Killing Sarai (29 page)

Victor

The client is late. Five minutes late, but even one minute by someone who Niklas described as ‘meticulous’ doesn’t sit well with me. Two more minutes and I’m leaving.

I watch people walk by on the street and I study them from the clothes they wear to the way they hold their heads when they talk to those walking alongside them. Are they really just tourists and residents? Or, are they decoys? Spies? I can never be too careful. This could be a setup, like any mission, but ones like this that put a knot of uncertainty in the pit of my stomach—

Wait…

I recall my phone conversation with Niklas earlier:

“Meet with her outside at
639 South Spring Street. She will be wearing a white blouse with a silver butterfly broach on the left breast. She’ll be there at one-thirty.”

“That’s in less than an hour,” I say
.

“You have plenty of time to get there
from the hotel.”

I had plenty of time to get here from the hotel…

I grip the steering wheel with both hands, my mind running a hundred miles per second. How would Niklas have known that? He had no idea where in Los Angeles Sarai and I were staying. He couldn’t have known that I could make it to that address from where I was in that amount of time.

Unless he knew exactly where we were all along.

Sarai

“Niklas…if you kill me, you’ll make an enemy of your brother.” My throat is dry like sandpaper, my lungs heavy. “If everything you’re saying is true, if Victor’s fate is already sealed then what would killing me accomplish?” I raise my voice out of desperation and fear. “It won’t solve
anything
!”

He doesn’t want to kill me. I don’t know whether it’s because of what I said, about making Victor his enemy, or if he’s just conflicted, but whatever it is it’s the only thing keeping me alive right now.

“Look what you’ve
done
!” He shoves the gun in the air toward me, his hand gripping the handle so tight his knuckles are white.

He moves forward. I move backward.

“Niklas…
please
,” I beg him. I don’t want to shoot him. I know he’s more likely to kill me, but I don’t want to shoot him.

Anger flickers through his eyes in an instant and he rounds his chin defiantly, his jaw clenching, his eyes narrow and his nostrils flaring.

Yes, he
does
want to kill me after all.

The door swings open and I hear a shot just as Niklas turns his head to see Victor storming through the room. And then another suppressed shot zips through the room, but Niklas, already running toward Victor too, manages to keep from getting hit and I hear the bullet move through the air just feet from me and embed inside the wall.

My gun falls from my hand and I fall to my knees. It takes a few seconds for me to realize that I’ve been hit, and once I do, I feel the burning hot pain in my stomach. Warm blood soaks the fabric of my dress. I lay on my side, both hands pressed firmly over the wound.

The table out ahead of me wobbles on its wooden base as Victor and Niklas crash against it. My little jewelry box falls from it and hits the floor, breaking apart the latch and scattering the jewelry about. Victor, on top of Niklas,
rains his fists down on him, blow after blow until the table can no longer hold their weight and tumbles over onto its side, sending them both crashing onto the floor with it. The tall lamp that stood over the back of the chair hits the table, the cord ripped from the wall and the light bulb shattering into pieces.

Niklas is on top of Victor now, hitting him repeatedly in the face, but Victor reaches up and grabs
Niklas’ throat and lifts him off of him, slamming his back hard against the floor. Victor stands up and kicks Niklas in the face before forcing his way through the room to get his gun.

In seconds, he’s standing over his brother’s surrendering body with the barrel pointed at his face.

“Victor, don’t kill him!” I manage to shout through the pain.

He blinks back into focus having been momentarily lost in a blind rage, and he glances at me.

“Please, don’t kill him,” I repeat in a soft, desperate voice.

“He tried to kill
you
,” he says, looking at me with a confused expression as though he can’t believe what I’m saying. “He
shot
you.”

I press my right hand harder over the wound, blood moves in-between all of my fingers. I’m starting to feel faint.

“Victor, he’s your brother. He’s only here because he was trying to protect you.”

He looks back and forth between me and Niklas, both of us lying bloody and helpless on the floor on opposite sides of the room. His face is consumed by conflict and pain and things that I can’t possibly understand because I’ve never had a brother or sister, I don’t know what it feels like to be loved in that way. Maybe Victor never knew either, until now.

I try to lift my head but I’m so weak that my cheek stays pressed against the scruffy carpet.

