Behind The Hands That Kill

TWELVE

I’ve never seen a look like that on Victor’s face before. He appears…traumatized; that calm, impassive disposition he always carries, replaced by something more…fragile.

And he’s not even looking at me.

“Artemis…” Victor says in a sort of gasp.

I gasp too, stunned, and I turn my head to see the woman behind me, the same woman who dressed me and fixed my hair and did my makeup. The same woman who told me that she was someone else. And then, as if a dam has been opened, the answers to everything rushes into my head like a raging river. Ah, so that’s what that traumatized look is on Victor’s face. Now I know exactly how I must appear to him.

I feel a hand on the center of my back, and my body is pushed forward. With my wrists tied behind me, I fall, skinning my knees on the floor; my shoulder hits next, and then my face. Oomph! A sharp stab darts through my head and spreads throughout my jaw, neck, and back, and my only consolation is knowing it was from the fall, and not the cattle prod this time. I don’t know how much more of the electric shock my heart can take.

Artemis walks past me as if I’m not even here, and steps closer to Victor and the cage.

I’m lifted from the floor by unseen hands, and am shoved onto the chair I sat on before I was whisked away to this crazy bitch’s beauty salon. “Don’t move,” I hear Apollo say behind me.

Suddenly I feel the pull of Victor’s gaze; he isn’t looking at me, but I feel like he wants to—or that he’s trying not to.

“Victor?” I say, but he doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t look my way; I’m not sure what I would say if I did happen to get his attention.

But why won’t he look at me? Why is Artemis the only person in the room he acknowledges? I mean sure, he thought she was dead, he thought he killed her himself, but the look-like-he’s-seen-a-ghost syndrome should be wearing off by now.

How is she alive?

And why, Victor, won’t you look at me?

It takes every ounce of strength I have to keep from looking at Izabel right now. The second my eyes stray from Artemis, the very moment in which Artemis sees me look at anyone other than her, and Izabel will be punished for it.

I focus only on her. It is what Artemis wants: my devoted, undivided attention. She has waited so long for this day, this moment; she has trained for it no doubt—I would not be in this cage if she had not, if Apollo had not worked with her. And as I look at her, secretly studying her movements, the expression in her eyes, the confidence in her walk, I know that the woman before me is a far cry from the woman she used to be. Artemis Stone, my first love, my first real mistake, she is so very different from the woman I once knew. And I know that whatever happens here tonight, whatever kind of beast that unleashes from within her, that it was created by me fifteen years ago. And I know that I deserve the havoc it will wreak.

“The police,” I begin with the first of many things swirling around in my mind—I indicate Apollo with the tilt of my head, but never take my eyes from Artemis. “He knew he could not get to you before Osiris, so he called the police. That’s how they got there so quickly that night.”

Artemis steps up to the bars, curls her long, delicate fingers around them with both hands. For seconds that feel like minutes, she just looks at me, unblinking, unflinching, and I feel slightly destabilized by it.

More than a minute goes by, and still she says nothing. She just stares at me, injecting discomfort into every one of my limbs, weakening my confidence. Why will she not speak?

“Artemis—”

She raises her right hand to stop me, and I do. Then the same hand moves slowly toward her throat, and carefully she takes the zipper tab of her bodysuit between her thumb and index finger, and slides it down. Slowly, very slowly. Her penetrating gaze never wavers, and still, her eyes never seem to blink. Only when the zipper has stopped, just above her cleavage, and her hand moves to her side, do I look away from her eyes and behold the thing she wants me to see.

A long scar, smooth-looking and raised above the skin, discolored against her natural brown flesh, looks back at me. Ashamed and consumed by guilt and regret, my gaze finally falls from hers and I can look at no one, nor anything, except the palms of my hands. I hold them out in front of me, remembering the blood, Artemis’s blood, seeping through my fingers the night that I killed her. Because I did kill her—I killed the person she was.

“Look at me, Victor,” Artemis says, calmly, yet with command. “Look at what you’ve done.”

What I’ve created…

I raise my head. And I swallow.

“Now do you know why you’re here?” she asks.

I nod, unable to offer a verbal response. I want to look at Izabel behind Artemis, but I cannot do that, either.

Apollo stands quietly off to the side.

“Tell me why you’re here, Victor,” Artemis insists.

I do not. I cannot say it aloud, not when Izabel is in earshot. I see the dress that Izabel wears; I see the makeup and the curled hair; I see the black high-heel shoes—I see Izabel as a copy of Artemis fifteen years ago when she and I spent our one-year anniversary in that restaurant, the night I killed her. Yes, I know why we are here. I know why…

“Answer her,” Apollo finally speaks up.

He steps forward.

“No, Apollo,” Artemis says, without looking at him. “Please let me do this. You’ll get your turn, but right now, it’s all me.”

Apollo holds his position, and his tongue.

