[English] Killing Sarai

Killing Sarai
Killing Sarai Page 20



My theory is confirmed when after lunch things between the two of them begin to…change.

“Will you two be sharing a bed?” she asks from the doorway of the spare bedroom.

There is only one bed in here. It’s a question I’ve been asking myself since I walked in.

“If not,” she goes on, glancing at Victor in a way that perhaps she didn’t expect me to notice, “then I can make up a bed for one of you on the couch.”

“That will not be necessary,” Victor answers and I don’t know why, but my heart leaps inside my chest. “I won’t be sleeping.”

Then my heart goes back to normal. Boring, non-fluttering normal.

Samantha looks pleased.

And for some reason, I’m instantly…jealous.

Trying to familiarize myself with this inane, absurd emotion that just infiltrated my head, I force myself to shake it off. I start looking at random objects within the room: the plain-Jane cream-colored bedspread that covers the full-sized bed, the matching dresser and chest of drawers placed against opposite walls, the large oak chest situated at the foot of the bed with a horse carved into the side, the window with equally plain white curtains where a beaded necklace of some sort dangles from one end of the curtain rod.

“Alright then,” she says standing in the doorway with her hands cradled in front of her. “Make yourselves at home. And Victor…,” she glances downward below his waist, “when you’re ready to patch that up, you know where to find me.”

“I’ll be there soon,” Victor says and then she smiles politely at both of us and walks down the hallway, leaving us alone in the room.

“Why are we here exactly?”

Victor opens his gun suitcase on the bed and takes out two sleek black handguns. He puts one underneath the mattress and the other on a small desk in the corner of the room. Then he opens the closet, taking down a new suit after sliding back several others dangling from hangers. Slacks first, then a long-sleeved button-up shirt, lastly, a matching jacket.

“You’re going to stay here,” he says, “until I kill Javier. I’ll be going back to Tucson later tonight, or wherever it is I am told that Javier was last seen and then I’ll find him and I’ll kill him.”

“But why Houston?” I ask, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Wasn’t there a…‘Safe House’ in Arizona somewhere closer? You know, maybe you should’ve used me as bait, after all. I could help you. I mean, it’s likely that whoever is looking for me that one of the first places they’ll check is where I used to live, around people I used to know.” I pause, thinking to myself how glad I am now that Mrs. Gregory no longer lives where she used to.

“You’re right,” he says. “And that’s why it’s likely I’ll be heading right back to Tucson. I’ve seen where you once lived, where the woman you spent most of your time with, once lived. By taking you there last night, you’ve already helped me by showing me precisely where Javier might be found. There’s no need to risk your life anymore by keeping you there.”

“So then you did have another agenda by taking me home,” I say, feeling very small right now. “You just wanted to see the location.”

Victor shakes his head and closes the top drawer on the dresser. He turns to face me and something unfamiliar is evident in his greenish-blue eyes.

A long breath emits from his nostrils.

“I took you home because it’s what you wanted,” he says and goes to the door with all of his clothes draped carefully over one arm.

“Even though you knew they’d go back there looking for me?”

He stops at the door with his back to me, his fingers placed on the knob ready to open it. His head tilts back some and his shoulders fall.

Instantly, I feel like I’ve offended him.

“I’ll use the shower in Samantha’s room,” he says and it stings. “You should get cleaned up, change into your new clothes.”

And then he walks out, leaving me in here all alone.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Instead of a shower, I soak in a long, hot bath. My muscles ache something awful and it wasn’t long after I slipped into the water that I started feeling the tiny scrapes and cuts all over my body that I hadn’t realized were there before. I’m just surprised I don’t have a gunshot wound to go with them.

By the time I get out, I’m cleaner than I feel like I’ve ever been now that I have new clothes to put on and that I’ve gotten to shave. Victor had told me back at the department store that I could pick whatever I wanted and that it didn’t matter how much it cost, just that I needed to be quick about it. I chose the most unfashionable, casual thing I could find. Because I don’t care about fashion and honestly can’t remember the last time that something like that mattered.

After I’m dressed I pull my wet hair up into a ponytail and then rummage through the things left out on the bathroom sink. Deodorant, toothpaste and toothbrush, various bottles of lotion and other random creams of sorts are lined neatly against the mirror. Everything is new and there’s no telling how long it’s all been sitting here waiting for a guest like me to come along and put it to use. And I definitely put it to use, starting with the deodorant first, a luxury that I rarely had at the compound. Javier, for the most part, made sure that I had necessities and nice things, but he left the shopping up to Izel and since she despised me immensely, she made it a point to go out of her way to buy the cheapest, most useless stuff that she could find. When it came to deodorant, the best I ever got was some strange brand of liquid roll-on that left red, inflamed spots underneath my armpits.

I brush my teeth and even use dental floss for the first time in years and then I find myself standing blankly in front of the mirror. I don’t see myself really, but I think about Victor and what he’s doing in Samantha’s room. Explicit pictures of him f**king her spring up in my mind and it upsets me more than I want to admit to myself.

I can’t really be attracted to a man like him, can I? A man who has killed no telling how many people. It doesn’t matter that I feel safe with him, or that I trust him; the truth is that he is what he is and I’d be stupid to ever think he wouldn’t kill me if he found it in any way necessary.

But I am attracted to him. I do have strange, unfamiliar feelings for him.

And I hate it!

I shake my head angrily at myself, finally taking notice of my own reflection. The area around the outside of my right eye is yellowed by a bruise. My lips are dried and chapped. There’s a tiny cut along my left brow bone. I look tired and…used up.

Only the sound of something falling on the floor in another room down the hall snaps me out of my self-loathing.

I crack open the bathroom door first to peer down the hallway. I hear Samantha’s voice, but I can’t make out what she’s saying. Finally leaving the bathroom, I walk quietly down the length of the hall toward her room, tiptoeing across the carpet as carefully as possible. Her door is closed, so I press my ear against the wood and try to listen in, but the moment I touch it, it creaks open a little and my heart falls into my stomach. I shut my eyes tight and hold my breath until I know that I didn’t just give myself away.

I shouldn’t be doing this, I think to myself, but I just can’t help it.

I peer inside the dimly-lit room. A television is on, but has been turned down really low or muted, the glow from it providing the room with most of its light. I see Victor’s bloody shirt and the rest of his suit hanging partially over the side of a laundry basket pressed against the wall near the master bathroom. That door is cracked open, too.

Pushing the bedroom door open a little more, just enough for me to squeeze through, I walk inside Samantha’s room. And every step I take makes me feel that much more violating and uncouth. But I have to know. Because the thought of him with her is torturing me on the inside. Maybe later I’ll try to figure out why. Right now, I just want to know.

I make my way through the room and to the bathroom door, where I wait just outside of it, my heart pounding in my chest, worried they’ll catch me eavesdropping. When after a few seconds pass and Samantha is talking again, I feel safe enough to peek inside to get a better look, only hoping that the partial darkness of the room helps to keep me from being seen.

Victor

I stand with my hands pressed against the counter, a towel wrapped around my lower body after having just showered. I peer into the mirror over the sink, tilting my chin to one side and then the other, feeling like I should probably shave but decide against it. Samantha sits down on the closed toilet seat with a suture needle and thread in one hand, ready to stitch me up.

“Are you going to drop the towel?” she asks. “I can’t very well do this with it in the way. And it’s not like I haven’t seen it before.”

I start to remove the towel just as she says that, but then I notice a sound so faint, like the sound of a sharp breath, that I’m surprised I heard it at all. I glance into the mirror and look behind...

Killing Sarai
Killing Sarai Page 21



It is exactly what I predicted she’d say.

I sigh and lean against the counter, crossing my arms. She pulls a large square of gauze from a packet to prepare it next.

I look right at her, hoping I can say what I’m about to say without turning her against me. I won’t leave Sarai alone with her if she thinks I chose Safe House Nine over her because of something as absurd as her age. Samantha is a killer. And a woman who feels scorned who is also a killer is a fatal combination.

