The Swan and the Jackal (7 page)

But there is one tall, dark figure amongst the crowd that appears out of place. He stands with his hands in the pockets of his long, black coat. He is calm, unaffected by the chaos in the streets.

He is you.

You look at
me
instead, across the street and through moving bodies and vehicles that pass by and temporarily block our path. Your eyes pierce through me like…like nothing I’ve ever felt before. All I know is that my stomach feels hot and that I’m afraid, yet I still want to look back at you.

I-I don’t know why, but…but my heart is breaking. Tears sting the backs of my eyes and my chest feels like it’s falling in on itself, like a star burning up its last breath before it collapses into a black hole.

And then I wake up in your home and I barely remember my name much less anything else about me.

Chapter Five

Cassia

Fredrik reaches out his hand and wipes the tears from underneath my eyes. I gently coil my fingers around his strong wrist and I shut my eyes softly to savor his touch.

“She said that you owed her.” Fredrik’s voice pulls me back into the moment and my eyelids carefully break apart again.

His hand falls away. He places it back within his lap.

I look at for a long moment and then back up at his eyes.

“What?” I’m confused.

Fredrik tilts his head slightly to one side.

“You didn’t say that before,” he explains. “That the woman told you just before she left that you owed her. It’s a new memory.”

I blink, a little surprised, and nod as the realization sets in.

“Yes,” I say. “She did say that. But I don’t know what it means.” I lower my head with regret and even shame. I want to give him whatever he needs or wants from me. I have since shortly after he brought me here many months ago. Even if it means that I’ll lose him to that woman, I love him enough that I would let him go if it’s what he wanted.

I don’t know why I love him. I don’t know how it’s possible to love a man who keeps a woman chained in a basement. But then again, there are so many things I don’t understand because I can’t
remember
anything. So much doesn’t make sense. Actually,
nothing
makes sense. I feel trapped in someone else’s life. Out of place in the world, and as it goes on all around me, I stay put in the same place trying to recall a life I had before that doesn’t seem to want to be found.

“Cassia,” Fredrik says kindly and I raise my tear-filled eyes to him. He sighs regretfully. “If you can’t make progress on your own, you know what I’ll have to do.”

My hands begin to shake within my lap, my bottom lip begins to tremble.

I shake my head. “No, Fredrik, please—”

He leans toward me in one swift motion, punishment in his eyes. I ground the palms of my hands against the mattress on both sides of me and push myself backward against the wall.

“I-I’m sorry,” I say with fear lacing my voice.

“Do not call me by my name,” he demands. “I can’t have you doing that.” He lowers his eyes and I can tell by that look of pain hidden behind them that his own rule burdens him in some way.

Fredrik stands from the chair and takes a seat on the edge of the bed closer to me.

“Come here,” he says gently, holding out his hand.

I take it with only slight hesitation because even as much as I fear him, I still want to be with him.

He guides me next to him and I lay my upper-body in his lap, my cheek pressed softly against his firm thigh. His large hand strokes my blonde hair. His touch is gentle and kind and euphoric, but I know too what else those hands are capable of. I’ve seen the things he does to people. Terrible, nightmarish things. The very things he is threatening me with now.

“I can’t bear to watch again,” I say. “Please…don’t make me watch.”

His fingers continue to comb through my hair, leaving shivers to dance along the length of my spine.

“But you’ll have to,” he says in a calm, relaxing voice, “because I don’t see any other way. Your memories only seem to be triggered by traumatic experiences. You wouldn’t know what you know now about the fire if it wasn’t for making you watch.”

I move my head against his lap so that I can look up at him. His fingers fall from my hair and he brushes the backs of them down the side of my cheek.

“Tell me about her,” I say in a powdery voice, trying not to force him away like I did the last time I insisted such a forbidden thing. “What did Seraphina do to you? Why do you want to find her so badly?”

He shoots up from the bed, leaving me to fall against the mattress.

