She doesn’t respond for a moment and a long bout of silence passes between us.
“OK,” she agrees. “I’ll tell Eric that we need to leave.”
“Thank you.”
I’m only a little relieved. I won’t feel good about this until I know they make it back home alive.
I hang up without another word.
“Well, that was convincing,” Victor says, slightly impressed.
“I guess so.”
“I know your friend believed it,” he adds. “But I didn’t believe a word of it.”
I turn to look at him. He knows me as well as I know him, it seems.
“That’s because not a word of it was true.”
He leaves it at that and we pull out from underneath the bridge.
~~~
We arrive at a house tucked at the end of a secluded road on the outskirts of the city, perched on a hilltop with semi-perfect views of the cityscape below. An irregular-shaped pool sits to the west side of the house and snakes around behind it, the light blue water lit by underwater lights making it appear luminescent. It’s quiet here. All I can hear is the wind brushing through the thick of trees that surround the east side and back of the house, which prevent a full three-hundred and sixty-degree view of the brilliantly-lit landscape of Los Angeles. As we approach the front door, a portly woman in a blue housekeeper’s uniform greets us. She has dark, curly hair and olive skin. Her cheeks are plump, encasing her beady dark brown eyes which look at Victor and I with scrutiny.
“Please come in,” she says with a familiar Spanish accent.
She closes the front door behind us. The house smells faintly of Windex and an unnatural mixture of sweet scents that can only be attributed to some kind of store-bought air freshener. It seems that all of the windows have been left open, allowing the summer night breeze to filter through the house. It’s nothing like the wealthy mansions I’ve been in, but it’s still immaculate and cozy and I feel like I could’ve at least cleaned up before coming here. My skin and my clothes are still stained with blood…
Victor is dressed in black slacks and a tight long-sleeved button-up shirt that clings to every muscle in his arms and chest, the sleeves unbuttoned and pushed up near his elbows. The shirt hangs freely over his slacks and the top two buttons have been left open. A pair of rich, casual black shoes dress his feet. A shiny silver watch adorns his right wrist and I can’t help but notice the single hard, ropy vein that moves along the top of his hand and down the length of his wrist bone. When he follows the housekeeper through the large entryway and briefly turns his back to me, I see the grip of his gun poking from the top of his slacks, the end of his white shirt tucked behind it.
He looks back at me, stops and puts out his arm, guiding me to walk in front of him. My skin shivers lightly when his hand touches my lower back.
Before I have time to feel too out of place next to Victor, Fredrik, Victor’s Swedish friend and accomplice whom I met at Hamburg’s restaurant long ago, enters the room through the large glass doors overlooking the backyard.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sarai
“You’re early,” Fredrik says with a deadly, yet unimaginably sexy smile. He’s dressed much in the same way Victor is except that in place of Victor’s button-up shirt, Fredrik sports a plain tight white tee that clings to his lean, masculine form. His feet are bare.
The first time I saw Fredrik I found him inconceivably gorgeous with soft, almost-black hair and haunting dark eyes; his facial structure appears sculpted by some renowned artist. But I’ve always felt there’s something dark and frightening that lives inside of him. Something I never personally want to get more acquainted with. I’ll settle with the way things were when we met: friendly and charming and mysterious, seeing only the beautiful mask that he wears to conceal the animal that dwells beneath it.
Victor glances at his expensive watch. “Early by only ten minutes,” he clarifies.
Fredrik smiles as he approaches, his white teeth semi-bright amid the backdrop of his tanned skin. “Yes, but you know how I am.”
Victor nods, but doesn’t elaborate. I’m left to wonder what that meant.
“It’s good to see you,” Fredrik says, looking down at me from his tall height and encompassing presence. He reaches for my hand and kisses the top of it, just above my knuckles. “I hear you killed a man tonight.” He raises back up out of his half-bow and releases my hand. A haunting, proud smile lingers on his face, the corners of his eyes warm with something reminiscent or…pleasurable, as if the thought of my killing someone somehow delights him.