“I chose Nine because she was a whore and proud of it,” I say, laying the truth out the way it needs to be, to make her understand. “I couldn’t use you like she let me use her. Because you were and still are my friend. I hope you understand.”

She laughs lightly. “You don’t have any friends, Victor.”

Her gaze skirts me as she places the gauze over the wound and presses two strips of dressing tape along its edges. Then she raises up the rest of the way and looks at me with thoughtful green eyes. I feel the same thing in her eyes that I always felt when I came here, when I slept with her. She might have been someone who could fall in love with me, if I had let it go that far. She started getting too close and I couldn’t let that happen. She had always been kind to me. She was different from the others who were more like myself and are only interested in ***. Because anything more is not only reckless and dangerous and foolish, but is completely unacceptable.

“Who do you think you’re fooling, Victor?” she asks with a playful, yet inoffensive smile.

I pull the towel the rest of the way back over my hips, tucking it in on itself at the waist.

“What do you mean?” I ask, looking upon her curiously.

Samantha starts clearing the countertop of the bandage leftovers and rinsing the blood and iodine down the sink with a burst of water.

“That girl down the hall,” she says. “Izabel. Of course we both know that’s not her real name, but regardless, what the hell are you doing with her?” She drops a handful of bloody tissues into the wastebasket beside the toilet.

“I told you,” I say. “I’m just using her until I eliminate my target. After that, she’s on her own.”

I never could completely fool Samantha, but what strikes me the most about right now is that she appears to know more about what’s going on with me than even I do. And I’m not fond of that idea.

I glance toward the bathroom door several feet away, wondering if Sarai is still hiding there, listening to everything between us. I know she is. I can feel it. But Samantha needs to stop. Right now. Because I can’t have her filling Sarai’s head with things that might cause her confusion. The girl is confused enough as it is.

“I need to get dressed,” I say, hoping to deter her from the topic. I reach for my clean boxer-briefs hanging nearby, but Samantha steps around in front of me.

She crosses her arms and the smile she wore before has been replaced by determination.

“You can’t do this. You know that.”

I reach around her and grab my boxers anyway, letting the towel drop to the floor and stepping into them.

“Victor,” she persists, “you can’t be the hero. Not for her or for anyone else. You know this. What you’re doing, what you’re feeling is only going to get you killed.”

I pull my thumbs from the elastic, letting it snap against my h*ps and shut Samantha up with the hard look in my eyes.

“You’re way off the mark, Sam,” I say, glaring at her. “You think you see something in me for her because it’s what you’re used to believing you saw in me for you.” Instantly, I regret my words.

Samantha glares at me coldly, her fingers pressing aggressively into her biceps. “What are you saying? That it’s what you think I—.” She can’t look at me anymore and her eyes stray toward the shower. Because she knows I’m right. I shouldn’t have said it, but she can’t deny the truth.

Finally she looks at me again, hurt and admission on her features. “You’re right,” she says. “I have always thought of you in that way. I read into things between us wrong and saw things that weren’t there.”

I keep silent to let her finish, but it seems that she has.

“I truly am sorry for anything I have done to you,” I say and mean it with everything in me.

She shakes her graying blonde head. “No, Victor, you did everything right. You saw that I was developing feelings for you before I knew it myself and you did the right thing.”

I cup my hands underneath her elbows and she relaxes a little.

“I hope that—.”

Uncrossing her arms, my hands fall away.

“Victor,” she says, putting up both of her hands between us, “please don’t apologize for not having the same feelings for me that I was having for you. That’s not something you can control, I know. And I hope that you’ll believe me when I say that you can always trust me. You’re the one person in the Order that I trust and can truly call…my friend.”

“I thought you said I didn’t have any friends?” I smile faintly.

Relaxing one arm back against her chest, she pats my shoulder with the other.

“OK, maybe you just have me,” she says, smiling back at me. But then she becomes serious again. “And because I’m your only friend, you have to trust me, listen to me when I tell you that what you’re doing with this girl is going to get you exiled, or killed, or both.”

I start buttoning my shirt.

I had hoped she would drop it altogether, especially if Sarai is still listening in from the other room, though I get the strangest feeling that she’s not and that relaxes my mind somewhat.

“I’m not doing anything with her other than keeping her safe until this is all over,” I insist. “She deserves a shot a normal life after what she’s been through and I decided at some point to try and give that to her.”

I slip into my black slacks, tucking in my shirt. Samantha pulls my tie from the hanger on the wall and drapes it around the back of my neck.

She sighs. “OK,” she says, surrendering. “But tell me, and be honest with yourself before you answer…,” she hesitates, her fingers paused around the tie. I nod. “Since she’s been with you, can you tell yourself that she’s going to be any different than you were years after you were taken by the Order?”

Her question quietly shocks me. I had not expected it at all.

“Even I see it, Victor, and I’ve only spent an afternoon with her so I know you see it, too.”

I know now what she’s referring to, but I’m still too taken aback by the revelation to comment. Samantha detects this, my need to hear more of what I already know to be true from someone else’s lips rather than just my own. Subconsciously needing the validation.

“I know you can’t tell me anything about where she came from, who she’s running from or how long she was with those she’s running from, but judging by what I see in her now I can tell two things.” She straightens my finished tie and lets one hand drop to her side, the other briefly holds up two fingers. “One,” she drops one finger, “she’s already so anesthetized to what is normal that she might never live a normal life. She knew I was testing her food for her because you were making sure it wasn’t poisoned, but it didn’t faze her. She sat at that table with us, scarfing down that lunch like we were a simple family of three sharing an afternoon meal in the suburbs.”

She leans against the counter, crossing her arms over her chest.

“And two,” she goes on, “for her to be that way I know she had to have been a prisoner, *** slave or no-telling-what for several years, no less than five. And at her young age—what is she twenty-three, twenty-four? (She gestures her hands around in front of her briefly)—that means she had to have been fairly young when she was taken. Like you. And we both know that the younger one is, the easier it is to mold them into whoever or whatever you want them to be. Also like you.”

Every word that Samantha spoke is true and I know it. I know it better than anyone.

I slip my suit vest on over my shirt and tie and button all four buttons.

“She’s in the fifty-fifty zone,” I say. “She can go either way with an equal shot at both. And she’s strong enough. And intelligent.” Lastly, I put on my suit jacket. “I’m just giving her her one and only shot. Which direction she chooses to take it will be her decision. And I won’t be there to see it. She’ll be on her own then.”

Samantha ****s her head to one side. She probably doesn’t fully believe me, but she has finally exhausted her warnings.

She comes up to me, the same sweetly seductive smile she always wore minutes before I’d have my way with her in the past. She stops directly in front of me and her fingers dance upward along the fabric of my jacket. She rests her hands on both sides of my neck, brushing lightly against my skin.

“One last kiss,” she says looking into my eyes, “for old time’s sake. I just want to feel...

Killing Sarai
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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...

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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.

I pick the steps up instead of pushing them across the floor to avoid making any unnecessary noise and I set them underneath the hatch. Climbing to the third one, I have to bend over forward to keep from hitting my head on the ceiling. I reach up with both hands, pressing my palms against the hatch and close my eyes as I push, hoping that it’s not blocked by anything and that wherever it leads it’s not anywhere Javier can see me.

The hatch opens, creaking once which makes me wince and freeze holding it partially open above me. I push again and walk up to the fourth step and my head emerges inside a closet. I see that a foam mattress pad had been folded over and placed on top of the hatch door to conceal it and there is carpet on top of the hatch that matches the carpet on the closet floor; I feel it with my fingertips as I raise the hatch the rest of the way and leave it to lean against the back of the closet wall.

I climb out and quietly push myself through the clothes hanging from the bar above.

Thwap!

“Two more minutes, Sarai!” I hear Javier warn from the living room.

