“Do you think Fredrik will tell Niklas where we are?” I change the subject for fear of breaking into him too much too soon.
“I think if he was going to do that,” he says, “he would have told Niklas the little he did know about your whereabouts a long time ago and Niklas would have tried to kill you already.”
“There’s something…off about Fredrik. Don’t you sense it?”
Victor reaches up and touches my wet hair. The gesture causes my heart to speed up.
“You have a good sense of people, Sarai,” he says as his hand moves to my chin. “You’re right about Fredrik…,” the pad of his thumb brushes my bottom lip. A shiver races between my legs. “He is…shall I say…unhinged in a sense.”
My breathing picks up and I feel my lashes sweep my face when Victor’s lips fall upon mine.
“Unhinged in what way?” I ask breathily when he pulls back. With my eyes closed, I sense him scanning the curvature of my face and my lips, and I feel the breath emitting softly from his nostrils onto my face.
Every miniscule hair stands on end when his other hand pushes up my thigh and finds my naked waist underneath the shirt. His long fingers dance against the flesh of my hipbone and then rests there.
I open my eyes to see him staring back into mine.
“Is something wrong?” he asks and his mouth sweeps mine again.
“No, I…I just didn’t expect this.”
“Expect what?” I feel his fingers fit behind the elastic of my panties.
My head is swimming, my stomach a fluttering, nervous ball of muscle. “This,” I answer, my eyes opening and closing. “You’re different,” I add softly.
“That’s your fault,” he says and then his lips devour mine.
He pushes my body back against the couch pillows and falls between my legs.
His cell phone buzzes around on the coffee table and I’m reminded just how human I really am when I curse Fredrik for ruining this moment, even if it’s to let me know that Dina is safe.
CHAPTER NINE
Sarai
I’m biting my lip for two reasons: hoping the news is good news, and sexual frustration. Victor talks to Fredrik for less than two minutes, hangs up and dials another number. Once he gets Dina on the phone, he holds it out to me.
I take it into my fingers and put it to my ear.
“Dina?”
“Sarai, my Lord, where are you? What on Earth is going on? I was sitting in the den watching TV when this man knocked on my door. I wasn’t going to let him in, was suspicious of him right away; was going to get my shotgun. But he said it was about you. Oh, Sarai, I was so scared something had happened!” She finally takes a breath.
“Are you all right?” I ask her gently.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. As fine as I can be. But he told me we were going down to the station to meet with you. Even showed me a badge. I can’t believe I fell for it. The gentleman lied to me.” She pauses and lowers her voice as if whispering into the phone so no one else will hear. “He brought me to a hooker’s house. What is going on? Sarai—”
“Everything’ll be fine, Dina, I promise. And don’t worry, whoever’s house you’re at, I doubt she’s a hooker.”
Victor’s eyes catch mine. I look away.
“Where are you? When are you coming home? I know you’re in some kind of trouble, but you can always tell me anything.”
I wish that were true. More than anything right now. But the bigger truth is that I don’t know how to answer her questions. Victor must’ve caught the look of confusion plaguing my face because he takes the phone from my hand.
“Mrs. Gregory,” he says into the phone, “This is Victor Faust. I need you to listen to me very closely.” He waits for a second and then goes on. “You need to stay where you are for the next few days. I will bring Sarai to see you soon and we will explain everything, but until then we need you to lay low. No, I’m sorry but you cannot go back—no, it’s not safe there.” He nods a few times, and I can tell by the vague crinkles forming at the spot between his eyes that he’s uncomfortable talking to her, like a man might be if someone else’s kid were dropped on his lap. “Yes…no, listen to me.” He has lost his patience now and just cuts to the chase, “It is a matter of life or death. If you leave there or make any phone calls to anyone you know, you’ll only get yourself killed.”
I flinch at those words, not because they’re true—I knew that already—but because I can only imagine Dina’s reaction to them. I can only imagine what she must be thinking right now, how scared she must be. Scared for me, not for herself and that makes it hurt that much worse.
“Yes, she’s fine,” Victor assures her once more. “Just a few days. I’ll bring her there.”
I talk to Dina for a few minutes more, letting her know what I can without telling her too much, to ease her mind. Of course, it isn’t helping much at all, considering. We hang up and I stand in the center of the room, feeling very different than I felt before the phone call.
I think it has finally hit me, how badly I screwed up.
Before, when I thought it was mostly me that was in trouble and after I told Eric and Dahlia to get out of L.A., I was worried, but not to this extent. The damage that I’ve caused runs deeper than my own safety. I’ve inadvertently put everyone that I know and care for in danger.
The reality of it all, of my actions and their domino effect consequences, the fact that Victor left me, the fact that I tried to live a normal life but failed miserably; I can’t bear it anymore. Not any of it. Hell, even the sting of finding Dahlia with Eric is beginning to bother me. Not because of Eric, or because he was my ‘boyfriend’, but because what they did didn’t affect me the way that it should’ve.
I’m a freak. And right now I can’t forgive Victor for putting me through it, for dropping me off into a life that he and I both knew I wasn’t fit for and expecting me to conform. I never wanted it to begin with. And that’s precisely why it never worked.
