She sits on my lap and I fit my right hand between her thighs.
“Breakfast,” I answer.
Sarai yawns and stretches her arms above her before laying her head against my shoulder. I fit my left hand behind her at the waist to keep her balanced on my lap. The smell of her freshly-washed skin and hair sends my senses into overdrive.
She makes a subtle face, halfway rejecting the idea.
“You should eat,” I urge her.
Raising her head from my shoulder, she looks thoughtful for a moment and then turns her attention to the housekeeper. “Sure, I’d like some breakfast, if you don’t mind,” she says in Spanish.
For a moment, the housekeeper looks surprised that Sarai speaks to her in her native tongue, but she’s over it just as quickly.
The housekeeper nods and heads back into the house.
“I think I’ve put this question off long enough,” she says. “Where do we go from here, Victor? What am I going to do?”
I had been thinking about this very thing since I found out that she was in Los Angeles and after what she had done. I stare off toward the pool, lost in thought, my last desperate attempt to sort out the answers in my head. But they are as broken and unsettled as they ever have been. All except for one.
“Sarai,” I say, looking back at her, “you can’t go home. I knew this the first time I sent you back to Arizona. The situation wasn’t nearly as dire as it has become, but now that things have changed, you can never go home.”
“Then I’m staying with you,” she says and for the first time in my life, I can’t bring myself to protest such an issue. Not with her, or even with myself. The largest part of me, the flawed human part, wants her with me and I’ll stop at nothing to make sure that it works.
But I know it’s not going to be easy.
“Yes,” I say, running the palm of my hand across her smooth thigh, “you’re staying with me, but there are many things that you must understand.”
She gets up from my lap and stands in front of me, one arm crossing her abdomen, the other propped atop it at the elbow. Absently, she brushes her fingertips across the softness of her face as she stares out at seemingly nothing. Then she looks down at me and shakes her head with a perplexed look in her eyes. “I expected you to put up more of a fight. What’s the catch? Regardless of what happened between us last night, or what has been going on between us even when we were apart, I still never thought you’d agree to take me with you.”
“Would you like me to put up a fight?” I give her a wry smile.
She smiles back at me and her arms drop back at her sides. “No. Definitely not. I-I just….”
I bring one leg up and rest my foot on the opposite knee.
“I never imagined that I’d be in a situation like this,” I say. “I cannot lie to you and tell you that I think it’s going to work. It very likely won’t, Sarai, and you have to understand that.” Her face falls just slightly, enough that I know my truthful words have discouraged her more than she’ll let her expression reveal. “I cannot change my ways,” I go on. “Not only because it’s all I know, or that it’s what I’m best at, but also because I don’t want to.” I look her straight in the eyes. “I will never stop doing what I do.”
“I would never want you to,” she says with a level of intensity. She pulls the nearby empty chair around and places it in front of me before sitting. “All that I’m asking, Victor, is to stay with you. I will do whatever you expect of me, but I want you to teach—”
I put up my hand and stop her right there.
“No, Sarai, I won’t do that, either. It won’t be like that.” Her expression darkens and she looks away from my eyes, stung by my refusal. “I’ve told you before, I was practically born into this life. It would take you nearly the rest of your life to learn to do what I do, and even still it would not be good enough.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” she asks with a trace of resentment in her tone. “I want to be with you wherever you go, but I don’t want to sit by and do nothing, sipping on martinis on the beach while you’re out killing people. I’m not useless, Victor, I can do something.”
“There are many things that you can do, yes,” I cut in. “But doing what I do is completely out of the question. Why do you want this so much?” My voice had begun to rise with the question as I suddenly felt desperate to understand the answer.
The palms of her hands come down on the tops of her bare thighs creating a light slapping noise. “Because it’s what I want.”
“But why?”
She throws her hands up beside her and yells, “Because I enjoy it! All right?! I enjoy it!”
I blink a few times, completely stunned by her admittance. Truthfully, that was the last thing I expected her to say. A part of me knew that Sarai was more than capable of taking a human life and be able to sleep soundly every night afterwards, but I never anticipated that she would enjoy killing.
I’m not sure how to feel about this. I need more information.
I lean forward, raising my back from the chair and I come face to face with her. “You enjoy killing?” I ask, though it comes out more like a statement. “So, if you were asked to take someone’s life, would you do it without question?”
“No,” she says, her brows drawing inward. “I wouldn’t kill just anyone, Victor, only men who deserve it.”
Men? This side of Sarai is becoming more intriguing. I wonder if she even realizes what she just said. Men. Not people in general, but men.
I pull away from her and rest my back against the chair again, cocking my head to one side thoughtfully.
“Go on,” I urge her.
She leans back as well, pulling both of her legs up and resting her feet on the seat, letting her knees fall together to one side.
“Men like Hamburg. Men like Javier Ruiz and Luis and Diego. Men like that guard I killed last night. Willem Stephens, for the simple fact that he works for Hamburg knowing what Hamburg does. Men like John Lansen and all of the others who I met at those rich parties when I was with Javier.” Her gaze pierces mine harshly. “Men who deserve to have their throats slit.”