I open the closet door and make my way more quickly now through Samantha’s bedroom, down the hall and into the living room where Javier is waiting on me, every bone and muscle in my body trembling.

“Ah, and there she is!” Javier raises both hands out beside him, his gun latched in the right. He smiles and looks genuinely excited to see me. He’s crazy….

His hands drop to his sides.

“I’ve missed you, Sarai.” He ****s his head to one side to appear sincere. “If you were unhappy why didn’t you just say so? I’d have done anything you wanted, you know that.”

I don’t care about what he has to say, all I care about is making sure that Samantha is alright. Trying to keep my eyes on Javier, my gaze carefully scans the room out ahead of me, looking for her.

Finally, I see her bare feet sticking out from behind the recliner on the other side of the room, her skin stained with blood.

“Samantha, are you OK?”

She doesn’t respond so I know she’s hurt pretty bad.

I look back at Javier, pleading in my eyes.

“Let’s just go. Please. Javier please don’t hurt her anymore.”

He smiles at me, appearing thoughtful but amused.

He’s wearing black from top to bottom: long-sleeved black shirt, black belt, black pants, black shoes. Black heart. He raises his gun at me and motions it for me to go over to him.

He curls his finger at me. “Let me see you.”

I walk closer, my bare feet moving over the Good Housekeeping magazines scattered about the floor. The grandfather clock standing tall in the corner ticks ominously behind me.

“Javier, she’s going to die if we don’t call for an ambulance,” I urge as I get closer. “Let me call nine-one-one. Then we can leave.”

I see her knees now, but it’s all that I can see as the rest of her is obscured by the chair and the darkness.

Javier reaches out his hand.

“Did he f**k you?” he asks and pulls me closer to him by my fingers. “Did you let him f**k you, or are you still mine?” He leans inward and inhales the scent of me, a loose strand of hair fallen from my ponytail he plays with in the tips of his fingers.

“No,” I say breathily. “I’ll always be yours.”

He’s wearing cologne, the same kind he always wore when he’d come to me in the night. And his hair, somewhat long on top, is clean and groomed, the way he always wore it when he’d dress me up and take me with him to the wealthy houses.

“Don’t lie to me,” he says quietly and I feel his breath on my neck. “You don’t know what you’ve done to me. You shouldn’t have left.”

I reach up with my left hand and curl my fingers softly around the back of his neck. I lean into him, the side of my face navigating the opened buttons at the top of his shirt until I feel his chest on my cheek. “I know and I’m sorry.” I kiss his skin lightly. “I am so sorry for leaving you like that,” I add in Spanish.

I shudder, both from pleasure and from disgust, when he slides his hand down the front of my pants and puts two fingers inside of me. It doesn’t matter that he’s insane or that he’s a murderer or that he might kill me any second, the touch still makes me wet. It’s my body betraying me, human nature betraying me, not my mind or my heart. I had conformed years ago to react to him in this way. A twisted survival instinct that they don’t teach in self-defense classes. Javier had to believe he was turning me on or he’d know everything else about me...

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Javier raises his gun at me, that last bullet I know now why he didn’t use it on her.

I stand frozen, one hand still on the wall behind me, the other somehow made its way to my stomach as if it could keep the vomit down by being there. I stumble on more debris and then press my back against the wall to let it hold me up. Because my body is still betraying me, my legs weak and unstable, threatening to give way beneath me any second.

I stare across the small space separating Javier and I. I stare into his cold, bottomless dark eyes, not the barrel of his gun pointed directly at me, but his eyes. I hear a click, just a click, and we look blankly into each other’s faces, both of us confused by what just happened. Then a shot rings out and my head falls against the wall with my back. I feel my body sliding down until I’m sitting on the floor just like Samantha. Limp and spent, just like Samantha. The room spins around in my vision like a thick haze of gray.

And I close my eyes and let the darkness take me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Victor

I’m forty thousand feet above the Texas landscape when I get the call.

“Victor,” Niklas says into the phone, “Javier is not in Tucson. He was reported to have used a known cre*** card with an old alias, just outside of La Grange, Texas.”

I raise my back stiffly from the seat.

“That’s less than a two hour drive to Houston,” I point out, more to myself. “At what time did the card process?”

“At three-twelve this afternoon.”

My body becomes rigid.

Hanging up the phone, I crush it in my fist down at my side as I make my way to the ****pit.

“Turn the plane around,” I demand.

Less than an hour later I’m driving through traffic heedlessly, I know drawing unneeded attention to me. But I speed on through, running a number of stoplights, not knowing how I managed to drive all the way back to Samantha’s house without having to lose a cop or two in a high-speed chase on my way there.

There’s a car parked out front on the street between Samantha’s house and the one next door. I don’t remember seeing that one before I left. With my gun in my hand, I stay low as I get out and rush up the driveway, using Samantha’s car as a shield just in case. There are no lights on inside the house. It’s unusually quiet. Samantha’s dog would normally be tangled up in the window blind by now, trying to see out after hearing a vehicle pull up.

I hear another, larger dog, barking in the backyard of the opposite neighbor and I stay crouched low, making my way underneath the carport and next to the older car parked there.

One figure emerges from the side of the house just after I move silently across the space and make it to the brick wall underneath the carport. I grab him by the throat too fast for him to react and throw him to the ground. His gun hits the concrete and in that same moment, I put a bullet through his temple before he has a chance to seize it.

Another man calls out a name, looking for the man I just killed. I don’t wait for him to come around the side. I step right out in front of him, raise my gun to his face and get my shot off before he sees me fully. His body hits the grass.

I wait only seconds in case there are anymore and then I rush inside the house through the side door underneath the carport.

The house has been destroyed; Samantha’s dog, shot to death on the kitchen floor. I smell gun smoke, blood, freshly brewed coffee and unfamiliar cologne.

The first body I see is Samantha’s. The second, Javier’s.

“Sarai?” I say when I see her sitting against the wall to my left, partially hidden by the darkness. I take off my black gloves and shove them inside my jacket pocket and go over to her. “Sarai?”

She doesn’t look up at me, so I crouch in front of her.

The gun I left underneath her mattress lies next to her foot. I slip it into the back of my pants. Both of her knees are drawn upward against her chest, her hands lay palm-up beside her on the floor.

“He’s dead,” she says, her words distant as if she’s still trying to process the truth. She raises her eyes to me; pain and confusion and disorientation reside within them. “I killed him, Victor.”

I reach out and lift her into my arms.

“I’m going to get you out of here.”

Holding her close to my chest, I carry her through the death and debris and out of the house. She doesn’t speak, but she holds onto me as if she’s terrified I’ll drop her. Or, perhaps, terrified I’ll intentionally let her go.

I set her carefully in the passenger’s seat.

Three police cars fly past toward Samantha’s house one block over as we leave the scene, doing the speed limit this time around.

Sarai is quiet and motionless, emotionless, all the way back to the private airport where the jet awaits us.

