Victor sighs and looks at the wall behind me.
“I was ordered to kill her,” he says. “Vonnegut wanted her dead before anyone else got a hold of her and got the information that he needed on Solis. Niklas wasn’t providing results. It was just a matter of time that The Order would take him out of the assignment and either put Joran Carver in his place, or eliminate her altogether. Joran was going there that night to replace Niklas, but The Order found out that another organization was on its way for her, too. I was sent to intercept and to take her out. I didn’t know my brother was in love with her.” He pauses, thinking back to something it seems. “I didn’t know until I saw that look on his face when he got out of the car, when he knew that Claire was dead. I was going to tell him that night that I was the one who ended his assignment, but when I saw that look, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
I reach out and touch the top of his hand with my fingertips.
“But Victor…you have to tell Niklas the truth.”
“I can’t,” he says and then finally looks into my eyes. “I can’t tell him the truth without telling him all of it.”
Confused, I ask, “What’s all of it?”
His gaze strays from mine again.
“That I still would have killed her even if I had known he loved her.”
My hand falls away from his as if I were touching something hot. I rest it back at my side. My eyebrows slowly crease in my forehead. I don’t want to believe him, but I know it’s true.
“I was a different man then, Izabel. I was given an assignment and I always followed through. I asked no questions because it was my job. And…,” he hesitates, staring off at the wall as a memory moves through his mind, “…Niklas meant everything to me. He’s my brother. I killed our father to protect him from Vonnegut and I would have just as easily killed Claire to protect him, too. From what you already know about The Order, you know that if Vonnegut ever found out that Niklas loved Claire, Vonnegut would have ordered his death. So yes, if I had known he loved her, I still would have killed her to save him.”
My heart aches. I look at the floor and just stare at it for the longest time until spots appear before my eyes, letting Victor’s words roll over tumultuously in my mind. Words that in a cruel way, make sense, but still cannot be justified. I don’t know whether to agree with him or blame him. I can’t choose whether to console him, or leave him to fend for himself alone with his guilt. I want to hold him and tell him that it wasn’t his fault…but it was. I want to tell him that Niklas will forgive him if he would just tell him the truth, all of it even, but my heart tells me Niklas will not be so forgiving. I want to blame Niklas because he’s always been so hateful toward me and I want to side with Victor because I love him, but I can’t.
“I will deal with my brother in time,” he says. “Right now, I want the rest of this resolved. Dorian must be dealt with. And I’m giving you and only you the job of killing Kessler.”
“Why me?”
He reaches up and touches the side of my face, brushing his fingers lightly against my skin. “You deserve the honor. And because I happen to love you, and I have no use for her.”
He presses his warm lips to my forehead and then walks away.
I used to know what was right and what was wrong. I may not always have reacted to a situation appropriately, but I always knew, and was prepared to face the consequences of whatever decision I made. But right now, in this moment as I watch Victor get farther away and disappear at the end of the hall, I…don’t know anything anymore. Except that I love him.
Pressing my back against the wall, I slide down and sit on the floor with my knees drawn up. And I stare at the door in front of me where just on the other side of it is a woman…a single person, a living, breathing weapon, who came in here and managed to turn all of our lives upside-down. And I think of Niklas and I want nothing more than to go find him and talk to him and try make things right. And I think of Fredrik, a man so cold and dark and…could he truly be lost forever? I don’t want to believe it. I want him to be OK…but I think I know that he will never be. And I think of Dorian sitting in that cell, and I can’t help but believe that he is not our enemy, but the proof is more than my need to believe. And Victor is not known for being a forgiving man.
And I think of Javier…I think of the child we had together and I wonder where he or she is right now. What is her name? Is he happy with the family he was sold to?
Being a killer is hard. It’s hard not just because of the obvious, but because in living this kind of life, you don’t just kill criminals and enemies and targets…you also kill everything and everyone you love.
I’m beginning to think Fredrik is the sanest one of us all…
19
Izabel
I run right into Dina’s arms when James walks into the building with her.
“Dina! I’m so happy you’re OK.” My arms engulf her.
She kisses my head and my cheeks and for a moment I feel like a little girl again. An innocent little girl happy to see her mother, who was never a sex slave and who has never killed anyone.
“I’m good, I’m good, baby,” she says, hugging me tight.
She’s wearing a light pink blouse tucked into a pair of tan slacks. Her gray-blonde hair is done up in a wave of loose curls that fall around her aging face where even more wrinkles than from when I saw her last are set around her eyes.
I take a step back with her hands clasped in mine and I look her over.
“You look…fine,” I say, having expected—and feared—to see her covered with bruises and blood, maybe a few broken bones.
“Well, of course I do,” she says as if I should already know she was fine the whole time.
I glance over at James standing behind her with a look of deep question on my face.
Victor enters the meeting room behind them.
“What’s going on?” I ask, looking to Victor and then back at James.