I look at Victor to my right. He nods, answering the question that is all over my expression: Did the guard I stabbed in the neck at the restaurant, die?
I look at Fredrik and answer matter-of-factly, “I guess I did.”
A tiny grin tugs the corners of Fredrik’s lips and he glances at Victor briefly with only the movement of his eyes.
“And you’re OK with that?” Fredrik asks me.
“Yeah, actually I am,” I answer right away. “The bastard deserved it.”
Fredrik and Victor seem to be sharing some kind of secret conversation. I hate that.
Finally, Fredrik says to Victor out loud, “You’ve got your hands full, Faust,” and he turns his back to us and heads back toward the glass doors. We follow him outside, passing underneath the covered portion of the patio and descend a set of rock steps that lead onto an enormous rock patio that spreads out in all directions. The patio is decorated by wrought-iron tables and chairs and an outside canopy bed.
I sit down next to Victor on a plush couch.
“How’d you know, anyway?” I ask Fredrik, but then I turn to Victor and say, “And you never did tell me how you knew that I was here.” Really, I don’t care much, I just want to look into his eyes again. I want to be alone with him, but for now I’ll settle with the three-inch space between our bodies sitting next to each other.
“Melinda Rochester told me,” Fredrik says with a knowing grin. I start to ask, Who the hell is Melinda Rochester, when he says, “Well, she told everyone, actually. Channel 7 news. A man stabbed to death behind a Los Angeles restaurant.”
I start to squirm inside my skin. I hope the cameras didn’t get a good shot of me.
I turn to Victor, worry heavy on my face. “I wore a white wig,” I say, trying to find something, anything that I did right. “I kept my face down…mostly.” I give up. I know that what I did is going to continue to dig that grave of mine. I sigh and stare at the bloodstained hands in my lap.
“And finding you was easy,” Victor says next to me. “Mrs. Gregory called me after you left Arizona. She was worried about you going to L.A. and thought I should know.”
My head swings around to face him. “What? Dina knew where you were?” I feel the skin around my eyebrows hardening in my forehead.
“No,” he says gently, “she never knew where I was, but she knew how to get a hold of me.”
His words sting. I swallow down the feeling of betrayal, on both of their parts.
“I told her to contact me only if it was an emergency. If something happened to you.”
“You left Dina with a way to contact you,” I snap, “but left me with nothing. I can’t believe you did that.”
“I wanted you to go on with your life. But in case Javier’s brothers found you, or if you decided to pull a stunt like you pulled tonight, I wanted to know about it.”
I can’t look at him. I scoot to put a few more inches of space between us and although I’m bitter and pissed off at him for what he did, I find myself wanting to move back. But I stand my ground, refusing to let him know that the power he holds over me makes my anger towards him feel more like a tantrum.
“I can’t believe Dina kept this from me,” I say aloud, though more to myself.
“She kept it from you because I told her how imperative it was.”
“Well, whatever the case,” Fredrik speaks up as he takes the matching c
hair next to the couch, “it looks like you’ve gotten yourself into a situation you won’t be able to crawl out of easily, if ever.”
“Why are we here?” I ask bitterly.
Fredrik laughs lightly under his breath. “Where else are you going to go?”
“I had to get you away from the hotel,” Victor says.
“Wait a minute,” I say, backtracking. “I didn’t kill that man behind the restaurant. It happened inside Hamburg’s private room upstairs.” I remember the man I saw outside behind the restaurant, the one who let me go, and my heart sinks.
“Hamburg wouldn’t have let the police believe it happened inside because they would’ve retrieved the camera footage and saw what really happened.”
I’m not following him. At all.
“Wouldn’t they want the police to know what really happened?”
Fredrik leans back against the chair casually and props one bare foot on a knee at the ankle, resting both arms across the length of the chair arms.
Victor shakes his head. “Do I really need to explain this to you, Sarai?”