There’s only one place to take her now. Home. To my home on the New England coast.

~~~

My driver picks us up from the airport hours later. Sarai rode all the way to my cliff-side beach house with her head pressed against the backseat window. She never moved. It’s the first time since I found her in my car in Mexico that I would welcome her chatty one-sided conversation and annoying questions. But I get nothing from her. And I find myself silently yearning for it.

The first kill is always the hardest, the one you never forget. But the first kill is also what drops the chances of living a normal life by half.

Sarai is no longer in the fifty-fifty zone.

I shouldn’t have left her there….

Carrying her across the cobblestone driveway and into the house, I take her inside and lie her down on my sofa. It’s been a month since I’ve been here and it still smells as clean as the day I left and set out on a job to kill a man in Columbia. It is because of jobs like that one that I can afford such luxuries. But it’s a shame that because of what has happened with Sarai that I will have to leave here soon, too. I thought perhaps I’d get to stay in one place for at least a year this time, but such is the life I lead, a dark and lonely path lined only with the solitude of death.

Sarai lays on her side, her head propped against a couch pillow.

I remove my suit jacket and drape it over the back of the chair next to me and then start to go into the kitchen to get her some water, but her voice stops me cold.

“The gun jammed.”

Standing in the arched kitchen entrance, I turn to look at her across the expanse of marble tile and expensive furniture. I walk toward her again, slowly, breaking apart the button of my shirt cuff.

I wait patiently for her to go on. She still doesn’t look at me; she stares out ahead of her seeing only the scene as she relives it.

“I’d be dead if it weren’t for that.”

I walk closer, still keeping my distance as though some part of me doesn’t want to disrupt her thoughts with my presence. I break apart the button on the left cuff and roll up my sleeves.

“I froze,” she says, remembering it. “I thought I was dead. I just stood there waiting to die.” She moves her head backward just enough to finally see me. “I don’t know how I reacted so fast, but when his gun jammed…that look on his face…next thing I know the gun in the back of my pants is in my hand and Javier is on the floor. I didn’t hesitate. It was like someone else was inside my head at that moment. She was the one who grabbed the gun. She was the one who pulled the trigger. Because I didn’t realize what had happened until it was over.” She looks away again. “I killed him,” she adds distantly.

“He deserved it,” I say calmly.

Her head snaps back to see me again, making me think that when she looked at me moments ago, she wasn’t really seeing me at all. It’s as if my voice just woke her.

She raises up from the couch.

I watch her curiously in a vague, sidelong glance. I glimpse her hands shaking and the corners of her mouth trembling. She curls her fingers towards her palms until her hands are balled into fists. And then she lunges at me.

“You left! You bastard! You left!” She cries out, beating her fists against my chest as hard as she can.

I let her. I stand motionless and let her until she can’t do it anymore and her body starts to fall exhaustively at my feet. But I catch her before she hits the floor, wrapping my arms around her small frame. She sobs into my chest, choking on her tears, grasping the seams of my suit vest with her trembling fingers. “You left…,” she repeats over and over again until the words fade into a whisper on her lips. “You left….”

I hold her tight. Awkwardly. Because I’ve never done this before. I’ve never experienced this type of sorrow and pain and have been the one to be expected to help mend it. My mother was the only one who had ever held me like this when I was a boy and I can’t remember the way it felt.

I feel like I want to press my lips against the top of her hair. But I don’t. I have the urge to squeeze her a little tighter and take her completely into me. But I can’t. I just can’t bring myself to do it.

“Sarai,” I say, gently pulling her away so that I can see her eyes. “I need you to tell me what happened. Tell me everything....

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“Javier Ruiz has been eliminated,” Victor says, as calmly and professionally as any other time I’ve heard him speak to Niklas.

“Yes,” he answers a question I can’t hear but I still dumbly push my head forward a little as if it’ll amplify the volume in some way. “Police arrived at the scene before I made it out of the neighborhood. It was not a clean kill.” He listens to Niklas for a moment and goes on, “I believe Samantha led them there. The girl was alive when I arrived just before I took Javier out. He had shot her, but she managed to tell me that she overheard Samantha on the phone with someone just after I left for Tucson. Yes. No, Samantha is dead. Inform Vonnegut that Safe House Twelve has been compromised. A Cleaner should be sent there immediately to confiscate her files. Yes. Yes.” He glances at me. “That will not be necessary. The girl died of her wound. I left her there.”

My stomach twists into knots. I cross my arms over it.

“Niklas,” he says, dropping the professionalism in his tone a degree. “Come to my New England location as soon as you can. We will get the payment squared away and then…I wish to tell you what happened in Budapest.”

I tilt my head gently to one side upon hearing those last words. Everything else that Victor told Niklas, I understand it all for what it was: a lie, a ploy to get him here. But the last part felt real, personal. The fact that he said it in front of me strikes me as peculiar. I know it has nothing to do with me, so why would he include it in this particular conversation? It’s in this moment that I begin to understand that Niklas is something more to Victor than his liaison, more than someone he works with and that whatever happened in Budapest needs to be said because his conscience needs to be cleared.

That’s what people do when they say their goodbyes.

I don’t know why, but despite Niklas trying to get me killed, I feel this pain and sadness inside. Because I know what Victor is going to do. I know he’s going to kill him. Yet, I feel like it’s the last thing that he wants...

He sets his phone on the glass end table next to the chair and breaks apart the buttons of his vest.

“I have nowhere else to go,” I tell him from the couch again. “I know I’ve been a burden and I’m sorry. Samantha told me that you’re risking everything, even your life to help me and I don’t have anything to give you in return. Other than my gratitude and I know that’s not much.”

I sigh and add, “And I’m sorry about Samantha.”

He tosses his vest and afterwards his tie over the back of the chair with his jacket.

“It was my decision to help you,” he says while untucking his dress shirt. “And Samantha was a good woman.”

“Did she love you?”

I fold my hands together within my lap.

“No,” he says, not looking at me. “She wanted to, but she was incapable.”

My brows wrinkle in confusion.

“Incapable of love?” I ask. “No one’s incapable of that.”

“You can’t fall in love with someone who isn’t there,” he says matter-of-factly. “I left before she had the chance.”

“Did you love her?” I mentally hold my breath.

“No I did not. Love is an impediment in this business. It’ll only get you killed.”

Although his answer leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, I can’t deny that maybe he’s right. Though I think about how Victor, or anyone for that matter, could go through life without loving someone. But then I realize that I’ve never loved anyone, either.

“And I know you have no place to go,” he adds, “but when this is over and I know you’re safe, you will have to be on your own. I will help set you up, give you a decent start.” He stops and looks at me intently, his eyes locking on mine as if to seize my undivided attention. “But this ends soon. You’ve been with me too long already as it is.”

It feels like suddenly he’s angry with me, or at least angry with himself for helping me. Maybe it has to do with whatever’s going on between him and Niklas, I could never know, but since his phone call with Niklas, Victor is different.

And it fills me with dread.

He turns and walks through a marble archway that leads to another part of this massive house. In a way it reminds me of the places Javier used to take me all dressed up and on his arm, but this house, although massive from what I’ve seen, is smaller than the others were. And darker, with dark cherry hardwood floors so shiny I can see my reflection, and covered with expensive rugs of the deepest reds and browns and grays. Tall rust-colored curtains dress the expansive windows that cover the entirety of one wall from ceiling to floor and overlooking the turbulent ocean below. Even outside the beach isn’t a bright ocean-side paradise with white sands and blue skies. Here it’s gray and gloomy and the waves crash angrily against the rocks many feet below, yet it’s not even storming.

For the next several hours, Victor stays out of sight. I don’t feel like he’s intentionally ignoring me, but I know that he wants to be alone.

I think a lot about Samantha. And Lydia. And Izel. And Javier. I’ve seen so much death. I killed a man tonight, yet, the only thing that picks at my mind more is the fact that I’m already over it. For the most part, that is; I still can’t get it off my mind. I still see Javier’s dark, almost black eyes staring back at me with that jammed gun in his hand. I still shake—I’m shaking right now—when I think about pulling the trigger, when his eyes followed mine all the way down until his body hit the floor. And I’ll never forget what he said to me just before he died:

