“Joran Carver stepped out of the unmarked vehicle dressed in a suit.
“I beat the shit out of him because he was there, why he was there. And I didn’t talk to my brother for a month after that. Because he kept the truth from me until the last minute when The Order’s plan to replace me with Joran, died with Claire that night.”
“Why was Joran Carver there?” Nora asks.
Letting the memory fade, I look back at Nora sitting on the other side of the table.
“I thought you knew everything?” I say sarcastically.
“This I don’t know,” she says. “And I want you to tell me.”
I shake my head with a sneer. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”
“It is now,” she says. “I’m curious to know.”
I want to be my pissed off, defiant self with Nora right now, but at this point I don’t even care anymore. I feel so goddamned defeated, not by Nora, but by myself.
“Joran’s role was to play the kind and caring homicide investigator who was going to show up at Claire’s house to question her about the last time she saw me. To rule her out as having anything to do with my murder.”
“They were going to kill you?”
“No.” I shake my head. “They were just going to take me out of the mission. Tell her I had been found murdered. She would’ve been devastated. And Joran, handsome, slick fucker that he was, was going to be the one to console her, and her only hope of getting the charges dropped against her for being the one who killed me.”
Nora’s eyes narrow. “So they were going to make it look like she was a murderer, play on her vulnerable state just so Joran could replace you.”
“Fucked up, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, that’s extreme,” she says.
“You wouldn’t believe how often things like that happen,” I say, and even now, long after I’ve left The Order, I feel like I’m committing treason against it by freely telling this woman this information. Again, I don’t give a fuck; a part of this feels strangely freeing. “Vonnegut’s operatives were, and still are, everywhere. Working as police officers, EMT’s, IRS officials, lawyers, actors, street sweepers—sometimes I think Claire is better off dead because they would’ve put her through nine kinds of hell to find out what they wanted to know, and ruined whatever life she tried to make for herself. I like to think that the last eleven months of her life with me was my way of getting back at them. Because I was good to her. And what I felt for her was real. I wasn’t just another Joran Carver sent in to lie to her. Claire would’ve died either way, whether by the other organization after Solis, or eventually by The Order itself. I’m glad I was the last person in her life. Because I fucking loved her.”
I get up from the chair and look down at Nora.
“When this is over,” I tell her in a calm voice, “I will kill you. On principle.”
“Those are bold words,” she says with no emotion on her face. “Threats like that—”
“Oh, it’s not a threat,” I cut in. I point my finger at her. “You don’t fuck with somebody’s loved ones; innocent people who never asked to be related to, or involved with someone not-so-innocent like the rest of us. Only cowards shoot somebody from behind. If you wanted something from one of us, then you should’ve called that person out from the start and dealt with it head-on.”
I take my pack of cigarettes up from the table, shuffling one into my fingers and then slide the pack into my back pocket. Fishing my lighter from a front pocket, I set the end aflame and take a quick drag.
“Good luck with my brother,” I say, smoke streaming from my lips. “And with Gustavsson—I actually look forward to that show.”
And then I walk out after I hear the lock clicking from the inside of the massive door.
9
Izabel
Niklas doesn’t join us back in the surveillance room after he leaves Nora. None of us expected him to. I feel terrible for him, and I really had no idea that he actually cared about me at all. He didn’t have to tell Nora anything; no one he loves has their life on the line. Because she’s already dead.
I don’t know what to think, or how to feel anymore when it comes to Niklas. He did try to kill me, after all. But can something like that ever be forgiven? Can a person just sweep a heartless and wicked thing like that under a rug and let bygones be bygones? I don’t know that it can. Or that I want it to. But it doesn’t change the fact that I feel awful about what he went through.
And I feel guilty.
I feel guilty because I’m alive and Claire isn’t.
It was so much easier when I hated him…
“Have you heard any word from Gustavsson?” Dorian asks from his chair in front of the screens.
Victor shakes his head.