The Swan and the Jackal (In the Company of Killers #3)

by Redmerski, J. A.

  I stumble back and fall against the chair again, sitting in a slouched and defeated position with my legs splayed out across the floor. I watch the woman from my seat, the way her eyes begin to glaze over, how her eyelids flutter in some soft yet sickening way. I watch helplessly as she chokes, and how her body fights to hold on to that last breath, her bloodied chest heaving desperately.

  And then her fingers uncurl and lay heavily over the chair arms. Her dead eyes look upward at the ceiling, filled with nothing. Blood drips from the chair into a dark puddle beneath it. It won’t stop. I wonder how much blood this woman’s body held.

  I sigh with pain and remorse and softly shut my eyes.

  I only feel this pain when the victim is innocent.

  Seraphina, standing with her back facing me, finally turns around. Her soft, plump mouth is partially agape. There’s something called confusion and maybe even regret swirling in her brown eyes. She looks down at her hands, the right one with the knife covered in blood, and then she drops the knife as if it’s a dirty, evil thing. She brings her hands up and looks at them, it seems as though asking herself how she could’ve done this. How could she have done this? I don’t understand it. Seraphina is a killer. An executioner. Many lives have been taken by her hands. But they were, for the most part, deserving deaths. These three women she killed since yesterday were the first—that I know of—that were done in cold blood.

  Was it because of me? Am I to blame for her madness somehow?

  No. She was already mad. She was a sadistic bitch when we met and when I fell in love with her. But this. What I’m witnessing now…

  I am so goddamn confused…

  “It wasn’t her,” Seraphina says, her voice cracking.

  She looks at her hands again, one covered in blood, and then she looks back at me.

  “I’m so sorry, Fredrik”—tears begin to stream down her cheeks—“I’m so sorry.”

  She falls to her knees on the concrete floor and buries her face in the palms of her hands, sobbing into her fingers.

  I rush the short distance to her and pull her against my chest, enveloping her in my arms. I rock her against me, pressing my lips to the top of her black hair as she weeps. I let her cry, but I don’t let it go on for long. Because I need answers now more than ever. I need to know everything.

  “Tell me, love,” I whisper, holding her tightly within my arms. “Tell me who you thought she was. I can help you if you’ll just tell me. Make me understand.”

  She shakes her head against my chest.

  “I-I can’t. I can’t tell you because you’ll hate me.”

  “I could never hate you,” I say with truth. I love her. Parts of her I don’t love, like who she was moments ago when she killed that woman. But right now, the person she is wrapped in my arms, I love with everything in me. “You said she owed you, Seraphina. What did she owe you?”

  At first, she doesn’t want to answer. I wait patiently, hoping that if I don’t push her she’ll feel more confident about telling me. I squeeze her gently for good measure.

  “I was ten when I met her,” she says, but then becomes quiet again.

  Anxious. Desperate. Perplexed. They are among a thousand different emotions I’m feeling right now. But still, I try to remain calm.

  “I never meant to betray you,” she says.

  I feel like she’s jumping subjects, evading the one about the woman.

  “But I knew you had to get away from me,” she goes on. “I couldn’t leave you on my own. I tried. But I couldn’t bear it. So I lied to you about everything. I started sleeping at Safe House Sixteen.”

  This is the part I don’t want to hear, but know that I need to.

  I brace myself, gripping her tighter, both out of preparation for the pain I’m going to feel, and the pain I’m going to inflict on her before this night is over, because of it.

  “I-I did sleep with him, with Marcus who ran the safe-house.”

  I grit my teeth and take a deep breath.

  I stay calm.

  I stay quiet.

  I want to skin her alive.

  “I did it because I wanted you to find out.”

  “Why did you want me to find out?” My voice is composed, careful.

  “Because I wanted—.”

  She stops.

  I’m growing more impatient. Subconsciously, I feel the leather straps on the chair slipping through my fingers as I bind her against it in my mind.

  “You wanted what?” I ask with my chin resting atop her head.

  “I wanted to hurt you.”

  “Why did you want to hurt me?”

  I love you.

  I despise you.

  “Because love is pain,” she says and I swallow down the truth of her admission. “Because love is the greatest scam of all time. And because as much as I fucking love you, I hate you for inflicting it upon me!”

  Suddenly, I feel a pinprick.

  Warmth moves from my thigh upward, spreading out through my veins.

  The room begins to blur, faintly at first, but enough that I instantly know I’m in trouble. I try to shake my mind free of the drug, but it’s too strong, wrapping around my consciousness like a spider’s silk around its prey.

  I didn’t even realize when Seraphina left my arms, or when I fell against the concrete floor.

  Gasoline. The cool air is rife with it, so much so that it’s beginning to burn my nostrils.

  “Love…where are you?” I call out, but can’t tell if the words ever actually left my lips. “Sera….”

  My lids are getting heavier. Flames. The air isn’t cool anymore. It’s hot…so fucking hot. I want to loosen my tie to let my neck breathe, to strip off my suit jacket, but I can’t move my arms.