“I knew you had it in you, Sarai.”

And I hate myself for it, but I…well, I feel an out-of-place sense of sadness over Javier. A void. That part of me which grew to accept him as being the only life I had, whether I wanted him to be or not, misses him. I guess because I was used to him after so long.

“Sarai?” Victor’s voice snaps me out of the memory.

I look up at him standing over me. I never heard him walking up, or noticed his tall form approaching the couch, I was so absorbed.

“Niklas will be here in about twenty minutes,” he says. “You’ll need to stay out of sight. You’ll go in my room and keep the door closed. Is that understood?”

“Yes.”

I hate how cold he feels again, just like he felt when I first met him. All traces of empathy and openness that I felt grow within Victor over the time we’ve been together are gone.

“What are you going to do?”

“What I have to do.”

He walks past me wearing a long-sleeved black pullover shirt and black pants. It’s refreshing to see him dressed in something so casual after only ever seeing him in suits. He is attractive in whatever he chooses to wear, I admit to myself.

I follow him to whatever part of the house he’s going.

“Victor?” I call out behind him, but he just keeps walking. “I-I could help you.” I can’t believe I’m saying this. “Have you ever…trained anyone? You know, to be like you?”

Victor stops mid-stride underneath the entrance of some spacious, marble-floored room out ahead.

I see his shoulders rise and fall. Then he turns to me.

“No,” he says, “and I never will.”

He leaves it at that and walks into the room where I continue to follow and once I’m inside, the beauty of it takes my breath away. There are four life-sized statues of Greek women wearing flowing gowns, standing tall in all for corners of this round, dome-shaped room. To my right another wall-sized window overlooks the turbulent ocean and in front of it, sitting proudly on display is the most beautiful piano I’ve ever seen.

I try to tear my eyes away from it.

“But why not?” I ask, coming up behind him. “What else am I going to do with my life? I can’t go back out there. I have no education, didn’t even get to graduate. I have no friends, no family, no work history. Victor, I don’t even have a real driver’s license or a birth certificate and social security card. I have no identity, at least not a legal one.”

He leaves the room with the piano, walking through an exit on the other side and I stay close behind him.

Now we’re in a smaller side room with a ceiling-to-floor bookshelf situated on the back wall, filled to the brim with books—mostly leather-bound—and an antique-looking black lacquer desk on one wall. A leather recliner sits in the center of the room with a small table and lamp beside it.

“You can get those things back,” he says walking toward the table beside the recliner. “It will take some time, but you can get them. As far as an education, you can get a GED, go to a community college.” He glances at me and adds, “It will be hard, but it’s your only option.”

He takes a writing book of sorts from the table and begins flipping through the edge-tattered pages.

“But that’s not what I want,” I say. “I want to…do what you do. I know it sounds ludicrous but—”

“It...

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Victor shuts the door behind me and I try to mentally prepare for what is about to happen.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Victor

When Niklas and I were just boys, before we were taken by the Order, he was my best friend. We fought a lot, hand-to-hand, always trying to size the other up, and although we both often came out with bloody noses and once a broken wrist, nothing could make us turn on the other. We would walk off the battlefield, carrying on about what we thought our mother’s would have waiting for us for dinner when we got home. And we’d wake up and attend school the next day with matching black eyes.

The ones I gave him were bigger, of course, but then Niklas would say the same about those he gave me.

After we were taken by the Order, things between us began to change. Vonnegut, although rarely ever making a face-to-face appearance—and that hasn’t changed even today—said that I showed promise. But he said nothing about Niklas. And the first time I saw Niklas’ face when Vonnegut promoted me—younger than any assassin he had ever promoted—to Full Operative when I was just seventeen-years-old, I saw something in Niklas that hardened me against him: a jealous heart.

I knew at that moment that one day I might be forced to kill him.

Niklas is the only family that I have left. And as much as I wish it didn’t have to be this way, that I could be wrong about him and go back to the way things were, I know that’s not entirely possible. The truth is, I have been watching my back where my brother is concerned since last year.

And our father is to blame for that.

I suppose I should’ve listened to him….

I meet Niklas at the front door. He walks in, calm and collective as always except when he’s angry with me for having my own mind and choosing to do things the way I see fit.

I shut the door behind him.

“This is a much nicer place than the last one,” he says, looking up at the scaling ceilings with his hands folded together behind his back.

I find myself privately studying his features, looking for traces of me and our father in him. We have the same eyes, though his are bluer than mine; mine tend to appear more green at times than blue. His face is rounder, mine slimmer. But I think what separates us the most are our accents. Our father and his mother were both German. I was born in France, my mother a French spy for the Order. My father moved us to Germany when I was two-years-old and I did not meet Niklas until I was six. I helped him learn to speak English and French, but he did not have the knack for linguistics that I had and so he never was able to fully lose the accent. But despite the differences we have, I still see only a younger version of me when I look at him. Especially right now as I try to grasp the fact that I’m going to kill him. I don’t want to. I want to walk away from this and forget that it ever happened, but that’s not an option.

He smiles at me.

We have the same smile, too. I remember our father telling me this.

“Yes,” I say about the house, “I thought it was time I slept in something more upscale. I hoped I might get to stay here for a while.”

“Has that changed?” he asks curiously, having reason to believe that judging by my tone.

“Unfortunately.”

I gesture toward the living room. “Let’s sit down,” I say and he follows. “We have a lot to discuss.”

He takes the chair next to the marble side-table.

I remain standing.

I sense that he wonders why I don’t sit down as well, but the curiosity disappears from his eyes and is replaced with attention when I begin.

“Niklas,” I say, “last year on my mission to Budapest, I wasn’t being entirely honest with you.”

Niklas laughs lightly, adjusting his back against the chair. He props his left ankle on top of his right knee and interlocks his fingers in front of him, his elbows propped on the chair arms.

“Well, that wouldn’t be the first time,” he says, still smiling as if this is any other casual conversation between two brothers. “You never were one to tell even me your secrets.”

“I went to see our father,” I announce.

The smile drops from his face. He turns his chin slightly at an angle, clearly confused by my admission.

“He sent for me,” I add.

“What for? Why would he send for you, Victor? After all those years of never seeing him once, why would he send for you and not me?”

I don’t answer. I find it more difficult to tell him the truth than I imagined it would be. I always knew it would be hard, but not this hard.

“Victor?” Niklas’ eyes are filled with concern and…pain.

He stands up from the chair.

“Just tell me, brother, please.”

I swallow hard and take a steady breath.

“Niklas,” I finally go on, “your mother was eliminated by the Order because proof was found that she was selling information. You already know this.” He nods. “But after that, because she was your mother, the Order could not trust you. Even Vonnegut felt you were unstable, that one day, sooner or later, you would avenge your mother’s death and betray the Order.”

He continues to listen, his face shadowed more and more by pain and rejection. And it kills me inside to see it.

“I went to Budapest to meet with him,” I say and can no longer look at my brother. “He spoke with Vonnegut and they both agreed that you should be eliminated even if only as a precaution, to prevent the inevitable. I was given the order to carry it out.”

Niklas’ head snaps around.

I meet his eyes.

“Vonnegut, of course,” I go on, “did not know that we were brothers and being his Number One, he knew I could carry out the job also because we were so close, you as my liaison. Father wanted me to be the one to kill you because he felt it would be the honorable thing, that if anyone should take your life it should be me because we are family and no other should have that privilege.”

Niklas can hardly get his thoughts together. He can barely speak, but finally manages and when he does, it hurts my heart as much as his expression continues to do.

“Father wanted you to kill me?”

“Yes,” I say gently.

He starts to pace the floor and then brings his hands up to the top of his head, pushing them roughly over his hair. He looks across at me, his eyes brimmed with tears. I have never once in our lives seen my brother cry. Never. Not even when we were children, or when his mother was killed.