“I’ve told you—”

I shoot up after him, stopping him mid-sentence, intent on making him understand, to make him talk to me once and for all. The chain around my ankle clanks loudly as I force myself across the few feet to stand in front of him.

“YOU TELL ME!” I scream at him, more tears pouring from the corners of my eyes. “
PLEASE!
I DESERVE TO KNOW!” I cry out. “You’ve kept me down here for a year. Took me away from…from whatever life I had before the fire. I may not remember it, but it was
mine
.” I point at my chest; my voice and I know my expression, strained by pain and desperation. “You believe I know this woman well enough that I can lead you to her, that somehow I can help you find her. And I’m willing to do that…,” my voice begins to soften. I only want to make him understand, not show defiance.

He shakes his head, though not as if telling me no, but it seems more like he’s convincing
himself
not to tell me. Something he has done time and time again in all these months that I’ve been his prisoner. His willing prisoner.

I lower my voice to a whisper and clasp my thin fingers about his wrists. “Please, Fredrik,” I say and he doesn’t reprimand me for calling him by his name. I look deeply into his hardened, conflicted eyes that refuse to look back at me. “Maybe if I knew more about her…I could remember. I might begin to understand who she was to me, how I knew her and…,” I try to force his gaze but it’s unshakable, “…and what it is that I owe her.”

This has been the one thing I’ve tried time and time again to make him understand, but he always cuts me off. He would rather make me watch him torture people to death to trigger my memories than to do something as simple as tell me more about this woman who I apparently used to know before I lost my memory in that fire last year.

“
Please
.” It’s my last desperate attempt. My chest is heaving with long, deep breaths. My heart is aching with hopelessness.

He looks down into my eyes from his tall height and I can’t read him. So much confliction. So much regret and anger and emotions I’m not sure I ever want to know. There’s a beast that lives inside this man that I have seen, but I never want to meet it again. Not face to face like others have met it. I feel in the deepest part of me that he holds that beast down for my sake. Because he doesn’t want to hurt me. But I also feel that it’s only a matter of time before it controls the man I know and love. And every time he looks at me, he inches that much closer to succumbing to the beast and letting it take control.

I feel like I know, because it’s what my heart tells me, that one day I
will
die by his hands.

I step toward him and soften my eyes as I reach my hand up and touch it to the side of his face. I smile warmly and push up on my toes, placing my lips against his.

He gazes deeply into my eyes when I pull away, and still, there’s so much going on inside of him that I can read nothing.

Fredrik

I step back and away from Cassia, resolved to end this before it begins. I can’t let her do this to me. Not again. I won’t let her. Seraphina is important to me and I’ll stop at nothing to find her, my ex-wife, the only woman I’ve ever known who I could be the real and true Fredrik Gustavsson with and not have to hide. The one woman who was so much like me that it was fate we were brought together.

Seraphina is the epitome of darkness. And I need her back.

She and I have unfinished business.

“Fredrik…,” Cassia says and I raise my eyes to her. Hers are so innocent and pure, so…vulnerable. I want to take her. Now. To press her tight pink flesh against the wall and ravage her little body violently from the inside out. I want to mark her with my blade and lick the blood from her wounds, the way I used to do to Seraphina.

I force the need away, rounding my chin. Because I can’t. I can’t do that to Cassia. I
won’t
do that to Cassia.

I force myself to walk away.

“Fredrik…please…don’t go. Not yet. Please!” she calls out after me.

I hear the chain wrapped around her ankle hitting the floor as she tries to catch up to me, but it stops hard when I step out of her walking range and head toward the basement steps.

I hear her crying. I hate to hear her cry. Goddammit…I hate to hear her cry!

Slowly, I turn to face her, and she looks back at me with the same light-brown doe-eyes that I have come to admire…that I’ve become a victim of.

I’ll need to kill tonight. Just so that I can wash this threatening feeling from my dark heart.

“I’ll be back in four hours,” I say impassively, coldly even. “And you will watch.”

I leave her standing there, drowning in her own tears, as I ascend the steps and out of the basement.

