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

by Redmerski, J. A.

  But the more I watched her, the more I began to reject that idea.

  A few times she made eye contact with the crowd, in between closing her eyes to emphasize particular lyrics. She moved her slim, curvy body in time with the slow beat, gestured her ring-covered hands out in front of her every now and then.

  That anxious, hot ball that was my stomach had begun to set my chest on fire when the song went on and on and she never noticed me. I wanted to stand up and look her straight in the eye, but I didn’t. I sat there appearing as calm as everyone else who was just there to enjoy the entertainment.

  By the time the last chorus came, I thought surely I was going to have to move to another table so that she’d see me.

  But then finally she did.

  Her soft brown eyes locked on me from across the short distance. And then she looked away.

  Seraphina didn’t know me.

  Even if she had been pretending, I would’ve detected it, the smallest hint of recognition. She had none. I was to her the same as any man who sat in the audience that night, making love to her with my thoughts, drinking from her soul as she poured it out across the audience in teasing amounts through her voice.

  I was baffled.

  And heartbroken.

  I may have wanted to kill her—because I knew I had to—but I still loved her intensely, and when the only woman I have ever loved looked me in the eyes and didn’t know who I was, I didn’t know what to do anymore. With myself. With anything. It was hard enough to live the past six years of my life without her, but I at least had hope that she was still out there and that we would be together again someday. But after this, my plan—there was no plan any longer.

  After that night, I began following her and watching her even more closely. I went as far as breaking into her apartment on the third floor of her building and bugging her home.

  Seraphina, living as Cassia, was as normal as anyone. The conversations she had with her friend from across the hall were about work and bills and rent and men, to which only the friend had much input on men. Seraphina was single, and according to the friend, had been ‘manless for far too long’ and needed to ‘loosen up a little’. The two of them even had sexual relations which, I admit, excited me as I listened to them through the audio feed in Seraphina’s bedroom. But they were just friends, letting off sexual steam because it was readily available and neither of them expected anything more from one another. Having sex with women wasn’t out of the ordinary for Seraphina, anyway. She did it often when we were together, though only with me involved. Men—that’s another story. I had been the only man she’d ever been with. Until Marcus from Safe House Sixteen. Again, that’s another story…

  But this Seraphina wasn’t my Seraphina. She was nothing like her, and without the black hair and heavy, dark makeup, she hardly even looked like her. I began to think that maybe she had a twin that I never knew about. But I quickly rejected that idea, too, once I thought of her up on that stage, singing that song with the same notes and emotion that she had sang it to me.

  She was Seraphina, after all, but she wasn’t herself.

  And I was determined to find out why.

  Another two weeks passed and I was on my way to her apartment again one cold night in December when I heard police, ambulance and fire truck sirens blaring clamorously between the old buildings of the street she lived on. I smelled smoke. As I picked up my pace, my hands buried deep in my coat pockets, I hurried toward the building as a hot, orange glowing light burned against the surrounding structures. People were standing around on the sidewalks, watching and pointing, all huddled in night robes and big coats and scarves tossed messily around their necks. I stood among them, watching with a quiet horror as Seraphina’s apartment blazed with licking flames into the cold, dark, night sky. The fire had started from her apartment and was quickly spreading to the rest of the building as the fire department worked swiftly to put it out.

  I felt dead inside, like something had crawled inside my soul and died there. I thought she was dead. That apartment was engulfed in flames. But then, from the corner of my eye, and past all of the shuffling emergency response workers clamoring to and from within the street, I saw her lying on her side on the frigid sidewalk surrounded by two EMT’s and a pile of old furniture and boxes probably left outside after a recent vacancy in the complex.

  I sucked in a quick breath, relieved to see that she was alive. And for a moment, I could’ve sworn, just before she was hoisted onto a stretcher, that she saw me from across the street, even through the darkness and the gathered crowd. And I could’ve sworn that she knew who I was for a fleeting moment. I could sense it, like a predator can sense fear.

  My heart skipped two beats and rattled boisterously behind my ribs.

  She saw me and she knew me.

  The game was back on. Or so I thought.

  Nearly thirty minutes later, when I had resolved in my mind that I was going to end up following her to the hospital, Seraphina was helped out of the ambulance by the EMT’s. I faintly heard her rejecting their recommendation that she go with them to the hospital for further tests. Waving her hands about in front of her, she told them no, and then she left, walking in the opposite direction of the burning apartment complex and slipping into the dark shadows cast by the surrounding buildings.

  Stepping off the sidewalk, I made my way through small pockets of gawkers and followed her.

  The farther away she got, the quieter everything became. The sirens and the voices began to fade into the background. The emergency lights bouncing sporadically off the buildings were reduced to vague flashes in the distance. Where was she going? I began to wonder if she even knew herself.

  With the blanket the EMT gave her draped over her shoulders, Seraphina continued with a severe limp, down the dark sidewalk heading deeper into the outskirts of the city. I kept my distance, staying in the shadows so she wouldn’t see me. Did she know I was following her? And if so, where was she leading me?