I grind my jaw, forcing my own tears back. I grit my teeth so hard that I feel the pressure in my skull. But I keep a straight face, as much of one as I can manage.

“Then why didn’t you?” he lashes out. “Why am I still alive? Tell me that, Victor.” The first of his tears streams down one cheek and he reaches up instinctively to wipe it away, angry at it for betraying him. “You should’ve killed me!”

“I refused,” I say. “You were the one job I could not carry out, Niklas. And so then Father had only one thing left to do: he was going to do it himself.”

Niklas’ body freezes rigidly, more hurt by this truth than the truth before it. Another tear escapes from his eye, but this time he doesn’t have the mind to wipe it away.

“I killed him,” I finally say. “Father told me that I would have to because it was the only way he wouldn’t finish the job. So I shot him where he stood.”

He can’t look at me. I feel the conflict within him, his mind and heart trying to choose which emotions to feel and which ones to reject: his hurt for what our father did, or his love for his brother, because both are too much to take on at once.

I go on:

“Being Vonnegut’s Number One, I convinced him to spare your life and made him believe that our Father was unhinged, paranoid, and that was why I had to kill him. I told Vonnegut that you were trustworthy and that I wanted a chance to prove that to him and the rest of the Order. I vowed to take full responsibility for you—”

“Full re—,” he glares at me, “full responsibility for me? What, am I a goddamned child? Everything I have done since I was seven-years old, I’ve done for the Order. I am the one of us who always did as I was told, who never questioned Vonnegut’s orders, who has never given him or anyone else reason to question me!” He clenches his hands into fists at his sides. “I have strived to become like you, Victor, to be respected and trusted and showered with the same glory Vonnegut has showered you with since before you were promoted Full Operative! I have done nothing to warrant—”

“You’ve been lying to Vonnegut for me for years, Niklas. What’s not to say that you would turn against me when the time was right? You’ve pretended to be Vonnegut’s trustworthy soldier, his liaison waiting to be promoted Full Operative, all the while lying to him whenever I asked you to.”

“Is that what this is about?!” He points upward and then drops his hand aggressively back at his side. “Have you been testing me all this time?! That’s what you’ve been doing! Isn’t it?!”

“No,” I say. “I would never use you like that, Niklas....

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“I lied.”

He still hasn’t flinched.

Is he telling the truth?

I raise my gun to him.

Niklas’ eyes widen and he puts out his hands toward me.

“Victor, I didn’t betray you. I swear to you on my life, I told no one anything!”

My finger presses carefully on the trigger.

“You are my brother!” he shouts. “I have always done what you asked, kept your secrets, played your game between Vonnegut and the orders he gave you! I would die before I betrayed you!”

When Niklas’ eyes avert behind me, I know that Sarai is standing there.

“I told you not to come out.” I keep my eyes on Niklas.

He looks back and forth between the two of us, his features riddled by shock and betrayal on my part.

“You said she died.”

“I lied about that, too.”

I press the trigger a little more.

“So who’s lying to who then? Who’s been betraying who?!”

Back and forth his eyes dart.

“Victor! It. Wasn’t. Me!” he roars. He’s more angry than scared, his face twisted with heartbreak and disbelief, his hands clenched tightly into fists at his sides. “I won’t beg for my life. I won’t do it, brother. If you must kill me then kill me, be done with it, but know that I did not betray you!”

In the last second, I lower my gun and catch the breath I’ve been holding for the past few minutes.

Then I sit down in the nearby chair and slump against it.

Silence fills the room. I’ve never been so confused in my life about anything.

“I think he’s telling the truth,” Sarai says softly behind me. I feel her there, standing with her fingers draped over the back of my chair. For a moment, I almost reach up and touch them.

Finally, I raise my eyes to Niklas and say to Sarai, “I believe he is, too.”

“How is she alive?” Niklas asks, more concerned with her than the fact that I’ve decided not to shoot him. He seems to be looking at her more now than me. I can’t tell yet what level of discontent he’s feeling about this, but maybe once the shock wears off I’ll be able to read his face a little easier.

“Samantha didn’t tell Javier where we were, either,” I say. “I only told you that to get you here because I was certain you were the one. You were the only one left.”

“Samantha was killed trying to protect me,” Sarai speaks up.

I wish she’d just stop talking and go back into the room.

“Javier killed her,” she adds with sadness in her voice.

“And Sarai killed Javier before I got there,” I say.

Niklas stares at both of us for a long time, perhaps still trying to fit all of the pieces together in his mind, and likely still feeling stung by my deceiving him the way I did to get him here.

“Fine,” he says, slashing the air in front of him with his hand. “Samantha didn’t do it, but neither did I.”

Sarai’s fingers move from the back of the chair and touch the back of my shoulders, likely involuntarily because she’s so nervous. For a moment, I find myself wanting her fingers there, but I get up quickly before my brother gets the wrong idea, if he hasn’t already.

“What is all this about?” Niklas asks. “Tell me Victor; what has this girl got to do with you?” He starts pacing again, looking back at me every so often, his mind in overdrive. “You went to Mexico to hear Javier’s offer, to see whose offer was worth the contract, his or Guzmán’s. And then on the way out, you find a stowaway in your car who clearly belonged to Javier Ruiz—”

“I don’t belong to anyone,” Sarai says acidly. “And my name isn’t girl, it’s Sarai.”

I put my hand up to her and she stops talking, but her harsh gaze grows darker looking across at Niklas. She crosses her arms.

Niklas glares back at her, but he says to me, “I’ve already reported the lies you told me to get me here to Vonnegut.” He sits back down in the chair. “You know as well as I do that to retract that story will raise all sorts of questions. You can’t keep her hidden forever. You might as well have formally requested a new liaison because they will assign someone else to you simply because of our ‘miscommunication’ if that’s what we choose to tell him.” He shakes his head at me, a faint smile of disbelief at his lips. “You’ve done all of this, you’ve lied to the Order, you’ve put the entire mission in jeopardy, destroyed it actually, all because of this girl…” He sneers. “Safe House Twelve was compromised because of her.”

Niklas looks right at Sarai standing behind me and without having to see her myself, I can sense the resentment boiling within her.

“So many are dead because of her,” Niklas says. “Samantha. That girl back in Arizona. Reports were that she was only sixteen-years-old. Dead because of…Sarai.” He smirks.

I see Sarai’s long, reddish hair whip behind her as she rushes past me. I could have reached out and stopped her, but Niklas deserves whatever retribution she can manage to dish out before he knocks her on her ass.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Sarai

My face burns with contempt, tears pouring from my eyes in droves as I bolt across the short distance toward Niklas.

I don’t care that he looks both surprised and faintly amused as I lunge for him, swinging my fists chaotically in front of me at his face.

In a flash, I’m on the floor on my back and Niklas is crouched on top of me, his hand pressed around my throat, rendering me unable to catch my breath. I claw at his wrist with both of my hands and try to kick him but there’s no way I’m moving from this spot. He glares down at me and moves his hand from my throat to my cheeks, seizing my jaw with his fingers like a vise-grip. With his other hand, he pins my wrists together, forcing them against my chest. He turns my chin to one side and then the other and I taste the chemicals leftover from his aftershave as his index finger presses against the edge of my lips.

“Get off me!” I growl under the weight of his hand.

“Niklas,” Victor says calmly from behind. “Leave her be.”

Niklas’ blue eyes bore into mine and he holds me here in this position for three more excruciatingly long seconds before doing what Victor said.

I try to catch my breath when he releases me, but I think mostly I just hold it longer until he has moved away from me completely.

I raise my back from the floor, but stay sitting on it. I’m so hurt, so outraged at Niklas for the things he said, but my pride hurts worse than anything.

Because I know he’s right.

I look at the floor rather than at either one of them. I don’t want them to see the shame and guilt on my face although it would be evident to anyone that it’s there.

“Niklas,” Victor says calmly, “I am sorry to have compromised you.”

I look up instantly. I feel a mood shift in the room and though I’m not exactly sure which one, I can tell by the pause in Victor’s voice that it’s something life-changing.

“We could devise a plan,” he goes on with Niklas’ undivided attention. “Let Vonnegut believe that Sarai is, in fact, dead—”

“Or we could just kill her to make it true.”

I jerk my head sideways to look at Niklas, who’s looking right back at me with the same condescension.

Victor shakes his head, objecting to his mordant yet entirely serious proposal.

