Reviving Izabel (11 page)

Fredrik looks over at me and I know what that calm look on his face reads. He thinks I should give Sarai what she wants.

But it’s not Fredrik’s opinion that ultimately makes up my mind, it’s my need to protect Sarai that decides, even if by doing so she still might end up dead.

I choose the safer of the two ill-fated paths.

“I will help you.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sarai

I raise my face from his shirt, sniffling back the damned tears that once again have betrayed me in a weak moment.

“You’ll help me kill them?”

He nods. “Yes.”

“Thank you,” I say softly.

I push up on my toes and kiss him lightly on the mouth.

The housekeeper speaks up behind us in a small voice, standing at the sliding glass door, “Breakfast is ready.”

She looks at us through dark and beady curious eyes, surely having heard the commotion while she was inside.

“Marta makes the best scrambled eggs,” Fredrik says with a gleaming smile, as though nothing had happened. “Cooks them in bacon grease.” He puts all of his fingers against the center of his lips and kisses them. “I love American food.”

He follows behind Marta. “Though I understand scrambled eggs cooked in bacon grease is a southern thing?” he asks looking back at us as we follow in behind him.

Victor shrugs.

“Well, Marta isn’t exactly from Alabama,” he goes on as we all enter the kitchen, “but she can cook like she is.”

Fredrik and Victor ramble on about food, I know probably trying to take my mind off what happened. But I don’t care about anything right now other than Dahlia and Eric’s faces in my memory. I know I’m being punished. By Life. By Fate. I don’t know by who or what, all I know is that I’d do anything to give them back their lives.

The three of us sit down at Fredrik’s glass-top kitchen table and eat. And I find it almost funny how Fredrik makes Marta taste the food before serving it to us as if he had taken the paranoid technique right out of the Victor Faust Handbook.

During breakfast, which we all take in very slowly due to conversation, Fredrik eventually relieves Marta of duty for the day. It was just after he and Victor began speaking to one another in Swedish. I hate that I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but it become clear to me that it had to do with Marta and not me.

Marta grabs her purse and tells us all goodbye, thanking Fredrik for paying her for a full day even though she didn’t work it.

“What was that all about?” I ask just after she closes the front door behind her.

I set my fork down on my plate, finished with my breakfast.

“There’s a lot to talk about,” Fredrik says and takes a drink of orange juice. “And she shouldn’t be in earshot of the conversation.” He points at me and smiles. “And Marta, though it might not seem like it, listens to everything that goes on around here.”

“Then why didn’t you just continue in Swedish?” I ask.

“Do
you
speak Swedish?” Victor asks me casually.

“No.”

“Well, you’re a part of this,” he says, setting his glass of water on the table.

I smile. It’s in this moment that I feel like a part of
them
for the very first time. Both of them. The three of us sitting around the table, minutes later cleared of plates and glasses, replaced by files and photographs of contract hits. In a sense it’s surreal to me, discussing the details of interrogation and murder as casually as if we were discussing the day’s weather. But also for the first time in my life, I feel that I belong somewhere. I’m not pushing my way through a dark tunnel with my hands out in front of me searching for the door anymore. The door is right there in plain view and I’ve already walked through it. I’m finally where I belong in my life. And I’m with Victor, which means more to me than anything.

