“One last kiss,” she says looking into my eyes, “for old time’s sake. I just want to feel young again, like I always felt when you’d visit me.”
I bring my hands up and cradle her face within them, kissing her forehead slowly first. “It was never about you being older than me, Sam. You’re still as sexy today as you were to me ten years ago.” And then I touch my lips to hers, dragging the tip of my tongue softly across her bottom lip and into her mouth.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Sarai
They’ve been in the bathroom for a really long time. But it’s none of my business what they do. I left the room right before Samantha started stitching Victor up, resolved to come to my senses and let it go. I feel like I should’ve stayed to hear the things they talked about at least, since I’m pretty sure some of it was about me and I have a right to know, but it was too intrusive. And I admit, I didn’t want to see them together.
Despite feeling some jealousy for Victor, which I realize is only natural given the extraordinary situation I’ve been thrust into with him, I know that he could never be interested in someone like me, or in anyone at all, really.
Except Samantha and others like her, I suppose.
Regardless of their age difference, I know they’ve been intimate before. I heard her say it right before I left the room and I like to think I’m smart enough to put together the rest of the picture on my own, knowing what little I do know. Whatever their past relationship I feel like even though she’s attractive and obviously a kind and smart woman, those probably weren’t the things that brought him here. And it wasn’t just the sex, either. It was that Samantha knew all along that sex was all it would ever be.
I’m no expert, but it’s just what I believe in my heart. Samantha is like him, maybe not exactly in what roles they play in their secretive world of crime and danger and death, but she knows he’s too disciplined and unemotional to become involved.
Victor could probably never trust himself with anyone on the ‘outside’. And when it comes to comparing me with them, I am the epitome of the outside.
I stare off toward the curtain-covered window in the spare room where Victor left me earlier. It’s pitch black outside even though it’s not even nine o’clock yet. I lay on my side on the bed, one arm bent beneath my head underneath my pillow. My feet are cold, but I don’t care to get up and break apart a pair of socks from the package Victor bought me, so I press my feet together at the ankles and slide them underneath the blanket.
Victor walks into the room. He leaves the door open to let the light from the hallway filter inside instead of flipping on the switch. I get the feeling he thought at first I might’ve been asleep.
He’s dressed from head to toe in refined sophistication, more-so than I’ve ever seen him and I can’t help but stare across the room at his dangerous beauty. His tall form moves through the path of light at the door and then is bathed in shadow when he approaches the bed where I lay.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he says and sits down beside me, his back straight, his hands resting along the tops of his legs.
“Are you going to come back?”
It takes him a moment to answer. He keeps his eyes trained on the window out ahead.
“It will probably be best that I didn’t,” he says.
My heart lurches. I swallow.
“When Javier is dead, either Samantha will take you where you need to go, or I’ll send Niklas for you.”
The back of my throat is beginning to burn, the top of my nose, just between my eyes is starting to itch.
I force the tears back.
I don’t want him to go at all, much less never come back. I want to stay with him, though I don’t know why.
“But what if others know?” I remind him, hoping to change his mind without him knowing the real reason why. “What about John Lansen? What about all of the other men I saw? Victor, they might know and maybe Javier won’t be the last to come looking for me.” I really don’t care if they do. That’s not what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of Victor walking out that door and never seeing him again.
Finally, I manage to sit up, anger twisting my features at first, until I notice it and let them soften.
I cross my legs Indian-style on the bed and reach out to take his wrist, tugging on the sleeve of his jacket. I halfway expected him to retract it from me, but he doesn’t. He rests his hand upon the tops of my crossed ankles and just that simple touch, that single gesture, causes my throat to close up with emotion. I look down at his hand, my fingers shaking nervously against the cuff of his dress shirt.
He didn’t move his hand away…, I keep thinking to myself.
Tears brim my eyelids, but I breathe them back quickly.
“I am sorry, Sarai,” he says looking me in the eyes as his churn with conflict and indecision.
I get the feeling that he doesn’t want to leave me here. I feel it…I know it….
Slowly he stands up from the bed. I sit here, frozen in a chasm of self-defeat and anger and fear. Fear! How can he accuse me of fearing nothing?! I want to shout at him, tell him how wrong he is as he shoulders his bags and takes up the gun suitcase in one hand.
Instead, I wipe the few tears that did manage to fall from my eyes and I say across the room to him softly:
“Victor, you were wrong.”
He turns only his head to look back at me.
“You were wrong when you said I fear nothing. You were so wrong….”
He holds his gaze on me for only a second and then turns and walks away, closing the door and letting the darkness of the room consume me again.
~~~
Samantha left me alone for the next hour and a half. I guess she wanted to give me time to myself because when she did finally come into the room with me minutes ago, I could tell that she felt something for me as I lay curled up on the bed, staring at that window. It makes me wonder what they talked about in her bathroom earlier, makes me regret not staying longer to have found out.
I would hate her for knowing more than me, if she was an easy person to hate.
But I realize I like her too much for that.