“We could devise a plan together,” Victor continues in the same stoic tone, “or I could do it on my own and you can walk away and not be any part of it.”

Niklas’ eyes grow wide, his body locks up firmly. He seems at a loss for words. And so am I. I may not understand how these kinds of things work in their business, but I don’t really need to know that what Victor just proposed is something very dangerous. It’s suicide.

I manage to pick myself up from the floor.

“You have a choice,” Victor says. “Go along with my plan to tell Vonnegut that she’s dead, or tell him the truth, tell him everything that went on here to secure your place in the Order. I won’t hold it against you. I’ll take her away with me, set her up somewhere so that she can go on with her life. And then I’ll go on with mine. It’s your choice, Niklas. But I won’t kill her, and if Vonnegut finds out that she’s alive he will, rightfully so, question my loyalties. And you know first-hand what happens when any of our loyalties is questioned.”

“Eliminated as a precaution,” I say out loud, though mostly to myself, remembering what Victor said moments ago about why they ordered Niklas dead.

Niklas is in shock. He shakes his head repeatedly as if trying to shake Victor’s treacherous words out of his mind.

“You of all operatives,” Niklas manages to say, “…I don’t understand why you’re doing this, why you would throw away everything and go into hiding—.” He shakes his head again, unable to finish the sentence.

“It wouldn’t be the first time I risked my position and my life to follow my conscience...

Killing Sarai
Killing Sarai Page 28



“Take off your clothes,” Victor demands.

My heart stops.

“What?”

“Sarai, take off your clothes.” He pulls me up from the chair by my hand. I try to wrench it away from him, but he applies more pressure.

“I’m not taking my clothes off! Why would you ask me to—?” I slap him with my free hand, right across the left side of his face.

He grabs my wrist. “I need you to trust me. I’ve brought you this far now do as I say and take off your f**king clothes.”

His uncharacteristic use of that vulgarity shocks me into compliance. My eyes dart back and forth between them again, my jaw tightening, my breath heavy and short expelling from my nostrils.

“Fine,” I say, jerking my hand from his. “But not in front of him.”

Victor takes me by the wrist and walks with me past Niklas and toward the entrance to his room.

“You have nothing I want to see,” I hear Niklas say just before Victor shuts the door.

I already feel nak*d standing in the wide open of Victor’s spacious ocean-view room and I haven’t even taken my clothes off yet. I want to linger as long as possible, drag it out so that maybe he’ll change his mind or at least tell me what this is all about, but he wastes no more time. And he doesn’t let me waste any more of it, either.

“Take them off. Now.”

I start with my shirt, pulling it over my head and exposing my bare br**sts. I drop the shirt on the floor beside my feet. He watches me, not with lust in his eyes, but with determination. I lean over and slip out of my pants and all that is left are my panties.

He steps right up to me.

I hesitate. The space between us is about two feet but it feels like two inches. I don’t want to take off my panties, not because I’m afraid of him, but because…I’m embarrassed for him to see me that way.

When he steps up closer and doesn’t demand I take the panties off, I breathe a silent sigh of relief.

“Lay down on the bed,” he says and that breath is sucked right back into my lungs again before it can expel completely.

When I don’t act fast enough, he wraps his hands around my upper-arms and gently pushes me down against his expensive designer comforter.

I swallow a lump in my throat.

As I start to raise my arms to my br**sts to cover them, I feel Victor’s warm hands on me. I freeze, my eyes wide and unblinking. He raises my arms above my head and begins to feel every inch of my skin, pressing his fingers along the underside of my arms first and then down toward my ribs before making his way to my br**sts.

His eyes catch mine briefly.

Maybe he wanted to ease my fear of him with that glance, but all it did was make me want him to touch me more.

The guilt of that thought sears through me. But the touch of his hands on my br**sts, kneading only a small portion of them with his fingers, does something entirely different.

I picture his mouth on my nipple…

I force that ridiculous thought away and I watch him, his intent eyes and how deftly, yet at the same time, aggressively, his hands move across every inch of my body. Furtively I inhale the scent of his skin, his natural scent that somehow makes me want him to kiss me. He leans up and away from me, but he isn’t done. He goes for my thighs next, starting with the left and kneading his fingers around the flesh using both hands. And then the other thigh.

When his fingers touch the sensitive skin of my inner thighs, right at my panty line, I gasp.

He stops. He looks up at me, across the nak*d landscape of my body. I can only wonder what he’s thinking, but this time I get the feeling his gaze isn’t to ease my fear of him, but instead to study my reaction to his hands being on me, so close to the most intimate part of me. I wonder why he would study my face at all, why he wouldn’t take my obvious reaction and reject it by moving his hands away as I expected him to do. But instead, he leaves them there, the pad of one of his fingers I feel grazing the flesh at the bend of my leg just on the edge of my panties, conflicted about what he should do. What he might want to do.

He pulls away and abruptly flips me over onto my stomach.

“What are you doing exactly?” I ask, adapting to the quick change of the moment.

He pulls my panties down halfway over my butt cheeks, moves his hands here and there in the same manner and then back up to my hips.

“I’m looking for something.”

“What?” I ask.

Then suddenly he stops, his thumb moving in a circular motion on one particular spot just above my right butt cheek, on the back part of my hipbone. The same general area where I removed his bullet.

“A tracking device,” he says. “You have one.”

I try to twist my head around to see him better, but it hurts my neck.

The flash of a silver blade catches my eye. I panic when I glimpse the knife in his hand and start to twist my body awkwardly. But he holds me down, putting the weight of his hand on the small of my back, the hand with the knife wrestling with my left shoulder.

“What are you going to do?!” I shriek.

“I have to cut it out.”

“Victor, no!”

I thrash around more violently, trying to roll over onto my back so that I can get up. Suddenly he’s lying fully on top of me, and his closeness, the warmth of his breath on the side of my neck, takes my breath away. My entire frame solidifies beneath him and then begins to relax, melting into his body as his voice dances along the shell of my ear.

“I will be gentle,” he whispers and my skin shivers from my ear down the full length of my spine.

He presses himself into me from behind, his hardness obvious behind the thin layer of his pants that separates us.

“I promise,” he says onto my ear. “But it has to come out. Do you understand? Do you trust me?” He presses his h*ps toward me again and I feel me moving against him involuntarily. I shut my eyes when the tingling sensation between my legs moves through my back and into my eyelids.

“Yes,” I whisper. “I trust you.”

“Good,” he says softly and slowly raises himself off of me.

I remain very still, thinking so much more about Victor and what he just did to me than the more imperative threat. A part of me doesn’t even care about what he’s going to do, that he’s about to cut into me with a knife, that it’s going to hurt like hell. And perhaps that’s the only reason he did what he did, knowing somehow that he could control my mood, my emotions, with the hope that he might touch me more than he already has. I feel like a toy and Victor knows every button on me which to push, to touch, in order to make me do whatever he wants, feel whatever he wants me to feel. And I don’t mind. I don’t know how he did it, but I don’t mind at all.

“Bite down on the pillow if you have to,” he says.

I reach up and grab the nearest pillow towards me, crushing it against my chest. I squeeze my eyes shut tight.

The blade goes in and I yell out in pain before burying my face within the pillow, my entire body hardening like a block of cement.

In seconds, the device is out and Victor stands at the foot of the bed looking down into the space between his bloody fingers at something as small as a grain of rice.

With his free hand, he reaches for the towel he used to dry off with after his shower, which had been lying on the floor nearby. He hands it to me. “Put pressure on it to stop the bleeding,” he says and walks across the room into his bathroom.

While I press the towel on the back of my hip, I hear the water running in the sink and then the sound of him rummaging through his medicine cabinet. With one hand holding the towel in place, I get up from the bed to find my shirt, letting the towel drop only long enough to slip it on.

Victor walks out of the bathroom with an orange pill bottle clasped in his fingers and walks right past me and to the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Victor

“Niklas,” I say coming out of the room, “does this look familiar to you?” I step right up to him and hold out the pill bottle with the tracking device inside.

He takes it into his fingers.

I hear soft footsteps behind me as Sarai emerges from my bedroom, but I keep my attention on Niklas.

He peers into the side of the bottle first but then twists the cap off and shuffles the device into the palm of his hand.

