Nora looks up at it briefly and then takes it into her blood-stained fingers.
“Then welcome aboard,” I say.
And the fact that she doesn’t shoot me in the back, or run away into the streets of Boston when I leave her sitting there and go back inside, further proves she’s telling the truth that I already knew.
22
Izabel
Four days later…
I wish I could say that things are getting back to normal around here, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Niklas is still gone and none us have seen him or heard from him—he could be in another country, or living in the back of a bar somewhere nearby, and either would be believable. His cell phones don’t even ring anymore—they either go straight to voicemail, or tell me the user doesn’t have a mailbox set up to leave a message. I stopped calling him two days ago. When he wants to be found, he’ll let us know. And I’ll worry about the outcome of that day until it happens.
Dorian, after Fredrik interrogated him for many long hours, I’m happy to say is still alive. He’s still imprisoned in cell C and will probably be there for a while until Victor figures out what to do with him. But according to Fredrik, everything Dorian told Victor seems to be true, and he hasn’t hidden anything else that we know of. But the thing with Victor keeping Dorian alive, I believe, is mostly to do with U.S. Intelligence and if they will retaliate in reaction to Dorian’s death. But Victor says it appears that the kind of private contractor Dorian is, if he were ever killed or compromised, the United States wouldn’t claim they knew anything about him.
It’s what U.S. Intelligence knows about us that keeps Victor from making a decision either way. Dorian admitted to profiling each of us and giving that information to his superiors, employers, whatever they’re called—I’m in the dark when it comes to this stuff and Victor doesn’t talk about it much…or maybe he does and I’ve just been too involved in my training with Nora Kessler to notice.
I started the following day after the night I let her in. And already I feel like I have to watch my back every moment of every day—not because she can’t be trusted, but because as part of her training, she attacks me out of nowhere. There is no such thing as a break. At any moment Nora could be testing me, mentally or physically, or in any way she sees fit. It’s the same kind of training I started out with Victor over a year ago, but much more intense. She fucks with my head so often that I can’t tell the difference when she’s lying to my face or telling me the truth—I’m supposed to be able to figure it out. Learn to fully trust my instincts and be able to react to any given situation accordingly without ever thinking about it. “If you have to stop and think about it, you’ve already fucked up,” she said during one of the rare times she’s given me actual advice. And then, “It’s not the same thing as ‘think before you react’, it’s about changing the way you think and react naturally.”
I never expected any training to be like this. And it’s just beginning.
Today Nora joins us at the table for her first meeting.
Victor didn’t approve of my decision to let her join us when I told him what I’d done. Not at first anyway. I had to remind him that he said he trusted me, and although I think deep down he didn’t need reminding, I know he least expected me to let her live and it all came as shock to him. It did me as well. I had every intention in eliminating Nora that night—eliminating; maybe I’m starting to become more like Victor—but at the last minute, I went with my gut instead of my hatred for her.
I walk into the meeting room to the faces of Victor, James and Fredrik. Nora will be late if she isn’t here in five minutes. I make my way to my usual chair close to Victor where I sit down and try to look confident—I know that if Nora doesn’t live up to everyone’s expectations of her that it’ll be on my head because I’m the one that let her join us. Being late to her first meeting isn’t a good way to start.