KILLING SARAI (A NOVEL)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE





Sarai





My face burns with contempt, tears pouring from my eyes in droves as I bolt across the short distance toward Niklas.

I don’t care that he looks both surprised and faintly amused as I lunge for him, swinging my fists chaotically in front of me at his face.

In a flash, I’m on the floor on my back and Niklas is crouched on top of me, his hand pressed around my throat, rendering me unable to catch my breath. I claw at his wrist with both of my hands and try to kick him but there’s no way I’m moving from this spot. He glares down at me and moves his hand from my throat to my cheeks, seizing my jaw with his fingers like a vise-grip. With his other hand, he pins my wrists together, forcing them against my chest. He turns my chin to one side and then the other and I taste the chemicals leftover from his aftershave as his index finger presses against the edge of my lips.

“Get off me!” I growl under the weight of his hand.

“Niklas,” Victor says calmly from behind. “Leave her be.”

Niklas’ blue eyes bore into mine and he holds me here in this position for three more excruciatingly long seconds before doing what Victor said.

I try to catch my breath when he releases me, but I think mostly I just hold it longer until he has moved away from me completely.

I raise my back from the floor, but stay sitting on it. I’m so hurt, so outraged at Niklas for the things he said, but my pride hurts worse than anything.

Because I know he’s right.

I look at the floor rather than at either one of them. I don’t want them to see the shame and guilt on my face although it would be evident to anyone that it’s there.

“Niklas,” Victor says calmly, “I am sorry to have compromised you.”

I look up instantly. I feel a mood shift in the room and though I’m not exactly sure which one, I can tell by the pause in Victor’s voice that it’s something life-changing.

“We could devise a plan,” he goes on with Niklas’ undivided attention. “Let Vonnegut believe that Sarai is, in fact, dead—”

“Or we could just kill her to make it true.”

I jerk my head sideways to look at Niklas, who’s looking right back at me with the same condescension.

Victor shakes his head, objecting to his mordant yet entirely serious proposal.

“We could devise a plan together,” Victor continues in the same stoic tone, “or I could do it on my own and you can walk away and not be any part of it.”

Niklas’ eyes grow wide, his body locks up firmly. He seems at a loss for words. And so am I. I may not understand how these kinds of things work in their business, but I don’t really need to know that what Victor just proposed is something very dangerous. It’s suicide.

I manage to pick myself up from the floor.

“You have a choice,” Victor says. “Go along with my plan to tell Vonnegut that she’s dead, or tell him the truth, tell him everything that went on here to secure your place in the Order. I won’t hold it against you. I’ll take her away with me, set her up somewhere so that she can go on with her life. And then I’ll go on with mine. It’s your choice, Niklas. But I won’t kill her, and if Vonnegut finds out that she’s alive he will, rightfully so, question my loyalties. And you know first-hand what happens when any of our loyalties is questioned.”

“Eliminated as a precaution,” I say out loud, though mostly to myself, remembering what Victor said moments ago about why they ordered Niklas dead.

Niklas is in shock. He shakes his head repeatedly as if trying to shake Victor’s treacherous words out of his mind.

“You of all operatives,” Niklas manages to say, “…I don’t understand why you’re doing this, why you would throw away everything and go into hiding—.” He shakes his head again, unable to finish the sentence.

“It wouldn’t be the first time I risked my position and my life to follow my conscience rather than my orders.”

Niklas takes in a deep breath and averts his gaze toward the ceiling. Then he looks at me and we share a moment suspended within this intricate web of lies and contempt and resentment, a moment where, despite all of that, we realize we have something in common: Victor saved us both equally, and for that we are one in the same.

Simultaneously, we look back at Victor.

Niklas finally breaks the thick silence.

“As I have always said, brother, I will never betray you.”

Victor nods and I see the relief hidden within his blue-green eyes. I wonder if he would’ve killed Niklas where he stands if Niklas had chosen to take the alternate route.

