Since the Krav Maga studio location has been ‘compromised’, as Victor calls it, he feels it’s best that we move from New Mexico as soon as possible. My goal for the day is to pack as much of the house as I can, though that shouldn’t be too difficult since Victor’s closets and such are devoid of the average person’s daily living. He doesn’t have a ‘junk drawer’ where he tosses miscellaneous items that will sit there unused for a lifetime. His closets are not cluttered with old shoe boxes and stacks of keep-just-in-case paperwork, or clothes that he hasn’t worn in five years. The cabinets in his kitchen aren’t stocked with expensive matching dishes that only get taken out of their neat little spot on holidays and special occasions. There are no family portraits hanging in a neat line on the walls down the hallway, or keepsake items sitting on a shelf given to him by important people which he can’t bear to part with for sentimental reasons. A few boxes should do it. His suits. My growing collection of clothes and wigs and jewelry and makeup and plethora of shoes. Looks like I’m mostly packing my own stuff.
I press the Power button on the remote and the flat screen television in the living room hums to life. I leave it on one of the national news stations for background noise. The sun beams through the glass door which frames the New Mexico landscape behind the house. I stare out at it for only a moment, feeling like I need a change of scenery. After spending most of my life in Mexico, surrounded by sand and thin trees and dried grass and heat…well, I’m glad to be moving. Victor said the new house will either be in Washington or New York. Either is fine with me, both of them a stark difference from what I’m used to.
I’ll know for sure tomorrow.
I make a small breakfast of a scrambled egg and a single slice of wheat toast and wash it down with a glass of milk. I do my morning workout and then take a quick shower, afterwards, slipping on a pair of black cotton shorts and a tight black cotton top. I pull my hair into a ponytail and slip my fingers between two halves, pulling it tight against my scalp. Standing in front of the enormous bathroom mirror, I start to put on makeup, but decide I’m too lazy to mess with it right now, and I go back to packing. As I’m taking Victor’s suits down from the closet, one by one, and securing them in tall, zippered garment bags, I feel something underneath my hand as I’m patting a sleeve down neatly against the jacket breast. I move the sleeve away, setting it against the bed and then open the jacket. I slip my hand into the inside pocket and grasp a small envelope in my fingers. It feels somewhat thick, about half an inch.
Before I pull it from the pocket all the way, for a moment I start to put it back, my conscience telling me that it’s none of my business. But I look anyway.
The envelope is old and worn, with thinly tattered edges and a yellow-brown discoloration. It’s a small envelope, more square than rectangular, and probably held a birthday card or an invitation at some point. There are photographs inside. Old photographs. I pull the flap from inside the envelope and open it the rest of the way, taking the small stack into my hand. The photograph on top is of a man, with light hair and a strong jawline. He’s wearing a white shirt with a maroon tie. He’s sitting in a leather chair surrounded by walls covered in tacky tapestry wallpaper. A young brown-haired boy and an even younger girl with white-blonde hair stand on either side of him, smiling widely for the camera.
The next photograph is of the same young boy and girl, posing with a beautiful woman with long, blonde flowing hair, outside in what appears to be a park.
All of the photos are aged, with a brown-orange tint and cracks running along the edges where they had been bent over the years. I flip each one over and read the backs. Versailles 1977, Paris 1977, Versailles 1976, scribbled in the left-hand corners and almost unreadable as the ink has begun to fade. In the next few photos the boy is older, maybe seven or eight, and he’s standing with his arm draped over the shoulder of another boy. München 1981, Berlin 1982. My heart sinks when I realize that all of these photos are of Victor and Niklas and who I believe to be their father and Victor’s mother. The girl must be a sister.
It breaks my heart to know that he carries these around with him like this. It’s further proof that Victor is not emotionless, that deep inside of him is a man who has been hidden from the world, who has been forced to carry around the only memories of his childhood inside a pocket.
It’s proof that he’s human, a lost, emotionally damaged human that I want so desperately to restore.
My head snaps around when I hear footsteps inside the house.