“Well,” James begins, “seems like Nora never hurt any of them. With Mrs. Gregory—”
“Oh, please call me Dina,” Dina cuts in, “that proper stuff makes me feel old.”
I smile to myself.
James smiles likewise and nods. “Nora told Dina that she was sent by you and Victor to take her to safety.”
“Oh but I didn’t believe her right away,” Dina says, shaking her graying head. “I knew better than that and when she killed that nice man that watched me a lot from the street, I was scared. I thought she was going to kill me next.”
I look back and forth between Dina and Victor, anxiously waiting for the rest of the story.
“Needless to say,” Dina goes on, “that woman put on some show I guess, because next thing I knew she was telling me to ‘get down!’ and she was lookin’ out the windows and I was really afraid there were other men there to kill me. She told me that man on the floor she killed was a traitor, or—I think she used some fancy movie word like conspirator or infiltrator”—I want to tell her to skip all that stuff, but I don’t have the heart—“or somethin’ like that—anyway, she had me believing her, that’s for sure. She took me out of that house and set me up real nice in another one and told me not to leave or go outside or make any phone calls. She took my cellular phone. Said it was for my own good. But I had everything I needed.” She combs her long, weathered fingers through the length of my hair. “And I didn’t want to put you in danger so I stayed put like I was told and waited.”
“She didn’t hurt you at all?”
I’m baffled by this. Completely baffled.
Dina shakes her head. “No,” she says, “she was real kind. So imagine my surprise when Mr. Woodard here told me she was going to kill me. I just couldn’t believe it.”
Victor and I glance briefly at each other.
“I suppose Tessa got fed the same story?” I ask.
“No,” James says. “Well, in a way. After Nora convinced Tessa she wasn’t there to hurt her, and after Tessa unknowingly g
ave Nora the ammunition she needed against Dorian—just like she told Dorian she did—Tessa believed Nora was U.S. Intelligence and so she cooperated.”
“So Tessa wasn’t hurt either?” I ask.
“Nope,” James answers.
“Where is she now?”
Victor steps up closer and answers, “I had them take her back home. She didn’t need to be brought here. She doesn’t need to know anything about us.”
“She thought I was a CIA agent,” James says with slight laughter, but a proud air. “As far as my daughters, well they weren’t so easy to convince. They were just scared out of their minds—they think I’m into Real Estate. So, I guess Nora had no choice but to tie them up somewhere.”
I look right at Victor.
“Then she really was working alone,” I say about Nora.
“It seems that way,” Victor says with a nod.
“I’m really thirsty,” Dina says, squeezing my hip with her hand. “Is there anything around here to drink?”
I hug her again.
“Of course,” I tell her and grab her hand. “I’ll take you to get something.”
I smile faintly at Victor as I walk Dina out of the meeting room and toward the tiny kitchen down the hall.
Fredrik passes us on the way as he heads in to see Victor. He says nothing to me, or even makes eye contact.
“Oh, he’s a looker,” Dina says quietly with big eyes as she looks back at his tall height in that expensive suit. “The thing I hate the most about being old is that men like that don’t look at me anymore.”
Oh, Dina, if you only knew what that particular man is capable of.
“Well, I think you’re beautiful,” I tell her, squeezing her cool, weathered hand. “Besides, men today are probably a little freakier than you were used to.”
“Hey, I used to be kinky,” she says with a grin.
“Dina!” My face twists all sort of ways and my cheeks begin to burn. “I do not need to know that.”
We both laugh together and slip inside the break room, which is really just a room with a leather sofa and matching chair with a marble coffee table and two end tables, a flat screen television mounted on the wall and a kitchenette area in one corner. Victor looked at Woodard funny when he asked him to put a break room in the building (“A break room? This isn’t exactly factory work, Woodard.”), but in the end, and after Woodard explained to me what a break room was and I liked the idea, we both got what we wanted. And I’m not the only one of us who uses it often—Niklas sleeps in here sometimes with his boots kicked up on the arm of the sofa. James brings his laptop in here and watches old stuff on TV Land. Dorian…well, he was always the one who kept the fridge stocked. Victor—OK, he doesn’t come in here at all except to find one of us.
Dina has a seat on the sofa while I grab two of Dorian’s sodas from the fridge.
“So, other than beautiful blonde women threatening to kill me to get to you,” Dina begins lightheartedly, “what else has been going on with you, Sarai?”
Dina’s the only person I allow to call me by my old name. I tried to get her to call me Izabel once, but she flat-out refused, said I grew up with her calling me Sarai and that she’d die calling me Sarai.
I hand her a bottle of soda and sit down next to her, pulling one leg up onto the cushion.
“It feels weird having conversations with you about my life,” I say. “It’s not like I can tell you about the last person I saw die, as casually as I can talk to you about getting the wrong order at a drive-thru.”
“I know,” she says and takes a drink, “but what’s going on with you and that handsome, mysterious man of yours?”
I take a drink and then look off at the wall behind her.
“Things are good,” I say, trying not to let onto the truth—I’m not even sure what the truth is; what’s going on between me and Victor isn’t exactly your typical trouble-in-paradise kind of situation.