“Niklas is all that you have, the
only
family you have left,” I say. “I would do anything to have someone who cares for me as much as he cares for you.
Anything
.”

The room gets very quiet. I can see Victor’s eyes, clouding over with…I’m not sure. Is he even really looking at me at all? I feel like I can hear Niklas speaking but it sounds muffled and distant in my ears. I see the ceiling now. Just the ceiling. Thousands of minuscule holes open up to me from within the material and I feel like I can see every single one of them as they push down on me from high above. That warmth. What is that warmth I feel all around me like a blanket?

“Sarai?” I hear a voice say, but whose voice it is I can’t tell.

All I see is blackness. I try to lift my eyelids, but they’re too heavy.

I hear the voice again and a shot of pain radiates through my body when I feel like I’m being lifted into the air. I try to cry out, but I don’t think anyone can actually hear my voice.

I try to cry out….

I feel like I’ve been dreaming for days. The same constant series of images and voices all around me always sound calming yet persistent. The images, they’re what tells me that it’s not real because everyone I see are already dead. Javier. Izel. Lydia. Samantha. My mother. They walk by me in a sort of quiet, contemplative state as if I’m not even here. I can almost touch my mother’s hair when she passes.

I must be dreaming.

But the dreams are slowly fading and the strange, unfamiliar voices I hear are becoming more distinct. I feel like I’m trapped inside my own mind and it has forgotten that it controls my body. Because I can’t move anything. Not my eyes or my lips or my hands. I can’t even tell if I’m breathing on my own. But mostly what I think about are the voices, how clearer they’re becoming. I find myself concentrating as hard as I can so that I can focus on their words, but I never get further than the sound.

At least not until I hear Victor’s voice in the distance.

“I won’t be here long today,” I hear him say to someone.

I try to wake up, but I think the effort has the opposite effect because in an instant I’m consumed by blackness and all of the voices disappear.

More time passes. More dreams. More voices.

And then just like that as if a switched had been flipped in my brain, my eyelids break apart and I see that I’m lying in a hospital bed.

Victor is sitting next to me in a chair.

“You’re awake,” he says and smiles down at me.

“How long have I
not
been?” I’m still trying to put my mind back together.

“Three days,” he says. “But you’re going to be fine. They kept you sedated most of the time you’ve been here.”

I try to raise my back from the pillow, but the pain in my stomach is too much. I wince and my hands come up to put pressure on the area, but Victor takes my hands and guides me back down. “You can’t be moving around yet,” he says and stands up. He takes the extra pillow from a nearby chair and positions it underneath the back of my head. Then he pushes a button on the side of the bed to raise it to allow me to sit upright. An IV snakes along the top of my hand, plastered to my skin with white tape. It itches like mad.

“The bullet missed every organ,” Victor says as he sits back down in the chair. “You were lucky.”

Niklas’ face flashes in my mind.

“Or your brother is just a bad shot.”

I look down at my arms resting on the bed at my sides. I want to know what happened to Niklas and I feel like I should hope that he’s dead, but I can’t.

“Is he—?”

“No,” Victor says. “Half of me wanted to kill him, but the other half couldn’t do it. I just wonder which half would’ve won if you hadn’t been alive in that moment.”

I reach across the bed a few inches with my hand in search of his. He interlocks his fingers with mine.

“I’m glad you didn’t,” I say, pushing a faint smile through to the surface of my face. “I couldn’t live with myself if I had been the reason you killed your brother. I-I never should’ve come between you. I didn’t know what I was doing, Victor. I am so sorry.”

He squeezes my hand.

“You did something that no one else could,” he says and I eagerly wait for him to tell me what that could possibly be. “You made me remember that I
have
a brother, Sarai. He and I have practically sat side by side at a table as strangers for the past twenty-four years. And I see now that despite his faults, he has never once betrayed me.”

He pauses and his gaze veers off.

Then he looks back at me.

“In a sense he did betray me when he went there to kill you,” he goes on. “He betrayed me when he misled me so that he could get to you. Yes, that is a betrayal. But it’s a very different kind of betrayal.”

“I know,” I say. “Look at me.” He does. “You did the right thing. Regardless of what he did to me, you did the right thing and I don’t ever want you think I’ll feel differently.”

He doesn’t speak, but I know that look on his face, it’s the conflict that’s always there. I wonder if he’ll ever be rid of it.