“You know, Victor does this stuff all the time, Izabel.” She pats me on the hip with the palm of her hand. She’s sitting in the same spot next to me where Victor last sat.
“He’ll be fine.” She smiles. “And I’m sure he knows you’re grateful to him for helping you.”
“What can you tell me about him?” I ask.
She inhales a deep, concentrated breath and her eyebrows rise with that loaded-question sort of look.
“Well, I’m guessing you know what he does for a living already, so you can probably imagine that I’m sworn to a certain amount of secrecy that if I break could get me in a lot of trouble.”
True, but she’s smiling and really seems kind of itching to talk to me, regardless. It may not turn out to be much, but something is better than nothing, I suppose.
I sit upright, dropping my legs over the side of the bed to sit like her. I rest my hands within my lap.
She smiles over at me in a short glance and reaches out her hand. “Let’s talk about it over a cup of coffee.”
She stands up and I put my hand in hers and accept.
“I swear it’s perfectly poison-free,” she jokes as I follow her out the door and into the hall.
“I believe you.”
I believe her mostly because if Victor trusted her enough to leave me alone with her then that’s enough for me.
I sit down at the kitchen table while she gets the coffee ready at the counter where the coffee pot sits next to an old giant microwave.
“I suppose it’s OK to tell you that he’s been the way he is pretty much all his life.” She scoops a few tablespoons of coffee into the filter and shuts the top of the coffee maker. “But I really only know the things he’s told me. Nothing more than that.”
“What kinds of things?”
She
pours the water in the back of the coffee maker while allowing the different conversations she’s had with Victor to materialize.
“Well, I know he loves his coffee black.” She smiles. “He loves Thai food and he won’t touch tuna fish with someone else’s tongue. He prefers a good beer over a fine wine, but only the best beer, preferably German.” She sits down at the table with me and props the side of her face in one hand, looking thoughtful. “To tell you the truth, Victor would rather go all the way to Germany for a beer than to drink the beer here.” She waves her hand at me once, removing it from her cheek. “He’s a very particular man.”
“But what about his family?” I ask. “He told me he had a sister and that he killed his father and something about his mother being in…Budapest, I think?”
Samantha shakes her head, smiling and maybe even finding what I told her a little amusing. But she’s not gloating about it.
“No, doll,” she says. “If that’s what he told you, it was probably just to get you to stop talking. (Well, she’s right about that much, I know.) He would never tell anyone else anything too personal about his life, especially his family. Not even me. I don’t even know if he has a family.”
I stay as far away from the topic of the two of them as I can.
“You need to know, Izabel,” she looks at me intently so that I’ll meet her gaze, “that Victor is risking a lot…no, he’s risking everything by helping you. And even though he left tonight and doesn’t intend to come back for you, what he’s already done where you’re concerned, though I have no idea what that might be, it could have already sealed his fate.”
My stomach tightens and I get this horrid feeling in the center of my throat.
Her gaze shifts softly and I feel as if she’s mourning me, or my feelings in some private way.
She leans her back against the chair. The coffee gurgles and drips into the pot behind her.
“But how do you know that’s what he’s doing?” I ask. “How do you know he’s helping me and that I’m not just part of his mission?”
“Because he would never have brought you here,” she says almost sympathetically. “And he wouldn’t have asked me not to tell anyone, our employer, no one, that he did it.”
I raise my gaze from the table to look at her, surprised by the information she just gave.
She nods at me as if to confirm my thoughts even though I never spoke them aloud. “Yes,” she says. “Other than Niklas, I am the only one he trusts. Maybe not completely because Victor is incapable of that, but he trusts me. And by hiding you out here and asking me to risk my life by keeping you a secret, that’s how I know.”
She’s telling the truth. I can’t bring myself to believe otherwise no matter how hard I try. And I do try. I think I’m subconsciously attempting to find some reason not to like her or to be suspicious of her because of my jealousy from before.
But I find nothing.
And I can’t help but wonder if she holds that against me, if there is any lingering bitterness towards me because Victor asked her to risk her life for me. But I sense that there isn’t. It makes me feel ashamed in a way.
She gets up from the table and heads back toward the coffee pot.
But then she stops mid-stride and freezes at the end of the counter as if she came within an inch of walking into a glass wall. Her right hand touches the edge of the counter, her fingers curling into a fist as her head snaps back around to me. Her eyes are wide and alert and the sight of her like that makes me jump in my own skin.
And then I hear something, too, and my heart starts to bang violently against my ribs, reverberating through my bones and into my ears. Shadows move across the kitchen window and at that moment, Samantha drops low toward the floor, though still on her feet, and rushes toward me, pulling me completely from the chair. It happens so fast that I don’t get to drop as gracefully as she had. I nearly fall on my butt, but my right foot keeps me grounded where I spin around precariously on it until I catch my balance and then follow her through to the hallway.
“Who is it?” I whisper.
She grabs my arm and pulls me around in front of her. Her dog, Pepper, runs to the back door, barking furiously.