The tears begin to well up in my eyes. I let them fall. I don’t care.
I sense Victor’s presence behind me, but I swing around to face him with anger twisting my features before he has a chance to touch me. And finally, some of the things I’ve wanted to say to him after all this time come out in a storm of angry words.
“You fucking left me!” I shove the palms of my hands against his form-fitting white dress shirt. “You should’ve just killed me! Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through?!” Rage-filled tears shoot from the corners of my eyes.
“I’m sorry…,”
I feel my eyebrows draw inward harshly. “You’re sorry?” I let out a quick, short breath. “That’s all you can say? You’re sorry?”
Deep down I know that none of this is Victor’s fault, that he only did what he did to protect me. But the bigger part of me, the part that isn’t ready to believe one hundred percent that there’s no hope for me, wants to blame anyone but myself.
The tears begin to choke me.
“Every single night,” I say, pointing sternly at the floor with my index finger, my face contorted with anger and blame, “every hour of every day, I thought about you. Only you, Victor. I lived every single day with hope, believing in my heart that you were going to come back for me. Another day would pass and you never showed, but I never lost hope. I thought to myself: Sarai, he’s watching you. He’s testing you. He wants you to do what he said, to try to be like everyone else, to blend in. He wants you to prove to him that you’re strong enough to take on any circumstance, to adapt to any lifestyle, because if you can’t do something as simple as live a normal life, there’s no way you can live a life with him.” I bite down on my bottom lip and try to stifle the tears. I shake my head softly. “That’s what I believed. But I was stupid to ever think that you had any intention of coming back for me.” A tear-induced shudder rolls through my chest.
Victor, with tormented eyes, which I never thought he could possess, steps closer. I step back, shaking my head
over and over, hoping he’ll get the hint that I’m not ready for him to be too close. I want to be left alone in my pain.
“Sarai?” he says my name softly.
“Don’t,” I refuse him and put up my hand. “Please spare me the excuses and the reasons, which I-I know I can’t blame you for—I’m selfish, all right? I know this! I already know you did what you had to do. I already know….”
“No, you don’t.”
I look back up into his eyes.
He steps closer. This time I don’t move away, my mind paralyzed by his words regardless of how few or uninformative they were. He cups my elbows within the palms of his hands and unfolds my arms from over my stomach. His fingers brush lightly against the sensitive skin on the underside of my arms, downward until he finds my hands and takes a hold of them.
“I left the Order primarily because of you, Sarai,” he says and the rest of me is paralyzed. “When Vonnegut found out that I had been helping you, he knew…,” he pauses, appearing to be sifting through his mind for the safest words, “…he knew that I had been compromised.”
I throw my hands up in the air. “Speak English! Please just say whatever it is you’re trying so hard to tiptoe around! Please!”
“Vonnegut knew that I had…developed feelings for you.”
I freeze and my lips snap shut. My heart is beating erratically inside my chest. My tears seemed to have dried up in an instant, only those wetting my cheeks left to linger.
“Being Vonnegut’s Number One operative, his ‘favorite’, the last thing he wanted to do was have me killed. He ordered that I be relieved of duty, taken off the wire for a time until I…came to my senses.”
I give him a what-the-hell-is-that-supposed-to-mean look.
“You might call it brainwashing,” he says.
He waves it off. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is that he was going to give me one chance to prove that my feelings for you were just a fluke and that it would never happen again. Very few ever get second chances in the Order.”
“A fluke?” I sit down on the edge of the coffee table. I look up at him and say, “Sounds to me like Vonnegut wanted you to prove that you aren’t human, that you’re still his obedient soldier who’s incapable of human emotion. What a deranged bastard.”
He nods and crouches down in front of me, interlacing his fingers, his elbows propped on the tops of this thighs.
“Vonnegut ordered me to kill you,” he says gently, holding my gaze. “To prove myself. I told him that I would, that I wanted to, to prove that I was trustworthy, and he let me go. Of course, I had no intentions of killing you. I left that day and went into hiding. Niklas, knowing only the Order his entire life, decided to stay. I thought maybe he just needed some time to figure things out, to decide what was best for him. I kept out of Niklas’ sights as well—if he didn’t know where I was, he couldn’t deceive Vonnegut or feel that he had to choose between us. But then I heard from Fredrik that Niklas had been contracted to kill me and has been looking for me ever since.”
“What a bastard,” I say, shaking my head in disbelief and then backtrack. “You said primarily. Other than me, why did you leave the Order?”
“It was a long time coming,” he says. “When I had to kill my father to save my brother, I knew then it was time for me to leave.” His strong fingers caress my softer ones. “You gave me the final motivation I needed to finally do it.”
I reach out and touch his lightly unshaven face with all of my fingertips. He continues to watch me, his eyes probing mine through the small, confined space between us, thick with passion and understanding. I lean in and kiss his lips.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” I say softly.
He brushes his lips against mine, his touch spreading through my body and down into my toes like a shot of smooth whiskey.
“I wasn’t testing you, Sarai.” He kisses me again.
“Then what were you doing?” I kiss him likewise and wilt when I feel his hands move across both of my thighs.