The gravity of her words, the determination in her face, it quietly stuns me into submission for a brief moment. Is it possible that I have not one, but now two killers in my midst who share a similar penchant for bloodlust? And just as his face crosses my mind alongside hers, I hear Fredrik’s car purring into the driveway. It steals the intense moment away and we both look up.
Moments later, Fredrik, dressed casually in a pair of dark-colored jeans and designer shirt, comes outside to join us. He drops the day’s newspaper on the coffee table and says, “You might want to have a look at that.” Then he glances at Sarai momentarily. “You look nice in my clothes, by the way.”
I glare at Fredrik from the side, but bite back my jealousy before either of them notice.
Sarai and I both glance down at the paper, but I’m the one who picks it up. Unfolding the paper, I scan the black text until I find what he is referring to.
Four bodies were found shot to death in an upscale Los Angeles hotel late last night. Only two of the bodies have been identified and are that of twenty-three-year-old Dahlia Mathers and twenty-seven-year-old Eric Johnson, both of Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
A few sentences down:
Sarai Cohen, also of Lake Havasu City, is wanted for questioning.
I suppose it doesn’t matter which identity she used to check into the hotel, her face is the same on both of them.
Sarai snatches the newspaper from my hands before I can finish.
“No…,” she grits her teeth as her darkening face peers down into the tragic news of her friends. She tries to make eye contact with me, but it lasts only a second before the paper seizes her attention again as if her mind hopes to have read it all wrong the first time. “I told them to leave L.A.! Dahlia said they’d leave—.” Her green eyes bore into mine, full of desperation and fractured by guilt.
&nbs
p; I stand up.
Sarai takes the newspaper into both hands and rips it in half right down the center, crushing the leftover halves in both of her fists.
“They fucking killed Dahlia and Eric!” she roars. “They killed them!”
The paper falls from her hands and scatters about the intricate rock patio.
Fredrik just looks at me, waiting for whatever I might do or say. He doesn’t speak but I can tell that he wants to.
“Sarai.” I place my hands on her shoulders from behind. “I will take care of it.”
She swings around at me, her hair whirling around her head before falling back against her shoulders, fury burning in her features.
“THEY ARE DEAD BECAUSE OF ME! JUST LIKE LYDIA!”
Trying to calm her down, I forcefully grab her shoulders from the front and I hold her in place.
“I said I will take care of it,” I repeat with even more intensity and sincerity than before. I lean forward to keep her gaze fixed on mine. “I will do this for you, Sarai. Hamburg and Stephens will both be dead before this week is over.”
I’ve lost her. She’s staring right at me, but it feels more like through me instead. Her chest rises and falls with heavy, uneven breaths. Her pupils appear tiny, like pinpricks through a sheet of construction paper, the green of her eyes appears to have darkened.
“No,” she argues in an eerily calm voice. “I don’t want you to do anything.”
Absently she steps backward and my hands fall away from her shoulders.
“I’m going to do this for you,” I say. “I want—”
“I said no!” She takes two more steps back and then turns around, putting her back to me as she faces the pool.
“I’m going to do it,” she says quietly, resolutely. “I’m going to kill them and I want you to back off.”
“I don’t think—”
She turns her head, her dark eyes catching mine. “If you kill either one of them, I’ll never forgive you for it. This one is mine, Victor! Give me that much!”
“Sarai, you can’t kill them.” I walk toward her. “The only person who will end up dead is you. You’re not capable—”
“I don’t give a shit!” Her objective is unshakable. She walks back toward me. “You either help me pull this off, or I figure it out myself. They die by my hands, not yours, or Fredrik’s, or anyone else’s. Only mine. Teach me. Show me what to do. Whatever the best approach is for someone like me. Help me or I die trying to do it myself. I don’t care either way.”
“I won’t…you can’t,” I shake my head.
Sarai gives up and starts to push her way past me intent on leaving. But I can’t let her go anywhere. I can’t because I know that she meant every word of what she said.
I grab her by the wrist, stopping her in her angry march toward the glass door. Fredrik steps out of the way, watching the scene unfold with an odd glint in his eyes that I can only make out as fascination.
“Let go of me!”
“You’re not leaving.” I hold her wrist tight and grab the other one as she begins to struggle against me.
She wants to take all of her anger out on me, to scream into my face, to curse me with words she desperately wants only to say to Hamburg and Stephens before she kills them, but she can’t do any of it. The anger, as always, gets the best of her and she bursts into tears.
She told me once that she always cries when she’s angry.
The tears roll down her cheeks in rivulets. She tries once more to break free from me, but I hold on tight and put painful pressure on her wrists, hoping to allay her.
“Victor please! Just fucking teach me, goddammit! Even if it’s only to kill the two of them! That’s all I ask! I’ll never ask you to help me again! PLEASE!”
She finally stops struggling and collapses against my chest. I wrap my arms around her small form, cradling the back of her head in my hands and I press the side of my face against the top of her hair. The cries roll through her chest violently, her body trembling in my embrace. These are not cries of sadness and pain, they’re cries of guilt and anger and the dire need to avenge the deaths of people—even Lydia—who might still be alive if it were not for her.