  Fifteen minutes turned into thirty. Forty-five. Nearly an hour of walking endlessly, up one block and down another, through traffic and past stores, I knew she had no idea where she was going, or even where she was. And if she was just fucking with my head—which was always possible—she was doing a damn good job of it.

  I followed her all the way to a homeless shelter, where instead of even going inside, she sat down in front of the building on the cold, hard concrete of the walkway and wrapped the blanket tighter around her shivering and bruised body.

  She raised her eyes when I stepped up in front of her.

  “Hello,” she said cautiously.

  I tried searching her eyes for the same recognition I thought I saw in her earlier, but it wasn’t there.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  She looked up at me again, afraid to make eye contact. She pressed her bare knees together and clasped her hands around the knit fabric underneath the blanket. Puffs of breath moved through her lips. She wore no shoes.

  “I’m just sitting down,” she said with an absence of understanding in her own answer.

  Leery of her, and halfway expecting her to slice my ankles open with a knife hidden beneath the blanket and then run away grinning back at me, I took a step back and crouched down in front of her, the ends of my long, black coat touching the sidewalk.

  Black streaks of soot were smeared across her reddened cheeks. The whole right side of her face was one large series of scratches, as if someone had grabbed her by the head and scraped her face against the asphalt until it bled. She shook from the cold and from her fear of me.

  “P-Please just leave me alone,” she said, looking up to keep me in her sights, but trying not to make eye contact.

  “Sera—.”

  I stopped myself and said instead, “What’s your name?”

  She frowned.

  “I don’t know you. Please just leave me alone.”

  “Do you know your name?” I asked. “If you can tell me y
our name, I’ll leave you alone.”

  She couldn’t.

  A large part of me still didn’t believe her. I believed she was suffering from amnesia, yes, but I was still convinced that once she remembered who she was, the game of a lifetime would be back on and pick up where she and I left off six years ago.

  And I wasn’t about to lose it this time.

  After coaxing—and manipulating her, taking advantage of her obvious vulnerability—I talked her into going home with me, and once I brought her to Baltimore, she became my prisoner. I would make her remember who she was and have her in my grasp the moment she did.

  Chapter Twenty

  Fredrik

  “…Only, when she did finally get her memory back just days ago, I never expected it to be the memory of a girl who I never knew.”

  I stare out ahead of me, the words lost on my lips, my mind lost in the memories as if the events just happened all over again. I can hear Izabel’s soft breaths expelling gently from her nostrils she’s sitting so close. I can almost hear her thoughts, loud with confused ideas and broken sentences. She wants to say something, needs to, but can’t quite figure out yet what to say.

  “Didn’t you tell her who she was?” she asks after a long pause, turning on the bench toward me. “If she couldn’t remember, didn’t you tell her her name?”

  I shake my head once. “I almost did a few times, but I was so intrigued by the fact that she couldn’t remember. Intrigued by her strange, delicate personality. The darkness inside of me wanted to understand her, to study her. I had never seen such frailty in a woman before, and to see it in someone like Seraphina—of all people—I was intrigued.”

  “What did you do then?” Izabel asks almost breathily beside me as she hangs onto every one of my words.

  “I tortured her”—I pause, bearing the pain of the memory of what I’d done—“And the whole time I tortured her, my conscience was telling me that she was innocent. I ached for her as I drew blood. But I didn’t stop. She was still Seraphina, after all.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me who you think I am?” Cassia cried from my interrogation chair as I stood behind her next to my tools. “Please! Please! I don’t know what you want from me!” Sobs racked her body, covered by nothing but a pair of white panties and a matching bra.

  “It’s not going to work like that, love,” I told her, stepping around the chair with a long razor in my hand. Her eyes grew wider than the sockets that contained them when she glimpsed the silver blade dangling from my fingers. “You’re going to tell me on your own, who you really are. I want to hear you say it, love. I’m the one in control of the game now.” I stepped right up to her side and peered down into her shrinking, tear-soaked face. “And I can do this for six more years,” I taunted. “Until you remember. Until you tell me your name.”

  “My name is Cassia! Cassia Carrington!” she screamed so loud her voice momentarily went hoarse. She strained against the leather restraints that held her against the chair at her ankles, wrists, torso and forehead.

  I positioned the blade in my fingers and started my cutting on her legs…

  “Cassia’s admission of her name shocked us both, though I ignored that while I tortured her. She had remembered something about her life so soon. Just days before, when I took her from the street in front of the shelter, she couldn’t remember anything. But she had remembered her name—though not the name I wanted—and it took absolute terror to make her see it again. I knew then that it was how I was going to draw Seraphina out and bring her back to me. With fear. And pain. And eventually…,” I stop and swallow down the guilt of my transgressions.

  Izabel’s hand touches my shoulder.

  “Eventually what, Fredrik?” she asks in a soft voice.

  Eventually, with sex, I want to say but can’t bring myself to admit aloud because I feel as though I’ve taken advantage of her even though she wanted it every time. I feel guilty and ashamed for defiling a girl so fragile and innocent. I feel unworthy of someone like Cassia because she is so kind and compassionate and pure. And each time I was inside of her, I hated myself more and more.