Dina and I talk for a while about simple things. She tells me about what’s going on with the characters on her favorite television shows, but I just listen mostly because I never watch TV and really have nothing to add. We talk about the small garden she planted behind her newest house and how the only vegetable growing are the cucumbers. I don’t garden and wouldn’t know how to grow the easiest of vegetables, so again, I mostly just listen to her talk. And she goes on about sales at the department stores she likes to shop at and how she got a thirty-dollar blouse for nine dollars—I don’t know much about sales because with the money Victor gives me—and that I earn myself—I don’t have to pay attention to sales.
And while Dina talks about a variety of totally unrelated things over the course of the next thirty minutes, there’s one thing I notice she mentions in every topic—Arizona.
“I used to watch that show every night before bed in Arizona,” she had said. “I had my recliner by the window and I’d always open it and let the heat in while I watched my show.”
And then:
“I didn’t really do much gardening in Arizona.”
And later:
“I hit the thrift stores every weekend when I lived in Arizona. I got some really good deals.”
Finally, after the fifth mention of Arizona, I ask her the inevitable:
“Do you miss home, Dina?”
She smiles faintly and sets the soda bottle down on the end table.
“I do, Sarai, I really do.”
She sighs and looks over at me, reaching out her hand and placing it on my knee drawn up on the cushion, tucked underneath my other leg.
“I want to go back to Tucson,” she says. “Even back to the trailer park. I miss it. I miss the damn dogs barking at night and the kids running up and down the street causing a nuisance. I just want to go home.” She pats my knee and then pulls away, looking at me with sad but smiling eyes.
“But Dina, it’s not safe”—I raise up on the couch—“you can’t go back there. Look what happened here, the reason you’re sitting in this room talking to me right now. If you go back there you’ll be where anyone who wants to find you, will likely look first.”
Her smile warms her whole face.
“Oh, honey, I don’t care about that stuff,” she says as if to console me. “I did at first, but it was mostly just because of you. But I can’t do this anymore, moving from place to place, having strange men parked outside every house watching me all the time. I’m too old for this. I appreciate all of the elaborate things you and Victor provide me and the beautiful houses and…just everything. I’m very grateful. But I just want to go home and live the rest of my life the way I did before—simply.”
My heart sinks deeper and deeper.
“But it’s dangerous. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Nothing’s gonna happen to me, baby girl.” Her smile lengthens. She lifts a hand and pats her chest over her thin pink blouse where her heart is. “If anything takes me out it’s gonna be my ticker. You know that.” She grins and pats my knee again playfully and adds, “Besides, I know how to use a shotgun, remember? And I ain’t afraid to blow somebody away if they break into my house.”
I can’t help but smile back at her, even though I want to fight her on this whole issue.
Dina turns around on the cushion to face me fully and she takes both of my hands into hers.
“I want you to promise me something,” she says, looking into my eyes. “And I mean it—it’s a real promise and it means everything to me and if you ever break it, even if I never find out, you should feel guilty for breaking it because it’s so important to me.”
This is scaring me, but I nod and agree.
“What is it, Dina?”
Her fingers grasp mine firmly as if to place emphasis on the words she’s about to say.
“When I go home, back to Tucson,” she says, “I want you to promise me that you won’t send anyone to watch me or protect me. No one. And I don’t want you doing it, either. Do you give me your word?”
; At first all I want to do is say no—I even begin to shake my head—but she wrenches my hands and forces my gaze, the look in her eyes so intense, and I feel just how important this promise is to her. As much as I want to lie to her and say that, no, I won’t send anyone to watch over her…I can’t. These are her wishes and I owe her everything and know I have to give in to them no matter how hard.
And before she leaves, as I wave her goodbye as she gets into the cab on the street to head for the airport back to Tucson, I can’t help but feel like this is going to be the last time I ever see her.
“I love you, baby girl!” she calls out to me from the open car window, her long, bony fingers waving in the cool night Boston breeze.
I press the tips of my fingers against my lips and send her my kisses as she pulls away, and I wipe the tears from my eyes and try so hard to keep the smile on my face for Dina’s sake. Because she deserves to be happy and she doesn’t need any more reason to worry about me than she already has.
~~~
“Have you seen Niklas?” I ask Victor in the meeting room with James. They’re looking through photographs and files scattered about the elongated table.
I’m still emotional from having let Dina go an hour earlier.
Victor looks up.
“He is gone, Izabel,” he answers solemnly and looks back down. “But don’t worry about him right now—”
“What?” I step farther into the room and stand at the end of the table. “Victor, how can you say that? Have you tried to talk to him at all?”
He locks eyes with me over the length of the table.
“I will talk to my brother when the time is right,” he says.
James glances at us briefly and pretends to be more interested in the photographs in front of him. He appears uncomfortable.
“How is any time right?” I ask with an accusatory tone. “Right now is as good a time as any will ever be.”