“I’m with you,” Niklas says and glances at me once. “Whatever you want to do. But before we do anything we need to figure out who told Javier where you took her.”

When Niklas’ eyes fall on me again they stay there, and I suddenly feel like he’s blaming me.

My eyebrows wrinkle in my forehead. I cross my arms tight over my chest. “Well, I sure as hell didn’t tell him,” I spat. “Don’t look at me like that.”

Victor walks between us and takes me by the wrist, leading me to the nearest chair where I sit willingly. My stomach swims nervously. I look up at both of them, my hands gripping the ends of the chair arms.

“It wasn’t me!”

“I know it wasn’t you,” Victor says. “But I need you to think right now, Sarai. Have you at any time spoken to anyone since you left the compound? Anyone at all. Have you seen anything that maybe didn’t seem right, something seemingly insignificant?”

I shake my head, my index fingers making a nervous circular motion against the cherry wood grain grooves in the design of the chair. “I-I don’t know,” I say breathily, desperately trying to come up with something, anything that he could be looking for.

But I can’t.

“Victor, I-I don’t think so.”

He paces once and then looks over at Niklas. Then as if he was just slapped in the face by a theory, he turns his body swiftly back to me.

“Take off your clothes,” Victor demands.

My heart stops.

“What?”

“Sarai, take off your clothes.” He pulls me up from the chair by my hand. I try to wrench it away from him, but he applies more pressure.

“I’m not taking my clothes off! Why would you ask me to—?” I slap him with my free hand, right across the left side of his face.

He grabs my wrist. “I need you to trust me. I’ve brought you this far now do as I say and take off your f*cking clothes.”

His uncharacteristic use of that vulgarity shocks me into compliance. My eyes dart back and forth between them again, my jaw tightening, my breath heavy and short expelling from my nostrils.

“Fine,” I say, jerking my hand from his. “But not in front of him.”

Victor takes me by the wrist and walks with me past Niklas and toward the entrance to his room.

“You have nothing I want to see,” I hear Niklas say just before Victor shuts the door.

I already feel naked standing in the wide open of Victor’s spacious ocean-view room and I haven’t even taken my clothes off yet. I want to linger as long as possible, drag it out so that maybe he’ll change his mind or at least tell me what this is all about, but he wastes no more time. And he doesn’t let me waste any more of it, either.

“Take them off. Now.”

I start with my shirt, pulling it over my head and exposing my bare breasts. I drop the shirt on the floor beside my feet. He watches me, not with lust in his eyes, but with determination. I lean over and slip out of my pants and all that is left are my panties.

He steps right up to me.

I hesitate. The space between us is about two feet but it feels like two inches. I don’t want to take off my panties, not because I’m afraid of him, but because…I’m embarrassed for him to see me that way.

When he steps up closer and doesn’t demand I take the panties off, I breathe a silent sigh of relief.

“Lay down on the bed,” he says and that breath is sucked right back into my lungs again before it can expel completely.

When I don’t act fast enough, he wraps his hands around my upper-arms and gently pushes me down against his expensive designer comforter.

I swallow a lump in my throat.

As I start to raise my arms to my breasts to cover them, I feel Victor’s warm hands on me. I freeze, my eyes wide and unblinking. He raises my arms above my head and begins to feel every inch of my skin, pressing his fingers along the underside of my arms first and then down toward my ribs before making his way to my breasts.

His eyes catch mine briefly.

Maybe he wanted to ease my fear of him with that glance, but all it did was make me want him to touch me more.

The guilt of that thought sears through me. But the touch of his hands on my breasts, kneading only a small portion of them with his fingers, does something entirely different.

I picture his mouth on my nipple…

I force that ridiculous thought away and I watch him, his intent eyes and how deftly, yet at the same time, aggressively, his hands move across every inch of my body. Furtively I inhale the scent of his skin, his natural scent that somehow makes me want him to kiss me. He leans up and away from me, but he isn’t done. He goes for my thighs next, starting with the left and kneading his fingers around the flesh using both hands. And then the other thigh.