His faintly aggravated attitude catches me off guard. I look over at him and it only takes a few seconds to understand everything all on my own, without him having to point it out.
“Oh, I get it,” I say, looking back and forth between them, “Hamburg doesn’t want the police involved because he’ll risk exposing himself. What, so he just had the body moved outside? Staged the area to make it look like a random robbery? Not too much different from what he did that night we were at his mansion, I suppose.” I don’t say any more with Fredrik here. I don’t know how close Victor is to him, or if Fredrik even knows what happened the night Victor killed Hamburg’s wife.
Victor’s eyes smile lightly at me, his way of letting me know how pleased he is that I figured everything out. Still feigning resentment, I don’t give him the acknowledgment he’s probably expecting.
The housekeeper comes outside carrying a fancy wooden ice bucket with three bottles of beer jutting from the top. Fredrik takes one and then she turns to us. Victor reaches for one, but I decline, barely making eye contact with her, too engrossed in the events of the night still running through my mind.
The housekeeper leaves us shortly afterwards without muttering a word.
“What did you mean by Javier’s brothers?”
Victor twists the cap off his beer and sets it on the table.
“Two of them, Luis and Diego, took over Javier’s operations just days after you killed him.” Briefly, Javier’s face flashes through my mind, the shocked, yet proud look on his face, the wideness of his eyes, how his body fell against the floor seconds after I put a bullet in his chest.
I shake it off.
I remember Luis and Diego. Diego was the one who tried to rape me when I lived at the compound in Mexico, the one who Javier castrated as punishment.
“Are they looking for me?”
Victor takes a sip from his beer and then sets the bottle down gently on the table. “Not that I know of,” he says. “I’ve been monitoring the compound for months. Javier’s brothers are amateurs. They’ve no idea what they’re doing with power like that. I doubt they even realize that you’re a threat.”
Fredrik takes a sip of his beer and lets the bottle rest between his legs. “Don’t look so relieved,” he chimes in. “You would’ve been better off with amateurs looking for you than Hamburg and that right-hand man of his.”
A nervous knot hardens in the pit of my stomach. I glance at Victor momentarily for answers.
“Willem Stephens,” Victor says. “He does all of Hamburg’s dirty work. Hamburg by himself is as cowardly and only as dangerous as the friendly neighborhood pedophile. He can barely shoot an unmoving target and would crack in two minutes to sell someone out to save himself.” He cocks a brow. “Stephens, on the other hand, has an extensive military background, is a former mercenary and was employed by a black market Order back in ’86.”
“A what?”
“An Order like ours,” Victor explains, “only they take on private contracts. They do things that other operatives won’t do, sell their services to just about anyone.”
“Oh…so basically he kills innocent people for money.” I recall what Victor told me months ago about the nature of private contracts, about how hits are carried out on people for petty things like cheating spouses and vengeance. Victor’s Order only deals in crime and serious threats to a large number of people or ideas that could have a negative impact on society or life as a whole.
I swallow hard. “Well, he definitely saw me.” I reach up with both hands and push my hair away from my face, running my palms over the top of my head. “He was the one who walked me upstairs to Hamburg’s room.” I look at Victor. “I’m so sorry, Victor. I…I didn’t know any of this.”
Fredrik laughs lightly. “Something tells me that even if you did know that you still would’ve gone there.”
I look away from Victor’s eyes and stare down at my lap again, my blood-stained fingers moving nervously against one another. Fredrik's right. I hate to admit it, but he’s right. I still would’ve gone to the restaurant. I still would’ve tried to kill Hamburg. But if I had known all of this, I think I would’ve had a better plan.
Suddenly, it feels like something just reached inside me and stole my breath. “Victor…my phone…,” I shoot up from the couch, my long, auburn hair falling about my shoulders, prickling my bare arms where the blood has dried within it, forming a coarse crust-like texture. “Dina’s number is in my phone. Fuck. Fuck! Victor, Stephens will go after her! I have to go back to Arizona!”