  “I love you, Fredrik,” I hear her voice whisper near my ear, soft like powder, fatal like poison. I want to kiss her, to feel her lush lips on mine. I want to grind my hips against hers until she cries. “I love you…and because I love you,”—I feel my body moving across the floor—,”you have to let me go.”

  Smoke. It’s scratching my throat and my lungs, seeping into my pores and suffocating my blood vessels. I feel like I’m being cooked from the inside out. The heat is becoming unbearable, the flames engulfing the wooden beams holding the basement ceiling up. I can’t see them through my heavy lids, but I can hear them, licking the walls like a thousand demons that sprang from Hell to torment me.

  “Seraphina…,” I call out, my voice hoarse with pain, every kind of pain, “…Sera…”

  ~~~

  I wake up the next morning lying in a cold field with the sun on my face. The thin layer of white snow around my body is stained black by soot from my clothes. I look up at the sky, so clear and so blue, and I see a sliver of gray smoke rising into the air in my peripheral vision.

  With difficulty, I try to get up, but can only go as far as rolling over onto my side. Dead grass pricks my cheek. Snow melts in a little indention near my face as my hot breath expels from my lips and nostrils against it. I’m freezing, yet I’m warm and it doesn’t make sense.

  The thin layer of smoke rising over the tops of the trees in the short distance is coming from what was left of my house.

  She didn’t leave me there to burn.

  Why did she drag me out?

  Upon realizing, finally I feel the pain in the back of my head and I reach up weakly to massage the area with my fingertips. She had to have dragged my body up the concrete steps.

  I’m aching all over. But I’m alive. And I wouldn’t be if Seraphina didn’t want me to be.

  I will find her.

  I’ll never stop looking for her.

  It’s a dangerous game that she and I play, that we’ve always played. Only this time, she has upped the ante.

  And I’m all in.

  Chapter One

  Fredrik

  Present Day…

  Five men, two on each side of me and another seated at the head of the dinner table my opposite, watch me
with guarded eyes.

  My gun was taken at the door.

  “It is a peaceful dinner, monsieur,” the door man had said. “No weapons allowed.”

  “Very well,” I had said and removed my gun from the back of my pants, placing it on the table.

  I knew not to wear more than one as I’d surely be patted down before they allowed me inside. And I was correct.

  But I need no gun.

  Unarmed, I walked past a dozen guards carrying a bottle of wine and stepped into the belly of the beast surrounded by four of François Moreau’s most experienced men.

  I knew in advance also that the wine I brought would be whisked away by one of the waiters and placed in the center of the table. François thanked me for the gift. It was an expensive French wine, after all, and it would have been quite rude of him not to thank me, even knowing that I came here to kill him.

  “Is it true?” François asks casually, looking over the length of the table at me seated on the other end. “Vonnegut has a bounty on three of his former men? Including you?”

  I nod. “I suppose the rumors are true for once.”

  A slim, confident smile pulls the edges of François’ hard, weathered mouth. He has short graying hair, cut smoothly at the back of his neck and combed over to one side in the front, plastered to his small head by thick amounts of hair gel.

  “And I suppose tis’ good that I have no interest in filling bounties for a man like Vonnegut.” His smile becomes more arrogant, as if I have him to thank for being alive in this moment.

  I nod again and bring my lips to my wine glass, which isn’t the wine from the bottle that I brought.

  The dark-haired man sitting to my left with a scar above his left eyebrow removes his white cloth napkin from the table in front of him. He unrolls it from its neat little arrangement and places it within his lap. The other three men sitting on the outsides of the table follow suit when they notice the waiters entering from a side door balancing full plates on their hands. François remains in the same position, not looking away from my eyes even when the waiter places his plate in front of him.

  François steeples his hands, his elbows propped on the table.

  “So, Monsieur Gustavsson,” he begins, “it is my understanding that you were sent here to get information from me on my employer, correct?”

  “Yes,” I answer, but offer him nothing else. I prefer to make him work for the details I know he wants before he has me killed.

  “And what makes you think that I am at liberty to give you such information?” He appears amused by the very prospect of it.

  My expression remains standard. Cool. Calm. Unruffled. And he grows more nervous by the second by my absence of tension. I’m only one man. Weaponless. Sitting at a table amongst five other men who, most assuredly, are packing heat despite the doorman’s claims. I’m but one man in a mansion on a private land just outside of Nice, France, where at least nine other men armed with guns patrol the outside.

  He must know that I am not just one man, after all.

  I steeple my hands the same as his.

  “Before this,”—I wave one hand at the wrist briefly—“lovely evening is over, I can assure you that I’ll have the information I came for.” I point my index finger upward gently. “But not only that, you’ll give it to me freely.”

  He looks surprised. And amused.

  François shakes his head and lifts his wine glass to his lips, afterwards setting it gently back on the table. He takes his time, the same as I have, by making me wait for more of a response. The blond-haired man sitting to my right eyes me from over the rim of his wine glass. All four of the men are dressed like François and myself. Tailored black suits and ties. Though I definitely look better in mine. And as if they were a collective, they pick up their forks and begin eating at the same time. François finally joins them, though I’m confident it has nothing to do with being hungry. He’s simply wanting to drag out his moment of pause longer than it needs to.