He lifts me into his arms, wrapping my legs around his waist, my ass fitted in the palms of his large hands. My fingers crawl up the sides of his stubbly face and touch his lips before my own lips do.
“I was waiting for when the time was right,” he says as his mouth finds my neck.
I wind all ten fingers through his short brown hair, raising my chin as his mouth searches my throat and my jawline. My eyes are shut, the lids heavy with a warm, tingling sensation that I know better than to fight against. He walks with me across the room, though to where I don’t know and I don’t care. I tighten my bare legs around his waist, the cool, smooth surface of his leather belt pressing against my inner thighs. My fingers are fitted around the buttons of his shirt, breaking them apart with ease.
Victor never answers my question, but I don’t care about that, either.
His lips cover mine, the warm wetness of his tongue tangling eagerly with my own. Without breaking the kiss, Victor drops my feet back on the floor to slip my panties off one leg at a time. He raises my arms above me and strips off my shirt, dropping it on the floor. My hands fumble his belt, yanking the prong from the leather hole and sliding the rest of it from the loops in one quick motion. He steps out of his pants and tight, black boxer-briefs. He breathes hot and heavily into my mouth as I’m hoisted back around his waist, and he shoves my back against the wall as if he doesn’t want to wait long enough to blindly find our way to the guest bedroom. I don’t want to wait, either. We’ve waited long enough as it is.
I feel his cock enter me and before he slides me all the way down on it, a shot of pleasure races through my thighs and up my spine, turning my neck to rubber, causing my head to fall back against the sheetrock wall. The backs of my eyes tingle and burn. The warm, wetness between my legs inundated by a hot, shivering thrill.
He thrusts once, deep inside of me and holds himself there, grasping my hips, my back pressed against the cool wall. I open my eyes slowly, still having little control over my lids, and I gaze into his staring back at me with the same voracious intensity. Tiny, uneven breaths waver through my parted lips. My arms are wrapped securely around him, my fingers prodding the tight muscles in his back.
“I’ve wanted this for so long,” I say breathily.
“You have no idea…,” he says in return and then devours me with a kiss, so forceful that I almost lose control of my muscles. My thighs constrict around his waist when he drives his cock into me again. I shudder and gasp, the back of my head falling hard against the wall. He holds my body in place with his arms fitted underneath my thighs as he drives his hips toward mine, tiny explosions going off inside my stomach with every thrust.
My back arches, my breasts pushed into his view where he covers one nipple with his mouth. I raise my arms above my head, seeking something above me that I might use to hold onto so that I can ride him, but I find nothing. I drape my arms around his neck to hold my weight up and I grind my hips against his, moving like a wave, gasping and moaning, desperate for every hard inch of him as deeply as I can take it. His fingers dig painfully into my back. His tongue tangles with mine, his moans moving through my body.
I come fast and hard, my legs and the sweet spot between them contracting around him, my muscles quivering. He comes seconds later and holds my naked body firmly in place, my ass seized by his powerful hands, as he empties himself inside of me.
In the moment, I couldn’t care less about the consequences of what just happened. But only in the moment.
With my head lying on his shoulder, Victor carries me down the hall and into the spacious bathroom across from the guest bedroom. He sets me on the counter and stands between my dangling, naked legs.
“Don’t worry about it.” He kisses me on the forehead and then opens the tall glass door to the walk-in shower.
Confused, I ask, “About what?”
The faucet squeaks as he turns on the water, moving both hot and cold into position until he finds the desired tempera
ture. I watch him from the countertop, the way his tall, sculpted body moves, the curves along the muscles carved in a poetic pattern around his hipbones, the way his calf muscles harden when he walks.
He comes back over to me and I slip his dress shirt the rest of the way off, sliding it down over his muscled arms.
“You won’t get pregnant,” he says and urges me to slide off the counter and follow him into the shower. “At least not by me.”
A little taken aback, I leave it at that.
He closes the shower door and begins to wash my hair. I bask in his closeness, the way his hands explore my body with such careful precision and need.
For a long time, I forget that he is an assassin, whose hands have taken many lives without thought or remorse or regret. I forget that I, too, am a killer, whose hands took a life just hours ago.
Seems we were made for each other, like two puzzle pieces that at first don’t appear to fit, but eventually fall into place when looked at in the most unlikely of angles.
CHAPTER TEN
Victor
Fredrik’s housekeeper arrives back at the house early in the morning. I’m awake just after dawn, having my coffee on the rock patio in the backyard when she enters the house. She sees me through the sliding glass door when she makes her way into the living room and then joins me outside.
“Would you like breakfast, señor?” she asks in Spanish.
I set the file consisting of my next job face-down on the wrought iron coffee table.
“Gracias, but I won’t be eating,” I tell her and then gesture toward Sarai walking through the living room in search of me. “But she will be.”
“I will be what?” Sarai asks as she steps through the opened glass door. She walks across the rock patio with bare feet, wearing another one of Fredrik’s t-shirts—it bothers me immensely that she’s having to wear his clothes rather than mine, but the only ones I have with me are those on my back—and a pair of loose running shorts. Her long, auburn hair is disheveled having just awoken and crawled out of the bed.
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