I start to head toward the back door, but Victor is behind me before I make it across the smooth, intricate rock walkway.
“Just wait,” he encourages.
I look down to see his fingers clasped around my wrist. His bewitching green-blue eyes stare back at me with intent and devotion. Devotion. I’ve never seen that in Victor’s eyes before.
Fredrik speaks up from behind, breaking me free from the trance Victor has put on me. “I’ll take care of that,” he says. I look away from Victor to see Fredrik, who is more important right now considering it’s Dina’s life on the line.
“How?” I ask.
Victor leads me back over to the couch.
Fredrik takes the cell phone from the table in front of him, searches for a number and touches the screen to call it. He puts the phone to his ear.
Victor urges me to sit back down next to him. I’m too engrossed with Fredrik right now to notice right away that Victor has made sure to sit so close that his thigh is pressed against mine. I want to bask in our moment of closeness, but I can’t. I’m worried about Dina.
Fredrik leans against the chair again, shaking his bare foot gently against his knee. The tone in his face shifts alert when someone on the other end answers.
“How fast can you get to Lake Havasu City?” Fredrik asks into the phone. He listens for a second and then nods. “I’m going to text you an address when we end this call. Get there as soon as possible. A woman lives there. Dina Gregory.” He glances up at me as if to make sure he got the name right and when I don’t correct him, he goes back to the person on the phone. “Get her out of the house and take her to Amelia in Phoenix. Yes. Yes. No, she is not to be questioned. Just make sure that no one harms her. Yes. Call me back on this number as soon as you have her.” He nods a couple more times. My heart is about to beat right out of my chest. I hope whoever he’s talking to can get to her in time.
Fredrik finally hangs up and then appears to be opening a text screen. He looks up at me, but Victor is the one who gives him Mrs. Gregory’s address. Fredrik types it in and then places the phone back on the table.
“My contact is only thirty minutes away,” Fredrik says looking at me first, but then he turns to Victor. “What do you want me to do?” He raises his back from the chair and props his elbows on his knees, letting his hands drape between them, a rather casual position,
yet he still manages to appear neat and important and dangerous.
“I still need you to check on what we discussed yesterday,” Victor says and it’s even clearer to me now that Fredrik takes orders from Victor, even though Fredrik doesn’t seem the type to take orders from anyone. But clearly, they have a strong relationship. “And if you don’t mind, I need to borrow your house for the evening.”
Fredrik’s dark eyes shift to see me and a hint of a grin appears on his face. He stands up and takes his cell phone from the table, hiding it within his rather large fist.
“Say no more,” he agrees. “I’ll be out of here in twenty minutes. I have someone I’m meeting tonight anyway, so it works out.”
Victor’s demeanor changes just slightly, but I notice it right away. He’s looking across the small patio table at Fredrik with a faint, wary look. “You’re not going to do what I think you are?” Victor asks.
I listen closely and I don’t try to hide the fact. I want them to know that I’m prying because I find it frustrating that neither of them are offering me any explanations for their clandestine comments.
One side of Fredrik’s mouth lifts into a grin. He shakes his head subtly. “No, not tonight, I’m afraid. But it’s been a while. I’ll need you to help me with that soon.” His eyes pass over me briefly and it sends a chill through my back. I just can’t figure out whether it’s a good chill or a frightening one.
“You’ll have your opportunity soon,” Victor says.
Fredrik walks around the table. “Sorry to cut our visit short.”
“It’s all right,” I say. “Thank you for helping with Dina. Will you let us know when you get that call?”
Fredrik nods. “Absolutely. I will do that.”
“Thank you,” I repeat.
Victor walks with Fredrik to the glass doors and they step through to the other side. I stay seated, but I watch them from across the stone patio and I listen in as much as I can, but they make sure to keep their voices low. This, too, frustrates me. And I intend to let Victor know it.