The police were there in under five minutes, and as I sat with Izabel, holding her hand, the woman did most of the talking, reiterating what she apparently had told them when she first arrived without me. After they asked me questions, and I told them what happened—a fabrication, of course—they left us alone.
I stayed with Izabel for a long time before I went outside into the hall, and I sat down next to the young woman who looked to be in her mid-twenties, but I got the feeling was a little older. She had soft brown hair that fell to her breasts, bright blue-green eyes, and freckles splashed across the bridge of her nose.
It was eerily quiet in the hospital; I could vaguely hear the nurse’s rubber-soled shoes squeaking against the floor, and a computer keyboard being tapped, and a life-support machine—Izabel’s life-support machine—beeping steadily from the cracked door of her room.
I sat hunched over, my forearms on the top of my legs; my feet were still bare, and my injured hand was wrapped in a bloody cloth. The woman beside me sat with the back of her head against the white brick wall. The bench beneath us was made of wood; I could distinctly smell the black paint that it had been coated with last.
“If she’s as tough as everybody says she is, she’ll—”
“Who are you?” I cut in; I did not look at her.
I heard her sigh. She began to adjust her position next to me on the bench; she placed her folded hands on her lap.
Finally she answered, “My name is Naeva. Though you might remember me as the little blond-haired girl who always tried to play with you and Niklas when we were children. Niklas slapped me in the face with a dead snake once. And you—”
“I took the snake from him and forced it in his mouth,” I finished.
I looked over, and Naeva, my baby sister, smiled.
I smiled, too. But it was short-lived. Izabel, clinging to life on the other side of the door just feet from me, controlled all of my emotions.
“Your hair is different,” I said. “It used to be white.”
“I grew up,” she said. “And it turned brown. Like yours.”
I nodded.
After a long time, she asked, “Is he dead?”
“Brant Morrison?”
“Yeah.”
I nodded again. “Yes. He is dead.” Then I glanced over briefly. “Does that bother you?” I hoped she would say no.
She shook her head. “Not at all; actually, I’m relieved.”
The silence went on for another stretch.
I sighed.
Naeva sighed.
There were many questions she and I both wanted, needed, to ask one another: our separation as children; where we have been all these years; what kind of life outside of The Order had we lived, experienced, and shared with others; how long she had been in The Order; how she ended up there in the first place; who raised her after our mother was killed; if she forgave me for killing our father. But this was not the time nor the place to open that book. There were other, more important questions that needed immediate answers, and so I spoke to her not as my long-lost sister, but as any other young woman who might be able to tell me what I needed to know.
“Morrison said that Izabel’s bounty is even higher than my own. Can you tell me why?”
Naeva looked at me and shook her head sadly.
“I don’t know, Victor,” she admitted. “All I do know is that just like you and Niklas, Izabel is to be brought in alive—and unharmed.”
“How much is her bounty?”
“Forty million.”
I blinked, quietly stunned. Forty million? How is that possible? I could not fathom why The Order would want Izabel so desperately, why she was more valuable to them than myself or my brother or Gustavsson, all of whom broke the most sacred of laws. To The Order, Izabel was just an escaped sex slave from a Mexican compound. Or was she?
Then it occurred to me: “At the compound, or anywhere Javier could keep tabs on you and control you, you were not a threat to him. But now that you have escaped, you are a bigger threat than anyone because you know too much. He probably never anticipated you leaving. You being alive and free is a threat to his entire operation and anyone involved in it.”
I thought about that revelatory conversation for a long time, trying to remember it word-for-word.
“The information you hold, no matter how insignificant you think it all is, could bring down a lot of high-profile people.”
I was almost convinced that it was all coming to fruition now, that word did get out about what Izabel knew, after all. I thought perhaps the bounty was so high because several ‘high-profile’ clients all chipped in and hired The Order to find her. But still, it did not make sense to me why, if someone held that many powerful lives in the palms of her hands, she would be wanted alive.
And then something else occurred to me.
I turned my head to see my sister.