Fredrik looks over at me and I know what that calm look on his face reads. He thinks I should give Sarai what she wants.
But it’s not Fredrik’s opinion that ultimately makes up my mind, it’s my need to protect Sarai that decides, even if by doing so she still might end up dead.
I choose the safer of the two ill-fated paths.
“I will help you.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sarai
I raise my face from his shirt, sniffling back the damned tears that once again have betrayed me in a weak moment.
“You’ll help me kill them?”
He nods. “Yes.”
“Thank you,” I say softly.
I push up on my toes and kiss him lightly on the mouth.
The housekeeper speaks up behind us in a small voice, standing at the sliding glass door, “Breakfast is ready.”
She looks at us through dark and beady curious eyes, surely having heard the commotion while she was inside.
“Marta makes the best scrambled eggs,” Fredrik says with a gleaming smile, as though nothing had happened. “Cooks them in bacon grease.” He puts all of his fingers against the center of his lips and kisses them. “I love American food.”
He follows behind Marta. “Though I understand scrambled eggs cooked in bacon grease is a southern thing?” he asks looking back at us as we follow in behind him.
Victor shrugs.
“Well, Marta isn’t exactly from Alabama,” he goes on as we all enter the kitchen, “but she can cook like she is.”
Fredrik and Victor ramble on about food, I know probably trying to take my mind off what happened. But I don’t care about anything right now other than Dahlia and Eric’s faces in my memory. I know I’m being punished. By Life. By Fate. I don’t know by who or what, all I know is that I’d do anything to give them back their lives.
The three of us sit down at Fredrik’s glass-top kitchen table and eat. And I find it almost funny how Fredrik makes Marta taste the food before serving it to us as if he had taken the paranoid technique right out of the Victor Faust Handbook.
During breakfast, which we all take in very slowly due to conversation, Fredrik eventually relieves Marta of duty for the day. It was just after he and Victor began speaking to one another in Swedish. I hate that I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but it become clear to me that it had to do with Marta and not me.
Marta grabs her purse and tells us all goodbye, thanking Fredrik for paying her for a full day even though she didn’t work it.
“What was that all about?” I ask just after she closes the front door behind her.
I set my fork down on my plate, finished with my breakfast.
“There’s a lot to talk about,” Fredrik says and takes a drink of orange juice. “And she shouldn’t be in earshot of the conversation.” He points at me and smiles. “And Marta, though it might not seem like it, listens to everything that goes on around here.”
“Then why didn’t you just continue in Swedish?” I ask.
“Do you speak Swedish?” Victor asks me casually.
“No.”
“Well, you’re a part of this,” he says, setting his glass of water on the table.
I smile. It’s in this moment that I feel like a part of them for the very first time. Both of them. The three of us sitting around the table, minutes later cleared of plates and glasses, replaced by files and photographs of contract hits. In a sense it’s surreal to me, discussing the details of interrogation and murder as casually as if we were discussing the day’s weather. But also for the first time in my life, I feel that I belong somewhere. I’m not pushing my way through a dark tunnel with my hands out in front of me searching for the door anymore. The door is right there in plain view and I’ve already walked through it. I’m finally wh
ere I belong in my life. And I’m with Victor, which means more to me than anything.
I’m finally with Victor.
~~~
Victor and I leave Fredrik’s house in the hills of Los Angeles late afternoon and drive eleven hours to Albuquerque, New Mexico. On the way, I have him stop at a mall where I pretty much spend a couple thousand dollars on new clothes, shoes, accessories and makeup for myself, seeing as how everything I owned is in Arizona or was left in the Los Angeles hotel. I stuffed the backseat with shopping bags and shoe boxes, but by the ninth hour on the road I wished I had bought less. All I wanted to do was crawl into the backseat and sleep, but I got stuck with being cramped in the front, curled up awkwardly on the bucket seat of his black Cadillac CTS with my head pressed against the window. Since Victor left the Order he no longer has the convenience of flying on private jets to get around. He can still certainly afford them if he wanted to spend his own money, but being a man who the Order wants dead, means staying under the radar and giving up some luxuries that might lead Niklas right to him.
Apparently, giving up such luxuries also includes the extravagant multi-million dollar homes he has always chosen to live in. His house in Albuquerque is far from matching the one he lived in on the East Coast that overlooked the ocean. As we come up the dirt driveway, I see a house of moderate size made of straight, high tan stucco walls with a boxy shape that reminds me of the houses I used to build with Legos when I was a kid. But judging by the elaborate landscape that hugs the smooth white sidewalk leading up to the door and surrounds the east side of the house, it’s obvious that Victor hasn’t completely given up all luxuries. Even more obvious when we step inside as the interior is as beautiful as Fredrik’s house had been, though with more of a southwestern style than a modern luxury bachelor pad. Rust reds and browns and yellows are dominant throughout the space, with tall ceilings held up by dark wooden beams and rafters which make the house appear much larger on the inside than it appears on the outside. A cozy stone fireplace is set in the wall in the spacious living room with two metal ornate mirrors mounted above it. The walls are painted yellow, which complement the terra cotta tile flooring that appears to spread throughout the whole house.