He looks up at me.

“Same type of device they use in the girls in Dubai,” he says. He glances at Sarai. “You found this in her?” Then he drops it back in the bottle and tightens the lid. “I hate to ask where.”

Niklas wipes his hand on his jacket.

“If it is one of theirs,” I say, “this means that Javier Ruiz has a much larger operation than any of us knew. I’ve never known of a drug lord like Ruiz to have access to this kind of technology.”

“They don’t care about technology,” Niklas says. “All they deal in are drugs, weapons and girls.”

“Had,” Sarai says and I turn around to see her. “That Javier had a much larger operation. He’s dead, remember?”

“Yes,” I say, “but that doesn’t mean his operation is. It means that it’ll be passed on to...

Killing Sarai
Killing Sarai Page 29



It was also because of the device that the two men came into the store pretending to be customers and speaking to the store owner in code. Given the fact that I killed all of the men that came with Izel the first time, I presume that Javier Ruiz wanted to play it safer by sending only two the second time. They were merely sent to gather information and to follow us until Javier devised a better plan.

When I took Sarai over the border it was more difficult to keep up with us. I imagine that he had sent more men to follow, possibly even to ambush us at some point, but that never happened and I have to believe it was due to us already being in the United States. It was even difficult for Javier to get through border patrol and he has powerful sway even with some corrupt American officials.

“I will contact you as soon as I get your new orders from Vonnegut.”

Niklas steps up to me.

He strips away the unemotional liaison part of him and appears more like my brother now.

“I am sorry for what our father did,” I say to him.

Niklas lowers his eyes briefly.

“I will do anything to protect you because you are my brother,” he says. “Just as you did for me.”

We share a quiet moment of understanding, nod and part ways.

“He hates me, as I’ve said before,” Sarai speaks up from behind. “But he is loyal to you.”

I had been staring out the large window from across the room, lost in thought listening to the waves crash against the rocks.

“Yes,” I say. “He is.”

She steps up to me and places her hand on my wrist.

“You couldn’t have known,” she says. “That it wasn’t him. But that doesn’t matter now. I think you cleared the air with your brother in more ways than one.”

“Perhaps,” I say and walk away. “But I can’t concern myself with that right now.” She follows me back into my room. “We should discuss you.”

I enter the bathroom and she stands at the door, the towel still pressed against her hip.

“Get over here,” I say.

She does without question.

I put my hands on her waist and turn her around to face the mirror. Instinctively, she props her hands upon the edge of the counter, letting the bloody towel fall to the floor. Tucking my fingers behind the elastic of her panties, I slip them down over her hips, letting them rest halfway at the center of her bottom.

“Where would you like to go?” I ask as I open the closet to my right. “I will set you up wherever you’d like, but we need to do this soon. I expect to have my new orders before the end of the day tomorrow and I won’t have much time to spare between taking you where you need to go and when I must leave.”

I come back over with my medical kit and set it on the counter.

Sarai doesn’t answer at first, perhaps she’s deciding on a place, but my gut tells me that’s not the case at all.

I can see her reflection in the mirror, but she doesn’t raise her head to look back at me.

“But I want to stay with you,” she says cautiously. “I’ve already told you, I have nowhere to go, no identity—”

“And I have told you,” I remind her, “that all of that can be remedied. You pick the place and I will take care of the rest. For now, you have the driver’s license I gave you.”

I clean the knife wound with peroxide and cover the area all around it with iodine. She barely winces from the stinging pain.

“I don’t need your help settling me into a life I no longer want,” she says.

I push the needle in and start to stitch her up. Not even this pain, although faintly obvious on her face, can deter her from the things she wants to say. I had hoped that it would, but her determination is unshakable right now.

“I used to dream about it,” she says, her eyes raised to the mirror now but all she sees is the reverie. “Though I could hardly remember what Arizona even looked like, I used to picture me living in that god-awful trailer with a boyfriend and friends next door. Real inspiring dream, I know,” she mocks herself. “But that place, after a while, was all I could remember. I would’ve given anything to be able to go back there and continue with the life that was stripped from me. But after the third year or so with Javier, I stopped dreaming about it. I gave up wishing that I could find a way to escape. Slowly over time I learned to accept my life the way it was. I hated it at first, of course. I hated Javier. I hated that even though he never raped me, at least not like you expect rape to happen; he knew at first I was unwilling, that I only gave in to him because I was afraid and yet he still had *** with me and I say that’s rape. But I hated him and I hated that I gave myself to a man that I did not want.”

I glimpse her throat move in the mirror as she swallows down the painful memory and she pauses before she goes on, trying to recollect her thoughts.

“At some point,” she says, “I even stopped hating him. I-I know that sounds crazy, and-and-and I never loved him,” she stutters over her words and I sense she’s conflicted about the things she saying. “But I stopped hating him….”

She catches my eyes in the mirror.

“Does that make me sick? I mean…,” she licks the dryness from her lips. I thread the last stitch and clean the area again with alcohol, only glancing away from her long enough to make sure of my technique. “I mean, because I stopped hating him, does that mean there’s something wrong with me?”

She desperately wants me to tell her no.

I slip her panties back over her stitches and go to wash my hands.

“It means that you’re human,” I say.

Trying to avoid her desire to remain with me, I leave her standing in the bathroom and offer no more of my own thoughts on the matter.

But she’s relentless and follows me out.

I continue about my business, intent on getting some much-needed sleep. I remove my shirt and step out of my pants, flipping the light switch off as I walk past, leaving the room bathed in a dark blue hue.

“Victor,” she says softly from behind. “Please take me with you. I’ve told you before, I can help. You can teach me, train me to be whatever you think I’d be good at.”

“You don’t really want that, do you?” I ask, knowing her better than she knows herself. I pull back my comforter and sheets and slip into my bed. “You just don’t want me to leave you. Alone in the world. Free to be what and who you want, to make your own decisions. To have *** with men of your choosing. To have a normal life. Because it’s foreign to you.” I pause. “If I told you to kill someone for the sake of a job, you wouldn’t be able to do it. You couldn’t bring yourself to kill any human being in cold blood, knowing nothing of their crimes or their families or even why they are being killed. You could never become like me. No amount of training could make you a murderer, Sarai.” I lie down fully upon my pillow, bringing the sheet up to my waist. “Now get some sleep. We’ll be leaving at six a.m. and I expect you to have chosen a place you’d like to go by then.”

She looks defeated. Beautiful and soft and damaged standing there before me partially clothed in the light of the moon beaming through the tall window. Beautiful, but defeated. That look in her eyes, it somehow latches onto my soul and all I want is for her to turn and walk away. Because I know that if she doesn’t, if she presses me further with those soft lips and sad, vulnerable eyes that I’ll succumb to the moment and either f**k her or kill her.

She turns and walks toward the door.

I stop her.

“Sarai,” I say, but she doesn’t turn around. “You never accepted your life with Javier, or you wouldn’t…be here with me now.” I had started to say: Or you wouldn’t have killed him, but decided against that.

She says nothing and closes the door on her way out.

I lie here staring at the thick clouds covering the sky and I think about the things I told her, the lies I told her.

She could kill in cold blood. Every part of me tells me that she can and that she would. In a way, it pains me to believe it, to know that her innocence was taken from her so long ago and that although she still has a decent shot at living a normal life, the fact that she chooses to want my life, is difficult to swallow.

It’s difficult mostly because I almost want to give it to her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Sarai

I listen to the thunder and the rain for an hour, unable to fall asleep. Despite the weather it’s so quiet in this house, so spacious and empty. Empty in nearly every sense of the word. I lie against the cool sheets in the spare bedroom, watching the dark clouds churn in the sky through that enormous window. I hear the waves crashing below and see the endless ocean in an eerie flash as lightning streaks across the turbulent sky.

Empty.

This house. My soul. Victor’s soul. It’s the only word suited for the way I feel, the way that I believe Victor feels, though him more-so than me.

How can anyone go through life so surreptitious, emotionless, so unattached to anyone or anything? When I look into his eyes I see something there, although dormant...