I’m finally with Victor.

~~~

Victor and I leave Fredrik’s house in the hills of Los Angeles late afternoon and drive eleven hours to Albuquerque, New Mexico. On the way, I have him stop at a mall where I pretty much spend a couple thousand dollars on new clothes, shoes, accessories and makeup for myself, seeing as how everything I owned is in Arizona or was left in the Los Angeles hotel. I stuffed the backseat with shopping bags and shoe boxes, but by the ninth hour on the road I wished I had bought less. All I wanted to do was crawl into the backseat and sleep, but I got stuck with being cramped in the front, curled up awkwardly on the bucket seat of his black Cadillac CTS with my head pressed against the window. Since Victor left the Order he no longer has the convenience of flying on private jets to get around. He can still certainly afford them if he wanted to spend his own money, but being a man who the Order wants dead, means staying under the radar and giving up some luxuries that might lead Niklas right to him.

Apparently, giving up such luxuries also includes the extravagant multi-million dollar homes he has always chosen to live in. His house in Albuquerque is far from matching the one he lived in on the East Coast that overlooked the ocean. As we come up the dirt driveway, I see a house of moderate size made of straight, high tan stucco walls with a boxy shape that reminds me of the houses I used to build with Legos when I was a kid. But judging by the elaborate landscape that hugs the smooth white sidewalk leading up to the door and surrounds the east side of the house, it’s obvious that Victor hasn’t completely given up
all
luxuries. Even more obvious when we step inside as the interior is as beautiful as Fredrik’s house had been, though with more of a southwestern style than a modern luxury bachelor pad. Rust reds and browns and yellows are dominant throughout the space, with tall ceilings held up by dark wooden beams and rafters which make the house appear much larger on the inside than it appears on the outside. A cozy stone fireplace is set in the wall in the spacious living room with two metal ornate mirrors mounted above it. The walls are painted yellow, which complement the terra cotta tile flooring that appears to spread throughout the whole house.

“You always manage to get the best housekeepers, that’s for sure,” I say, setting several of my bags down on the floor in the living room.

“Not this time,” he says behind me. He sets the other bags from the car down next to the tawny-brown leather couch. “It’s just me.”

“Really? But it’s so clean in here. I guess you haven’t been here long then?”

“About four months.” He looks over at me. “Do you like it? I hope so since it is your new home.”

A smile breaks in my face.

He breaks apart the buttons of his dress shirt and takes it off, laying it over the back of a brown leather chair. Secretly, I take note of his physique as he walks toward a long, brightly-lit hallway with an arched entrance.

I follow him.

“Of course you know we won’t be here forever.” We enter a large bedroom. “But it’s home for now, at least.”

He steps out of his pants and I’m trying really hard not to watch him too intensely, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult.

“Come here,” he says, standing before me in nothing but his tight black boxer briefs which are doing very little to hide the hard bulge growing behind the fabric.

I swallow nervously, though why I’m nervous all of a sudden, I have no idea, and I walk toward him. A twinge spasms between my legs, and I’m not sure why of that, either. It’s as if my subconscious mind is more aware of what’s about to happen than my conscious one. Either that, or my mind is just running away from me with thoughts of what I only wish would happen.

I look at him curiously, tilting my head gently to one side.

“I’m not sure what this is between us,” he says carefully, “but I
am
sure that I don’t want it to stop. Whatever it is.”

“I feel the same way.”

A little confused about where this is heading, I tilt my head to the other side and ask, “Is something wrong?”

He shakes his head subtly. “No, nothing’s wrong.”

“Well…if you’re worried I’m going to fall in love with you and cling on to your every move, you don’t have to worry.”

“You’re not in love with me?” he asks and it seems like nothing more than a simple inquiry.

“No, I don’t love you, Victor.”

He nods, completely accepting it. “Good. Because I’m not in love with you, either.”

I don’t think either of us truly knows what the word means in this kind of situation. We both display the same accepting, yet somehow confused expressions.

“But…I uh…,” I clasp my fingers together behind my back and look down at the tile floor, moving my foot about as if I were shuffling my toes nervously in sand. I stop and look him in the eyes. “But I uh would maybe…appreciate it if you didn’t sleep with anyone else. I…well, I don’t think I’d like that much.”

“I agree,” he says with another solid nod. “I think if I caught you with another man, I would have to kill him.”

