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“Anne listened in on the original call.”
    As a Reader—a human lie detector—Kori’s friend Annika was less helpful on the front lines than Olivia was, with her gun and her Tracker abilities. Liv had helped us find those interested in breaking their bindings to Julia Tower, and she’d been my backup on more than one occasion. But Anne was invaluable behind the scenes. She helped keep us from walking into traps.
    “Thanks for doing this,” Kenley whispered in the dark as her small hand slid into my grip. “I know your work is important, and you didn’t have to uproot yourself and Gran, and—”
    “This is important, too, Kenni.”
    I knew much more about her work—and our work to undo her work—than she knew about what I’d been doing while she and Kori were slaves to Jake Tower’s every whim. While they were bound to the syndicate, there was so much I couldn’t tell them. So much I couldn’t show them. So much I couldn’t do for them, without putting them in greater danger and risking the lives of everyone else counting on me.
    Knowing that didn’t ease my guilt over the years they’d spent bound to Tower, out of my reach. But finally, all that had changed. Now I could stand with them. Fight for them. Protect them.
    Now I could help them take down the organization that had broken Kenley’s spirit bit by bit, with every binding Tower had made her seal. The criminal underworld that had heaped unspeakable abuse on Kori, left her scarred physically and psychologically.
    Julia Tower was the brain at the center of her late brother’s operation, and with him gone, there was no one to apply the brakes to her ambition or restrain her psychotic enthusiasm for backstage world domination, or whatever evil scheme was currently sparking across her synapses.
    “No one deserves to be tied to Julia Tower. Not even the assholes.” And if we actually managed to take down the Tower syndicate, one human brick at a time, no one would benefit more than the people I worked with. “So let’s go make this asshole a free man.”
    Kenni squeezed my hand—as good as a smile in the dark—and I tugged her forward one step. Two.
    Then the room around us changed.
    The air tasted different at Meghan’s childhood home. Cleaner, with an antiseptic aftertaste that told me she was a much better housekeeper than anyone living at our hideout.
    Meghan’s bathroom was colder, too, and the tiles sounded different beneath my boots—harder, and more echoey than the linoleum in the house we were renting under a false name.
    Kenley released my hand and flipped a switch on her side of the wall, and soft light from one of those old-fashioned round bulbs lit the bathroom with a yellowish glow. Everything here was a little older. The tub was porcelain, standing on claw feet, and the rest of the house had real hardwood floors. Tongue and groove. Not that we could see much it from the bathroom, because the rest of the house was dark.
    Unease crawled across my back. Why was the rest of the house dark?
    Stay here, I mouthed to Kenley, and she nodded, eyes wide. She could feel the wrongness, too.
    I stepped into the hall and the floor creaked beneath my feet.
    “Kris?” Olivia called, and the pain in her voice triggered alarms like bolts of electricity shooting through me.
    “Liv!” Kenley cried, and I was so busy trying to hold her back that my brain didn’t process what else Olivia had said until it was too late. Until Kenley had already pulled free from my grasp and was halfway down the hall, her shoes squeaking on those hardwood floors.
    “Run!” Olivia’s frantic shout ended abruptly, then echoed in my head as a hand shot out from a bedroom on the left side of the hall.
    Kenley screamed as the hand dragged her into the room, pulling her right off her feet. I charged into the bedroom an instant later, my gun drawn, and nearly ripped the light switch out of the wall as I flipped it. Bright light flooded the unused bedroom, but I was too