I drop the photos on the bed and grab the 9MM from the bedside table, releasing the magazine into my hand to check that it’s full. I pop it back inside the gun and rush quietly across the room in my bare feet, pushing my back against the wall, and walk alongside it toward the door. I keep the gun fixed at head-level, gripped in both hands, and stop at the door to listen. Nothing. At least, I hear nothing but the damned television that I’m wishing I had never turned on.
I begin to think it could just be Fredrik, but I’m not taking any chances.
With my back still against the wall, I move around the doorframe and step into the hallway when I see that it’s clear. A shadow moves against the terra cotta tile floor at the far end of the hall and I freeze in my steps. I feel my heart drumming in the tips of my fingers, itching to put all of my force on that trigger. I remain still, the back of my neck breaking out in beads of sweat, and I watch the floor for a long moment without allowing myself to blink for fear of missing anymore movement. When I hear the footsteps again, farther away this time, I move stealthily down the length of the hallway on the pads of my feet.
Approaching the end, I stop feet from the corner and take a deep breath into my lungs. I let it out slowly, quietly, and then listen again. The voices of the people on the news carrying on and on about ‘Obamacare’ grates on my nerves as it only helps to drown out any voices or footsteps I might be able to hear, and from which direction they might be coming from.
Finally, I do hear voices, whispering:
“Check the rooms,” I hear a man say. “She’s probably hiding underneath a bed or inside a closet.”
No, asshole, I’m waiting for you to come walking down the hallway so I can put a bullet in your face.
A man in a black suit rounds the corner with a gun in his hand and I squeeze a shot off the second he appears at the end of the hall. The shot rings out, vociferous in my ears, and the man falls against the floor, blood spewing from the bullet wound in the side of his neck. He gasps and chokes, trying to cover the wound with both of his hands now covered in blood.
I step around his body, ignoring the unsettling gurgling sounds that he makes and round the corner firing off three more shots. I manage to hit one more man before a white-hot pain sears through the back of my head. As I’m going down, I see the second man that I shot going down with me out ahead. And I see Stephens, standing next to his dead body in all of his tall, brooding glory. My gun is no longer in my hands and I’m so disoriented by whatever just made contact with the back of my head that it takes me a moment to realize I’m lying on the cool floor with my cheek pressed against a crevice in the tile. I reach back to feel my head and there is blood on my fingers when I touch my hair.
Stephens crouches beside me, a menacing grin etching deep lines around his hard mouth. His salt and pepper hair appears darker, his height, taller, the chasm of a dimple in the center of his chin, deeper. He peers down at me, propping both elbows on the tops of his thighs, his big hands hanging freely between them, the right wrist dressed in a thick gold watch. He smells strongly of cologne and cigars.
“You’re a hard girl to find,” Stephens says.
“Go fuck yourself,” I say as casually as if I were telling him how nice the weather is.
Stephens smiles a big, close-lipped smile and it’s the last thing I see before everything goes black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Sarai
I slowly stir awake to the sound of something humming low and deep, hi
gh above me, accompanied by a fast and constant whooshing sound. My vision is blurred, allowing in only a limited amount of dull gray light which at first bends and distorts as it hits my eyes. The air feels incredibly humid, the back of my shirt and the area between my breasts and underneath my armpits, soaked to the point that when the strange breeze hits me, it chills me to the bone. My hands are tied behind my back, just like I tied Izel’s hands behind hers when she came for me after I’d escaped in Victor’s car. I think of her briefly, the way she looked at me that day, how her sweaty dark hair was streaked across her face. I imagine I must look like her now, except that my hair is still pulled into a ponytail.
My ankles, I realize quickly, are also bound.
I force my eyes open the rest of the way and try hard to focus my vision. I’m sitting in a chair in the center of an enormous dark and dusty room of what appears to be an old warehouse.
I laugh inwardly at myself as I now see Andre Costa’s face in my mind, as it was inside that warehouse back in New Orleans.