  He chews and then swallows.

  “Is that so?” François finally says with an air of authority and a smile. His shiny silver fork clinks against the glass plate as he sets it down.

  “As a matter of fact, it is,” I say with confidence, as if I were simply telling him that, yes, it is raining outside, and welcoming him to step over to the window and see for himself. “I know your Order to be run by a man named Monsieur Sébastien Fournier. He took over last year after Monsieur Julien Gerard was killed in Marseille.”— François wipes his mouth with his cloth napkin and continues to listen—“I also know that your Order is strictly black market and that many of the men under Fournier are American, running American hits on innocent American women.”

  François tilts his graying head to one side, thoughtfully.

  “Oh come now, monsieur, you cannot make me believe that you, of all people, care what happens to a few innocent women,” he taunts me.

  I remain unruffled on the outside, but on the inside, his words sting. And he knows this, otherwise he wouldn’t have brought it up.

  Bringing my lips to my glass again, I meet François’ eyes from across the table, challenging him to test me further, without having to move a muscle in my face.

  He smiles faintly and takes another sip.

  I set my glass on the table.

  “Well, I must say,” François cuts in, looking down at his food, “if you know all of this, what more would you possibly need from me?”

  “I want the key to the safety deposit box in New York,” I say.

  The lines around François’ mouth deepen with his smile. He looks up toward the waiter standing at the ready to his left and the waiter goes over to him.

  “Please, do us all a kindness and open that bottle of wine that Monsieur Gustavsson was so generous to bring this evening.” He gestures toward the bottle with two fingers.

  The waiter does as he is told and sets the opened bottle in the center of the table.

  The other four men at the table all place their silverware back onto their plates, knowing that something other than dining is going on now and that they need to remain sharp. All of them wipe their mouths with their cloth napkins after taking a sip from their wine glasses.

  François snaps his fingers and a small-framed woman with honey-colored hair pinned to the back of her head steps through a side entrance and scurries over to him. She is exquisite. Vulnerable. Frail. She wears a short black skirt that clings tightly to her hourglass form. I study the gentle slope of her bare neck and the fullness of her plump breasts underneath the thin white fabric of her blouse. She’s not wearing a bra and her nipples are like little beads of sex inviting me to devour them.

  I would love to break her beneath me.

  Briefly, she meets my dark gaze but looks away before François catches her. And in just that small moment, I could sense the tiny jolt between her legs.

  “New glasses please, mademoiselle,” he orders and she scurries off to do his bidding.

  “You like what you see?” François asks, noticing my attention on her as she leaves the room. “Perhaps I could offer you her services before our meeting comes to a close? I am a generous man, after all. Just because I do not plan to let you walk out of here alive does not mean I cannot treat you to life’s luxuries before you die. Think of it as a parting gift.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” I say. “But I appreciate the offer.”

  “Well, you should at least eat something,” he says, gesturing at the food in front of me that I haven’t touched.

  I shake my head and sigh. “I did not come here to dine, monsieur, as you know. I came here for the key. That is all.”

  “Well, you won’t be getting it,” he says and offers another smile.

  Then he points to the blond-haired man sitting next to me and says, “Bring me the black box on my desk.”

  The man glances at me coldly, drops his napkin on the table and stands up. And as he’s leaving the room, the woman with the honey-col
ored hair and heat between her legs re-enters the room with six slim wine glasses wedged strategically between her fingers. She sets one in front of each of us, walking over to me last. She takes her time about pulling her slender hand from the glass. I don’t offer her the luxury of my eyes.

  François points at her. “Come here,” he says and she walks over to him.

  He looks across the table at me in a sidelong glance with a clever look in his eyes. He points at the opened bottle of wine I brought. “He will drink first,” he says indicating me.

  The woman takes the bottle and approaches me with it.

  “You think I did not anticipate your intentions?” François says waving his hand in a dramatic fashion at the wrist. “I know more about you than just your…mishap…in San Francisco. Killing that woman. That innocent woman.” I’m seething beneath my skin, but I can stay calm. Taunting me in this way only shows François’ true level of worry. “I know all about you.” He grins maliciously and instantly I get the feeling he hasn’t brought out the big guns yet, that he knows something worse about me that I did not expect him to know.

  For the first time since I walked through those mansion doors, I’m unsure of my next move. But I can keep my calm. It takes much more than the provoking words of a dying man to trigger me.

  The woman pours the wine into my glass and steps over to the side.

  Seeing that I’m not going to ask François exactly what else he knows, he proceeds to tell me anyway.

  “I’ve heard of your past.” He takes another sip of the wine he’s been drinking since before dinner began. “About how you got that nickname of yours.” He rubs the fingertips of one hand together and looks up in thought. “What was it? Ah, yes, I remember now. They called you the little jackal. A scavenger boy. Rabid and worthless.”

  I’m going to enjoy watching him die.

  I pretend to be unaffected and simply raise my brows inquisitively. “Seems to me you’re trying to buy time.” I glance briefly at my Rolex. “You don’t have much left, I’m afraid.”