Then he says, “But you did something else that no one else ever could.” His features soften and my heart is slowly melting. “You made me feel real emotions. You unlocked me.”

I reach out and touch his lips with my fingers, my hand cradling his chin.

The subject changes all too fast.

“Niklas will never hurt you again,” he says. “He gave me his word. And besides, he knows that if he ever tries that I won’t hesitate to kill him the next time.”

Then suddenly he adds, “You’re just as important to me as he is.”

I’m quietly stunned.

Victor stands up and walks to the window, crossing his arms looking out at the brightly-lit day. I can see that there are so many things he wants to say, so many loose ends he wants to tie up with me. But things have changed since Niklas shot me. I can feel it. And I won’t fight him anymore because I know that it has to be the way it is, that it has to end the way it’s going to end.

“I don’t expect to ever see you again, Victor, and I understand.” I swallow hard. I don’t want to say these words. “
It’s better this way, I know.”

“Yes, unfortunately it is,” he says distantly with his back to me. “I can’t keep you safe with the life that I live. I wanted to, but in the end, I couldn’t. I knew better, but I…”

I wait quietly.

“…but I was wrong,” he says, though I feel like he wanted to say something else. “I’m sorry, but there’s no other way.”

My heart is
breaking
….

“Promise me one thing,” I say and he turns only his head to look at me. “Don’t go to Germany. Don’t go to that man, your employer or whatever the hell he is. Niklas told me about what will happen if you go there.
Please
don’t go there….”

I hear him sigh softly and he looks back out the window.

“I can’t promise that,” he says and my heart crumbles. “But I can promise that I won’t just stand there and let someone kill me.”

That doesn’t make me feel any better, but I know it’s all he’ll give me.

He leaves the window and produces a package from a briefcase lying on the nearby table. He walks back over beside me and places it in my hand. It’s an elongated black box stuffed inside a tattered paper package that had been covered in tape at some time. I pull the box from the package and open the lid. A single stack of cash is inside along with an envelope that has been folded over length-wise to fit and a few other random pieces of paper.

“What’s all this?”

“Your real birth certificate, social security card, shot records, which you are behind on a few that you should get taken care of soon.” He points to the folded envelope as I’m opening it to see the contents.

I look at my birth certificate first
.
Sarai Naomi Cohen. Born July 18, 1990. Tucson, Arizona
.
I say my full name over in my head three times just so that it might feel real to me, real like it used to feel.

It doesn’t.

“How’d you get this?” I look up at Victor.

“I have my ways,” he says with a smile behind his eyes. “I also set you up a bank account. The details are on the rest of the documents in the box.”

“Thank you, Victor,” I say, setting my birth certificate down on my lap. “For everything.”

I mean what I’m saying to him. I would’ve been dead many times over if it weren’t for him. But saying these things to him, these goodbyes, are shredding every last bit of what’s left of my heart.

“When are you leaving?” I ask.

I don’t really want to know the answer.

I put the documents back into the envelope and close them away inside the box.

“In a few minutes,” he says and I choke back my tears. I want to be strong for him because I know this is hard for him too. “But there’s one more thing before I go.”

He goes to the door and opens it. In walks Mrs. Gregory. I’m so shocked that the only part of my body that moves are the tears streaming down my face. My hand comes up over my mouth. I look back and forth between them. They’re both smiling, Victor less so, but smiling nonetheless.

Mrs. Gregory, looking so much older than I remember her, walks toward my bedside with open arms and she envelops me in a hug. She smells of Sand & Sable perfume. She always wore it.

“Oh, Sarai, I have missed you so much.” She squeezes me gently, knowing just how to without hurting me. Her voice is heavy with emotion, but she’s vibrant with joy.

“I missed you too,” I say, squeezing her back. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

She pulls away and sits beside me on the bed, running her long, aged fingers through my hair.

But then my smile fades and my heart finally dies completely
when I look back at where Victor stood to see that he’s gone. For a long moment the things that Mrs. Gregory is saying to me sound muffled, forced somewhere far off in the back of my mind. I want to leap out of the confines of this bed and run after him. I swallow hard, pushing my scarred emotions down into the very depths of me and pull myself together as much as I can for Mrs. Gregory’s sake.

I turn back to
her and enjoy our reunion.