  Still facing forward, I say distantly, “That doesn’t matter.”

  With quiet reluctance, Izabel accepts my refusal to tell her.

  Her hand slides away from my shoulder at the same moment the small family from outside earlier, enters the spacious room. Izabel and I both make note of their presence, as they do ours, choosing to walk in the opposite direction of us.

  “What’s wrong with her?” she asks, meeting my gaze. “She seems very…I don’t know, traumatized. Jesus, Fredrik, as much as I hate her for what she did to you, I can’t help but feel sorry for her, too.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” I say with a pang of helplessness.” I lower my head, propping it in my uplifted hands. After a moment, I raise my head again and slap the palms of my hands down on my legs. “I could’ve dealt with anything. I was prepared to kill her, Izabel, even as much as I loved her. I was prepared. Shit, I’d been preparing for it since she left me in that field. I was ready to confront anything she threw at me. But not this.” I shake my head, my gaze fixated on a spot on the ground between my shoes. “I never imagined anything like this.”

  “Why did you choose to tell me any of this?”

  “Because I don’t know what to do. I had a plan and it changed when I finally found her. So then I devised another plan, and just like the one before it, I’ve had to toss it entirely and start from scratch.” I sigh deep and long and then straighten my back out of a slouch. “It’s a mind-fuck of a problem and I don’t think I’ll be finding the answers I need to deal with something like this on Google.”

  The voices of the couple and their small child become more pronounced as they slowly draw nearer.

  I stand from the bench, slipping my coat on. Izabel does the same.

  “Fredrik,” she says in a quiet voice, “Did you want my advice because you don’t know what to do, or are you really just looking for validation of the choice you’ve already made?”

  I frown faintly, but choose not answer. Because I’m not sure of the answer.

  “I can’t be with someone like Cassia,” I say instead. “She and I are too different. Someone like her deserves someone better than me.”

  “What does that mean?” Izabel says carefully, though I get the feeling she understands something in what I just said more than even I do.

  I think about it for a moment, but she helps by saying, “You said ‘someone like her’. You didn’t say Cassia. Why didn’t you say Cassia?”

  I understand now and it just makes my mood darker.

  “Because when this is all over, there’s a chance she won’t be Cassia anymore.”

  Izabel looks at me with benevolent eyes.

  “Then I guess in the meantime you should love the one who’s there,” she says just as the family approaches from behind.

  Love? Was that an accusation, or simply an observation?

  Izabel looks at me with a soft, understanding face, but then the moment is disrupted—thankfully—by the family who are now too close for us to talk anymore.

  We walk down the pathway side by side, heading for the exit. Izabel glances over at me and adds, “Just out of curiosity, what did you plan to do to Seraphina when you found her?”

  “Everything,” I answer and leave it at that.

  We make it back outside in the frigid air and head quickly to our cars parked side by side in the parking lot.

  “I won’t say anything to Victor,” she says, standing at the door of her car, looking over the roof of my car at me. “Technically you’re on leave, so this is all personal. He’ll understand.”

  I nod, shivering beneath my coat.

  “Thanks, doll.”

  “But when Victor calls you back to the field, if you’re still considered out of commission because of this, I’ll have to tell him why.”

  “I know,” I say softly.

 
; “For now, I’ll look into Cassia Carrington,” she says. “If you couldn’t find anything on Seraphina Bragado, maybe I’ll have better luck with her other name.” I nod. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  She pops open her door and starts to get inside, but stops and looks back at me once more. A sort of unnamed grief rests in her features.

  “And if you need me for anything else…anything, Fredrik, you know I’ll do it.”

  Neither of us blink for several moments as we stare at each other; the unspoken meaning of her offer playing between us like a tragic, inevitable event too painful to say out loud.

  ~~~

  I stay away from my house for the rest of the day. I have a lot of thinking to do, though it’ll take more than several hours to sort through my thoughts.

  By six o’clock, I’ve come up with absolutely nothing. By eight, after driving around aimlessly for as long as I can, I’ve only grown more intolerant of this entire situation. I can’t even think straight. I can’t function enough on my own to form a reasonable sentence, much less a solution.

  Because there is no goddamn solution.

  I know that no matter what happens, all I can do is let it because it’s going to, anyway.

  “Would you like more coffee?” I hear a soft voice say.

  Pulling my fingers from the top of my hair, I raise my head from staring down at my phone on the table. The pretty dark-haired waitress stands beside me with a smile, looking once toward my empty coffee mug.

  How long have I been sitting here?

  I shake my head. “No, but thank you.”

  She leaves me alone in my grief again and a part of me wishes she wouldn’t. The old Fredrik would charm her for a little while, promise her things with my eyes that I know would excite her, and then wait for her after her shift was over. The old Fredrik would take her to the nearest hotel and tie her hands behind her back. He’d fuck her until there were tears in her eyes and she’d beg me not to stop.