What comes around goes around, I suppose. Retribution for every death I caused or have been a part of is coming sooner than I had hoped.
The strange air and the whooshing sound above me I see is coming from a large industrial fan jutting out from the wall near the high ceiling. The walls are made of concrete, the ceiling of metal beams that stretch from one end to the other, held up by tall concrete pillars. The place smells intensely of paint thinner and glue and other lung-damaging chemicals.
My throat is painfully dry. My first instinct is to ask for water, but just like with removing the rope around my wrists and ankles, I know that nothing I ask for will be given to me.
I look down when I feel the tops of my feet burning and I see the skin on my toes has broken, indicating that at some point I must’ve been dragged.
Loud footsteps, like hard, flat soles, echo through the enormous space as Stephens makes his way toward me.
I laugh under my breath at the ridiculousness of the situation.
“What, might I ask, is so funny?” Stephens says in his deep voice, tinged with amusement of his own.
I smile brazenly up at him as he stands over me with his hands folded behind his back.
“I thought you and that sick fuck you work for wanted me dead?” I laugh. “This is a little overkill, don’t you think?” I smirk up at him.
Stephens smiles chillingly and I immediately compare it to the look I saw on Fredrik’s face after he strapped Andre Costa to that dentist chair. Instead of answering, he looks to his right as another man walks over with a chair. The legs hitting the concrete briefly as the chair is placed on the floor echoes through the small space separating us. Stephens sits down, casually straightening his fine black suit, tugging gently at the lapel and then brushing away invisible dust from his leg.
“Seriously?” I say, shaking my head. “Let me guess, Hamburg still wants to get his peep-show. Didn’t get it with me and Victor in his room at the mansion. Didn’t get it with his guard in his office at the restaurant—I’m glad that piece of shit is dead by the way. Was he a friend of yours?” I smirk more evidently.
Stephens’ eyes smile. He crosses one leg over the other and places his hands gently on his lap. It’s incredibly unnerving at how relaxed and unaffected by my words he appears. But I don’t let him know that it bothers me in any case.
“Trust me, Izabel, Sarai, whatever you’re called, if it were up to me, I’d have killed you in that house instead of bringing you here.”
“Of course,” I taunt, “you’re just the lackey, sitting at Hamburg’s feet waiting for his next blowjob.”
The ceiling appears in my vision in an instant as my hair is pulled from behind, my neck forced back so far it cuts off my airflow. Another man is standing behind me, looking down into my widened eyes. I try to swallow, but I can’t. I start to choke and gasp instead.
“Release her,” I hear Stephens say.
My head is forced forward as the man lets go; the weight of my body causes the chair to shake and wobble briefly and then it steadies itself. I’m relieved I can breathe again. I raise my head and glare at Stephens sitting just two feet in front of me. I begin to gaze about the room, looking for a way out, searching for a plan that I know will likely never materialize. Even if I could get out of this room, I don’t know how I’d pull off getting myself out of these bonds. The one around my wrists is so tight that it feels like the blood circulation is being cut from my hands. The ones around my ankles are almost as tight, but I feel like I can move them just a little more, my ankles grinding against the wood of the chair legs. But I’m not going anywhere. Except maybe to Hell very soon.
I’m not afraid of Stephens. I’m not afraid of what he’ll do to me. I’m not afraid of being tortured. I’m just afraid of how long it will last.
“Why don’t you just get this over with?” I lash out at him, hatred and vengeance evident in my voice. “I don’t care what you do to me, or what Hamburg does to me, so just do it.”
“Oh, but you’re not here because of Hamburg.” Stephens flashes a chilling smile. “And no, I don’t want to get it over with.” He leans forward in the chair, pushing his square-shaped jaw farther into my view. I can smell his aftershave. “I hope that you don’t talk for at least a few days because I very much look forward to spending this time with you.”
I swallow down my fear of knowing what his words mean, that he’s going to torture me and for a very long time. I try to play it off, hoping he doesn’t detect the slightest bit of worry in my face.