“Stay low and get back to your room!” she hisses. “Hurry!”
Crouched as low to the floor as I can possibly be without actually sitting on it, I feel like I’m scuttling across the carpet toward the opened bedroom door. Once I’m inside, Samantha comes in right behind me and dropping the rest of the way to her knees, she thrusts out both arms and presses her hands against the large wooden chest sitting at the foot of the bed. As she’s moving the chest, more shadows move across the window and I hear voices whispering outside.
And they’re speaking Spanish.
I whirl around to Samantha, tearing my eyes away from the window just in time to see her lifting a small metal door in the floor that had been hidden underneath the chest.
“Get inside! Hurry! Now!”
In that last second, which I don’t even think I really have the time to spare, I reach underneath the mattress and grab the gun that Victor left there, shoving it into the back of my pants. Samantha waves her hand at me to hurry and when I’m close enough she grabs my arm and helps me the rest of the way by practically shoving me down into the hole beneath the floor.
The metal door closes over me, shutting out the only light I had which had been shining thinly through the single bedroom window from the streetlight outside. And then I hear the chest being moved back over the metal door and my heart sinks like a stone at the thought of being trapped down here, regardless of what’s up there.
Make that one more thing that I fear, Victor: being trapped in a small space.
I hear Samantha’s footsteps move across the floor above and then the sound of the bedroom door clicking closed once she makes her way out.
Everything is eerily silent: the heaviness of my breath, the pumping of blood through my ears; I can’t hear either of them though I know both should be raucous in the small confined space that conceals me. I can’t see a thing, so I reach my hands out in front of me and start feeling my surroundings. I painfully count three walls to my left, right and in front of me, but am relieved that behind me there is no fourth wall to keep me confined. It’s a narrow hallway.
I don’t have time to investigate it further when I hear the first gunshot, although suppressed like Victor’s always sounds, but I know that this time it isn’t Victor.
Pepper isn’t barking anymore.
I hear a voice. It sounds far off but it echoes from somewhere above me. That’s when I feel a small draft on my hairline and I reach up my hand to feel for the ceiling. There’s a vent, though far too small of one for me to fit my head through much less the rest of my body, but it’s a vent and I know now that’s how I heard the echo of the voice.
There’s another suppressed shot and this time when I hear the voice that succeeds it, I know that it belongs to Javier.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“I have four bullets left in this gun,” Javier says to Samantha somewhere in the house. “And I’m going to put one in you every two minutes that my sweet Sarai is still in hiding.”
My hand comes up involuntarily and clutches at my heart.
“Victor is coming back,” Samantha says in a weak, strained voice.
It fills me with dread to think of where Javier has already shot her.
“You lie, puta! You stink of lies. Now tell me where Sarai is. Because I know she’s here.”
How did he know I was here?
Then in Spanish Javier shouts, “Search the house! Every room. Turn it upside-down and find her!”
Two seconds later the sound of furniture being overturned, glass shattering and feet stomping across the floor echoes through the walls.
“She’s not here,” Samantha says as if pushing the words through her teeth. “Victor was here earlier. With a girl. A little black-haired girl he called Izabel. But he took her with him when he left.
”
Thwap!
Another shot sounds and Samantha screams out in pain, but then her screams are muffled and I can only imagine that it’s by Javier’s hand. Or maybe someone else within the room. Tears stream down my hot cheeks. There’s a chill in the air being so close to the cold ground outside, but my blood pressure is so high from the incredible amount of stress on my nerves that it feels like my head is on fire.
“I know she’s here,” Javier says coldly. “I know she didn’t leave with him because I was watching. Now you have six more minutes. The last bullet I’ll put in your brain.”
Then Javier’s voice rises:
“You hear that, Sarai?” he calls out to me. “In six more minutes you’ll kill her. Just like you killed Lydia. All I want is to take you home. I could never hurt you, you know that.”
My legs are shaking.
After the ransacking noises finally stop, the extra sets of footsteps, two judging by the pattern, move back into the room with Javier.
“Both of you go outside,” Javier demands. “Look everywhere, search the neighborhood but don’t draw attention. Go!”
I can’t leave Samantha up there with him to die.
“I told you there’s no one here!” she shouts.
The noise I hear this time I know is Javier’s hand across her face and then her body hitting the floor. The floor beams shake above me with the force of her fall.
I turn behind me and start feeling my way through the narrow passage, hoping that it leads me out. Because I won’t leave her like this. Javier can take me back. He can kill me if he wants to, but I won’t hide under here like a coward and let her die for me.
Thwap!
My breath hitches and my bones lock up, but I keep on moving forward and finally come to the end. There’s nothing here, nothing but more walls and the same passage I just walked through. I reach up above me and feel around on the ceiling for another metal door hatch. And sure enough, there is one. And just when I think there’s no way I can lift that lid all the way and climb my way out without making enough noise to tell Javier exactly where I am, I stub my toe on a four-step set of moveable stairs shoved into the corner.