When his fingers touch the sensitive skin of my inner thighs, right at my panty line, I gasp.

He stops. He looks up at me, across the naked landscape of my body. I can only wonder what he’s thinking, but this time I get the feeling his gaze isn’t to ease my fear of him, but instead to study my reaction to his hands being on me, so close to the most intimate part of me. I wonder why he would study my face at all, why he wouldn’t take my obvious reaction and reject it by moving his hands away as I expected him to do. But instead, he leaves them there, the pad of one of his fingers I feel grazing the flesh at the bend of my leg just on the edge of my panties, conflicted about what he should do. What he might want to do.

He pulls away and abruptly flips me over onto my stomach.

“What are you doing exactly?” I ask, adapting to the quick change of the moment.

He pulls my panties down halfway over my butt cheeks, moves his hands here and there in the same manner and then back up to my hips.

“I’m looking for something.”

“What?” I ask.

Then suddenly he stops, his thumb moving in a circular motion on one particular spot just above my right butt cheek, on the back part of my hipbone. The same general area where I removed his bullet.

“A tracking device,” he says. “You have one.”

I try to twist my head around to see him better, but it hurts my neck.

The flash of a silver blade catches my eye. I panic when I glimpse the knife in his hand and start to twist my body awkwardly. But he holds me down, putting the weight of his hand on the small of my back, the hand with the knife wrestling with my left shoulder.

“What are you going to do?!” I shriek.

“I have to cut it out.”

“Victor, no!”

I thrash around more violently, trying to roll over onto my back so that I can get up. Suddenly he’s lying fully on top of me, and his closeness, the warmth of his breath on the side of my neck, takes my breath away. My entire frame solidifies beneath him and then begins to relax, melting into his body as his voice dances along the shell of my ear.

“I will be gentle,” he whispers and my skin shivers from my ear down the full length of my spine.

He presses himself into me from behind, his hardness obvious behind the thin layer of his pants that separates us.

“I promise,” he says onto my ear. “But it has to come out. Do you understand? Do you trust me?” He presses his hips toward me again and I feel me moving against him involuntarily. I shut my eyes when the tingling sensation between my legs moves through my back and into my eyelids.

“Yes,” I whisper. “I trust you.”

“Good,” he says softly and slowly raises himself off of me.

I remain very still, thinking so much more about Victor and what he just did to me than the more imperative threat. A part of me doesn’t even care about what he’s going to do, that he’s about to cut into me with a knife, that it’s going to hurt like hell. And perhaps that’s the only reason he did what he did, knowing somehow that he could control my mood, my emotions, with the hope that he might touch me more than he already has. I feel like a toy and Victor knows every button on me which to push, to touch, in order to make me do whatever he wants, feel whatever he wants me to feel. And I don’t mind. I don’t know how he did it, but I don’t mind at all.

“Bite down on the pillow if you have to,” he says.

I reach up and grab the nearest pillow towards me, crushing it against my chest. I squeeze my eyes shut tight.

The blade goes in and I yell out in pain before burying my face within the pillow, my entire body hardening like a block of cement.

In seconds, the device is out and Victor stands at the foot of the bed looking down into the space between his bloody fingers at something as small as a grain of rice.

With his free hand, he reaches for the towel he used to dry off with after his shower, which had been lying on the floor nearby. He hands it to me. “Put pressure on it to stop the bleeding,” he says and walks across the room into his bathroom.

While I press the towel on the back of my hip, I hear the water running in the sink and then the sound of him rummaging through his medicine cabinet. With one hand holding the towel in place, I get up from the bed to find my shirt, letting the towel drop only long enough to slip it on.

Victor walks out of the bathroom with an orange pill bottle clasped in his fingers and walks right past me and to the door.