Chapter Six

Fredrik

If Dorian Flynn wasn’t part of our new Order, and my assigned partner, he’d be the one I killed tonight. I hate this guy. I might just kill him anyway.

“Tha fuck is this bitch talkin’ about?” Dorian asks, staring down into a magazine with some famous couple posing with a baby on the front. He flicks the center of it with his middle finger, making a short snapping noise and then drops the magazine on the table between us. “Don’t you ever read this shit?”

“No,” I answer simply, uninterested, and bring my mug of coffee to my lips.

I continue to watch out the tall glass window of the coffee shop for signs of my next interrogation. Short, bald man with a death wish long overdue.

“Well, you should,” he says, looking at the magazine again. “This is what society has become. An overpopulated flock of loudmouth, zero talent celebrities who get paid to fondle America’s nutsack with bullshit drama.” He shakes his head and presses his back against his chair. “Y’know, I could make a goddamn killing on pickin’ these motherfuckers off. Hell, I think even Faust would be up for it.”

I really don’t care much about what Dorian is going on about, but I know that if I don’t respond with something soon, he’ll notice and might never shut up.

“Those people, as moronic as they may be,” I say looking across the square table at him, “aren’t hits. At least not yet.”

Dorian shrugs and reaches out to close the magazine with two of his fingers. “Well, for the record, I want the first one that is.”

I nod and look back out the window. “I’ll let Victor know.” And then I add with a smirk, “Seems to me they’re fondling your nutsack just fine. The fact that you care about any of it at all proves that.”

Dorian grins. He crosses his arms, covered by a dark brown leather jacket over his chest. He has short dark-blond hair, clean-cut though spiked-up in the front and on the top. He’s not as tall as I am at 6’3, must be about 6’, with bright blue eyes that he often covers with sunglasses. He’s been killing people for eight years now (he told me this when we first met, as casually as he might tell me he’s been working in real estate for eight years) and I admit, he’s good at only twenty-six years old. But a lot like Niklas Fleischer, Victor Faust’s brother, Dorian is undisciplined and sometimes reckless. Though, I also admit that it seems to work for him.

He shakes his head, smiling across at me. “I’d like to bag one of those bitches. It’s true. You got me.” He puts up his hands, palms forward, and then drops them back onto the table. “But only to see the look on her face when I kick her out of my bed after I’m done with her. Knock her off her pedestal a little.”

My left brow rises. “Oh, I see.”

He nods. “Yeah, I could fuck a woman like that all day long, but at the end of the day, I’m looking for a nice, quiet, respectable girl to bring home to my folks, y’know.”

“I thought your folks were dead?” I take another sip of my coffee.

Dorian shrugs and stretches his arms behind him high above his head. “Yeah, they are, but you get the picture.”

“Sure I do,” I say, though I still wish he’d shut up already. “But somehow I just don’t see you settling down.”

The spot between Dorian’s eyes hardens as he rears his chin back. “I didn’t say anything about settling down.”

“Well, nice, quiet and respectable usually means settling down,” I point out.

He throws his head back and laughs lightly. “Maybe in your world,” he says. “Then again, you’re kind of sadistic and I highly doubt that a nice, quiet, respectable girl would get too close to you for you to find out.”

No, but I happen to have one in my basement. Granted, I have to keep her shackled inside the room so she doesn’t run away or try to kill me, but Cassia is the kindest, most respectable girl I’ve ever met. And I’ve met a lot of women. Broken a lot of women.

A short, stubby bald man wearing a waist-length thick coat steps outside of a black sedan that just pulled into the parking lot. Its headlights are on, beaming at us through the tall window, and the motor remains running. Puffs of exhaust pour out of the rear stimulated by the frigid December air. Snow is thick on the outskirts of the parking lot where a snowplow made its rounds this morning, shoving mounds of it off the parking lot and out of the way.

“It’s James Woodard,” I say quietly, keeping my eyes on him from the tall window.