Victor just looks at him and I’m choking on the tension in the room.
Niklas turns and goes to leave.
“Wait…” I come up behind him, collapsing my hand about his wrist, “Niklas—.”
“Leave me alone, Izabel,” he says calmly, pushing my hand away and then he heads for the door.
James, riddled with the same kind of shock as me, steps out of his way, mostly for fear of Niklas moving him out of the way.
“Will you be needing anything else?” Fredrik asks Victor, uninterested in everything that has transpired.
It takes me a long time to break away from Niklas and my desperate need to run after him, to console him, and finally I look back at Victor and Fredrik and Nora.
Fredrik is standing at the table, cleaning off his tools with a rag and a small spray bottle filled with bleach solution, and then placing the items back inside the briefcase.
Victor looks at Nora.
“Where are they?”
“429 South Padre Drive,” Nora answers. “24 Arlin Avenue is where you’ll find the daughters”—she still has no idea that James’s daughters escaped—“and the old lady—12421 Griffins Street. All of them are here in Boston.”
Victor turns to James.
“Take some men,” he demands. “Go with them and call me as soon as you see them well and alive.” He looks back down at Nora as James is leaving hurriedly out the door.
“That will be all for now,” Victor tells Fredrik even though he’s not looking at him. “But don’t go anywhere. I have another job for you.”
Fredrik nods, takes up his briefcase and walks past us.
He doesn’t even look at me and it cuts me to the bone.
As much as I want to run out after him just like Niklas, I don’t. And right now if I had to choose which one of them to run after, it would be Niklas.
“How does it feel?” Nora asks icily from a puddle of blood on the floor. “To lose someone you love? I told you that I’d get what I wanted either way.”
And she did—if Victor didn’t confess, he would’ve lost me because of Dina, but because he did confess, he lost his brother.
I don’t know what to think, or how to feel, or who to blame, or—I don’t know anything and it’s killing me inside. The man I thought I knew, the man I love with everything in me, isn’t who I thought he was. I think…
I don’t understand any of this!
“Victor?” I say, stepping up behind him. “Why?” It’s all I can get out.
“I will tell you later,” he says. “Now isn’t the time.”
I’m so angry with him. Who the hell is this person? I’m so confused. He chose me. He chose to confess to save Dina because he loves me. But why do I feel so awful? Why do I want to run away from all of this and hide?
“We are even,” Nora says—her face is beginning to swell from the back teeth Fredrik removed.
Victor pulls his gun from the back of his pants.
I step up in front of him.
“Don’t,” I tell him. “Let her speak—we have to wait anyway in case she lied about the addresses.” I can’t believe I’m even having to tell him this; he knows these things better than I do, so his quickness to want to end her life tells me just how angry he really is inside. So angry that he’s blinded by it, which is a rare thing to see in Victor.
His eyes pass over mine and he gives in, leaving the gun hanging down at his side.
I turn to Nora.
“Say what you have to say,” I tell her. “I can’t stop him from killing you, and honestly I don’t really want to after what you’ve done to us, but say what you have to say.”
Nora grimaces as she scoots over to sit against the wall, pressing her shoulder to it instead of her wounded back. She stops to catch her breath and let the pain move through her before she starts to speak.
“Claire was born with a defect,” Nora says. “A heart murmur. Anything that could potentially put one of us at risk, or compromise our missions later in life, would make us unfit to be part of the Sect. When Claire was born, she was sold as an infant to a family through an adoption. It’s how the Sect made some of their money—selling the defect babies instead of killing them. Because they’re just babies there’s nothing for them to have seen or remember about the Sect, so they aren’t considered a threat. Just money-makers.”
I sit down on the chair and listen intently.
“But the defects are watched all their lives by the Sect,” she goes on. “Just as a precaution. I was commissioned to be the one who watched Claire. I didn’t know she was my sister until much later, but to make a long story short, I found out through a blood test after I had befriended her, and something inside of me…changed. She was a sweet girl. Innocent”—she eyes Victor coldly with blame—“I became protective of her. And because she was my sister, I started lying to the Sect about everything. They found out. And that’s when they realized I had been compromised.”