“What could I possibly know that you’d need to get me to talk at all?” I laugh smugly. “And what kind of aftershave is that? It smells like you’ve been dumpster diving between a crack-head’s thighs.”
Stephens’ eyes dart behind me, narrowing thinly in a way that tells me he just stopped the man from pulling my neck back again, or maybe from hitting me across the face. He ignores my insult.
Stephens pulls away and rests his back against the chair again. And he says nothing. I hate that. I’d rather him talk a cheesy monologue of circles around me than to say nothing at all. And I think he knows how much it bothers me. That smug expression in his eyes tells me so.
“OK, so then if I’m not here because of Hamburg, then why am I here?”
Another pair of footsteps moves through the room behind me. I try to look back, but can only stretch my neck around so far.
Finally, the figure steps around and into my view.
“You’re here because of me,” Niklas says, dropping a cigarette butt onto the floor and snuffing it out with his black leather boot.
I gasp quietly. My entire body freezes solidly against the chair. I hear my mind searching for my breath, desperately trying to regain its control over my body again, but for the longest moment I’m nothing but an unmoving shell.
“Niklas…,” I finally say, but it’s all that I can get out.
Rage churns inside of me, my need to kill Stephens suddenly overshadowed by my need to tell Niklas everything I’ve been wanting to say to him.
Unlike Stephens, Niklas doesn’t smile or grin or feel the need to taunt me with threats. I sense something else within him, something much darker than Stephens, something more threatening than words could convey. Looking up at his tall height and tousled light brown hair, his fierce blue eyes framed by a perfectly round, yet sculpted face, I see someone more attuned to vengeance than I could ever be.
And finally, I’m terrified.
Niklas steps forward to stand directly in front of me, completely undaunted by the short distance. Stephens had kept away from me a couple feet at least, as if worried I might manage to spit on him, or break free and grab him. But not Niklas. I feel like he’s daring me to move. He wants me to make a move.
I swallow hard and raise my chin arrogantly at him and try to remain strong in the face of my fate.
“You know what I want,” Niklas says evenly, the German accent just as I remember it, still evident i
n his voice. “Or, do we need to discuss it in detail?” He cocks his head to one side.
He looks so much like Victor. I wonder how on the inside he can be so very different.
“You’re gonna have to explain it,” I say. “Is it Victor?” I glance briefly at Stephens. “This piece of shit was just at his house. You already know where to find Victor. And not that it surprises me much, but what are you doing with them?”
I catch Stephens look over at Niklas, but Niklas doesn’t take his eyes off me. He crouches down in front of me, between my opened legs, and looks upon me with a face so calm and dark that it sends a shiver up the back of my neck. I can smell the leather from his slim black jacket and a faint layer of cigarette smoke lingering on his dark gray shirt underneath.
“I’ve been looking for Victor for months,” Niklas begins and I listen closely, keeping my eyes trained on his. “I’m sure he’s told you that he left Order, betrayed Vonnegut and betrayed me—”
My eyes grow wider and my mouth falls open with a quick breath. “Betrayed you?” I cut in with disbelief. “You can’t be serious. You betrayed Victor! You were the one—”
I choke and gasp as his strong hand shoots out and fastens firmly around my throat. I thrash about within the chair, unable to bring my hands up and try to pry his away. My eyes roll into the back of my head as his grip tightens.
He releases me.
I wheeze and pant trying to catch my breath, the corners of my eyes wet with tears of exhaustion and pain. I’m terrified of him, but not enough to cry or beg for my life. I’ll die before I beg for anything.
“My brother betrayed me long before he left the Order,” he says with a little more emotion in his voice than before—resentment. “He betrayed me when he went against everything we stood for to help you. He betrayed me when he lied to me about helping you. He lied, Sarai, because he knew it was wrong.” He pushes up on his toes and is mere inches from my face. “He almost killed me because of you. And he would have if you hadn’t have stopped him. He betrayed me!”
Reviving Izabel (In the Company of Killers) Page 21