I nod a few times, as casually as he had.

“Definitely,” I say in return. “The same goes for you.”

“Agreed.”

There’s an awkward bout of silence between us and I glance over at the king-sized bed with tall cherry wood posts at all four corners, just feet away.

I look back at Victor as he approaches me. I lift my arms above me when his fingers slide behind the ends of my shirt and he pulls it off.

“I would also like to say that I don’t mind if you cling to my every move.” He fits his fingers behind the elastic of my panties. “For the record.”

“Really?”

He crouches down before me as he slides my panties over my hips and down my legs. He stays there, looking up at me, his head level with my bellybutton.

“Yes,” he answers. “Of course, you can’t be getting in my way when I’m trying to do a job.”

“Yes, of course,” I say and my skin reacts to his lips kissing the area just above my pelvic bone. “I-I would never get in the way of your job,” the words shudder from my lips. My hands begin to shake when he lowers himself between my legs, spreading my lips below with the pads of his thumbs.

I move my legs apart just a little, enough to give him access.

“But no leaving me in someplace far away while you travel everywhere to fulfill contracts,” I say, my fingers curling within the top of his hair, my breathing uneven and rapid. “I don’t want to be a stay-at-home wife, y’know what I mean?”

A sharp gasp pierces the air around my mouth when the tip of his tongue flicks across my clit. I nearly wilt right here and now, the muscles in my thighs deteriorating with every passing second.

“Yes, I am quite aware of the concept,” he says and then licks me again, dragging his tongue between my wet petals. I throw my head back and grasp his hair tighter, winding it within my fingers. “You’ll go wherever I go. So I can keep an eye on you.”

“An eye on me. Of course.” It was a poor attempt at a response. All I can think about is his head between my legs and that hot, prickling sensation turning my insides into mush.

Victor hoists me up with my ass planted firmly within both of his hands, my thighs wrapped around his head from the front and he licks me furiously for a moment before tossing me onto the bed on my back.

With my thighs pushed toward me, his mouth falls between my legs and my eyes roll into the back of my head as he sends me into oblivion.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sarai

Training begins two days later, but it doesn’t start off the way I expected it to. I don’t know what I expected really, but it certainly wasn’t
this
.

“What are we doing here?” I ask as we pull into the parking lot of a physical fitness and martial arts studio an hour away in Santa Fe.

“Krav Maga,” he says and I just look at him as though he were speaking to me in another language. He shuts the car door and we walk toward the front of the building. “I won’t be able to devote one hundred percent of my time teaching you. So, three days a week I’m going to bring you here for some training. You can learn a lot in Krav Maga in a short time. And it focuses on self-defense—”

“What?” I stop on the sidewalk just before we get to the front door. “I’m not a damsel in distress who just got robbed in a dark parking garage, Victor. I don’t need self-defense classes. I need to learn how to kill.”

“Killing is the easy part,” he says matter-of-factly. He opens the glass door, gesturing me inside ahead of him. “Getting to that point without getting
yourself
killed in the process is the hard part.”

I scoff. “So, you want me to learn how to kick a guy in the nuts? Trust me, I’m already perfectly capable of doing that.”

A faint grin appears at the corners of his delicious lips.

Just then, a tall dark-haired man with rolling muscles walks toward us through the vast room. Tall windows are set along the top of the wall, letting in the sunlight. Two separate groups of people are training in a turn-by-turn sequence, standing around in a half-circle atop an enormous black mat spread across a large section of the floor.

The man with bulging arms underneath a black t-shirt offers his hand to Victor. “How long has it been? Three? Four years?”

Victor shakes his hand firmly.

“About four, I believe.”

The man looks at me momentarily and then Victor introduces us.

“Spencer, this is Izabel. Izabel, Spencer.”

“A pleasure,” Spencer says, holding out his hand.

Reluctantly, I shake it. They know each other? I’m not sure I like that or not. I suddenly feel like I’m being set up. I smile squeamishly up at the tall, good-natured brute.

Victor turns to me and says, “There’s no one better to train you in self-defense than Spencer. You’re in good hands.”

Spencer smiles so big I feel like if it were any bigger he might bite my head clean off my neck. He stands with his heavily-muscled arms down in front of him, his hands folded. The thick, ropy veins running along his hands and up his darkly-tanned arms reminds me of a body builder, but he’s not quite as big as one. He’s just bigger than
me
, making him more intimidating.