. I hated the apple wood smoke clinging to his clothes from the grill, making my stomach rumble and cramp. I hated the slight flush in his cheeks that told me hed had two glasses of red wine with his steaknever more, never less, because Tower was in control. Of everything. Always.
Jake Tower was the heart of the Tower syndicate. Wethe initiateswere the lifeblood of the organization, but Tower was the pump that kept us flowing through the veins and arteries of this living machine. He pushed the buttons and pulled the strings, and we belonged to him, all of us, bound into service, sealed in flesh, by blood and by name. We lived and died according to his will. And we obeyed because obedience was a physical mandate. Even when our minds resisted, our bodies complied, helpless in the face of a direct order.
But Id found a loophole. Id disobeyed the spirit of an order, if not the order itself, and as punishment, Tower had thrown open the gates of hell and shoved me inside. Hed locked me up and given Jonah free rein, and for all I knew, Jake had forgotten I even existed until
Until what?
Until he needed me. Why else would he be here? Why else had he let me live, if my current state could even be called living?
Towers nose wrinkledI didnt smell goodthen he closed the door at his back and sat on the edge of the bare foam mattress covering the raised concrete slab that was my bed. He grabbed my chin and tilted my face toward the light, studying me. I knew what he saw, though there was no mirror in my cell. Bruises. Dark circles and sharp cheek bones. Split lips. And the damage didnt end with my face. I looked like hell and I felt worse.
Tower looked satisfied. Does it hurt?
You fucking know it hurts. Everywhere. That was the whole point. With my existence reduced to fear, and pain, and dead shadows, surely I would never even consider another betrayal. The lights? I didnt want to ask, but I had to know. Your idea? Jonah wasnt smart enough to think of something like that.
Towers lips curled up in a small smile, like hed just remembered some distant childhood pleasure. An irony I hope you fully appreciate. Absolute, inescapable darkness for the shadow-walker. Imprisoned by the source of your own abilities. How did that feel?
I am a Traveler. A shadow-walker. I can step into a shadow in one room, then out of a shadow anywhere else I want to go, within my range. I can see better in the dark than most people. Sometimes I can look into one shadow and see through another one, somewhere else, like looking through a periscope, or one of those paper-towel-roll telescopes we used to play with as kids.
But the basement darkness was anemic, thanks to a grid of infrared lights, too high up for me to reach. So while my cell looked absolutely, claustrophobically dark to the naked eye, that darkness was too shallow for me to travel through. The shadows were dead. I was trapped in the element that had always been my ally. My escape.
How did that make me feel?
Like Id been betrayed by my own body. Like I was lost to the rest of the world. Like I no longer existed at all, which would have been easy to believe, if not for the pain anchoring me to the reality of my own miserable existence. But I wasnt going to tell Tower that.
It sucked, on ice. Happy?
He said nothing. Whatever he wanted to tell me would come on his terms, and making me wait for it was just another way of making me suffer.
Why? I demanded, pissed off that my voice was as weak as the rest of me. Why didnt you just kill me? Hed killed others for far less than what Id done.
You needed to pay for your crimes, and others needed to know you were paying. He said it like he might explain that grass is green, as if it should have been obvious, and the emptiness in his voice was the scariest thing Id ever heard.
You told them?
You were an object lesson, Korinne. I showed them. He glanced at the slab of one-way glass in the top half of the interior wall, and my blood froze in my veins. I started to shake, and I couldnt stop.
You let them watch? Hed invited an audience to see me beaten, and broken, and humiliated, and I closed my eyes against this new layer of humiliation.
Only those who needed to see.
Kenley? No. Please no. I didnt want her touched by this. I didnt want her to know. If Tower was void of human emotion, Kenley was made of it, and she couldnt defend herself. That was my job.
Tower shook his head. Your sister only knows that youre alive. Shes anxious to see you.
I exhaled slowly and blinked back tears that would never fall, using them as fuel for the rage burning deep in my gut. Fury that would have no outlet for four more years. Anger that would fester and burn as I planned for the day when Id be the one throwing punches and spilling blood. Jake Tower would pay. Jonah would pay. Milligan and the other guards would pay. Everyone whod watched would fucking pay.
I would listen to them beg while they bled out on the floor.
But Id have to survive to get revenge, and to survive, Id have to play Jakes game. It was always his game, always his rules, and the only cards he dealt me were penitence and obedience. So I would play the shit out of penitence and obedienceanything to get out of the basementand keep the cards Id dealt myself up my sleeve. Until it was my turn to deal.