Artemis crosses her arms. “You asked my brother,” she begins, “why fifteen years—let me tell you the real answer to that question.” She cocks her head to one side. “In the beginning,” she says, “I just wanted to be prepared; I needed to be trained. I wasn’t anything when you knew me; I was just the daughter of criminals, a sister to a traitorous brother. I could hardly defend myself from a mugger at a bus station, much less hunt down a dangerous and elusive, not to mention elite contract killer, and manage to kill him without him killing me first. And I knew I had to keep to the shadows, stay dead to you.” She stands directly in front of me, fiercely holding my gaze. “And I did it. I pulled it off, to my surprise, to my brother’s surprise.” She pauses, and then says, “I guess since you thought you killed me, you had no reason to look out for me, giving me the chance to fly under your radar until I was ready. And when I was ready, Apollo said something to me the day I planned to make my move against you—tell him what you told me, Apollo.”

“I said it was a shame she couldn’t get you where it would really hurt,” Apollo speaks up.

“Yes,” Artemis says. “That’s what he said; half-joking of course, but I saw it as something else”—she twirls a hand in gesture—“I thought it would be perfect poetic justice to do just that: kill the one you love right in front of you since you felt it so easy to kill me.”

“It was not easy, Artemis,” I say with truth. “It was the most difficult thing I have ever had to do.”

“But you didn’t have to do it!” she shouts, and it stuns me. Then she calms her voice again and adds, “You could’ve found another way; if anyone can find a way, it’s you, Victor. We all know it, you know it. You didn’t have to kill me.”

“You are right,” I answer, again with honesty. “I could have found another way.”

“You admit it,” Apollo says with condemnation.

Artemis turns from my cage and puts the palm of her hand against her brother’s chest, stopping him from moving forward. She shakes her head at him as he stares me down. And after a few tense seconds, he steps away, glaring icily at me. But when his angry eyes pass over Izabel sitting obediently on the chair, my blood runs cold. Stay away from her, my eyes tell him. Stay away from her…

“Why fifteen years?” I bring the subject back, trying to avoid the latter. And to distract Apollo from Izabel.

Artemis turns. “Because it took that long for you to fall in love again,” she reveals. “I was willing to wait. I was patient. I wanted this moment to be perfect. After eight years, I thought I’d never get the chance. But still, I waited. Ten years, and you were as cold and unloving as the day you slit my throat. But still, I waited.” She grabs the bars again, and brings her beautiful face closer between them. “Then finally, I got the news: Victor Faust has gone rogue from The Order, allegedly because of a girl in Mexico”—she glances briefly at Izabel—“and I knew, despite Apollo telling me that it couldn’t be true, I knew that it was. I just felt it”—she holds a closed fist against her chest—“here in my little black heart, a heart that used to beat only for you…I knew it was true.”

Her hands slide away from the bars. But her gaze never falters.

“Why did you kill me, Victor?” she asks.

“That is not a simple question to answer, Artemis.”

She shakes her head, smirking.

“I thought I knew why for a long time,” she says. “The last words you said to me as you held that knife to my throat, told me everything I thought I needed to know—but I was wrong.” She looks back at Apollo and holds out a hand. “Give me the key.”

Apollo steps up solidly, argument in his features. “No, Artemis, I don’t think—”

“Please, brother, just give me the key,” she insists. “Victor won’t hurt me. Not because he gives a shit, but because he knows”—she looks me right in the eyes, threatening me with her gaze—“that if he does, you’ll kill his precious little Mexican redhead.”

Against his concerns, Apollo sighs, reaches into his pants pocket and places the key to my cage into Artemis’s hand. Then he motions to his left and right, and seven other people leave their positions and walk forward; three stand behind Izabel, pointing their guns at the back of her head; the other four stand at the opening of the cage, guns pointed at me. Apollo unsheathes a knife from his belt and holds it to Izabel’s throat. “I won’t think twice, Victor,” he warns.

When Artemis feels that the message has gotten across to me, she walks around to the front of the cage and inserts the key into the lock. She turns it fully and it clicks; I notice the hands of those standing at the entrance, tighten nervously on their guns.

Artemis passes the key off to the nearest guard, and then the cage door opens with a creaking sound. She steps inside the cell with me, closing the door afterward; it automatically locks. Carefully, slowly, she approaches me—secretly I look for evidence of any weapons on her, but she has none so far as I can tell. That is a shame.

“Just kill her, Victor,” Izabel calls out from the chair; her voice is now smothered by Apollo’s hand; his other hand putting pressure against the knife at her throat. “Say another word,” he taunts her, pressing the back of her head to his midsection, “and the gag goes back on.”

As desperately as I feel I need to speak out against Apollo, I know that I cannot, or it will give him more power. Ignoring Izabel, as much as I possibly can, may be the only thing that saves her. At least for a little while.

“Tell me, Artemis,” I say, looking up at her. “Tell me everything you have wanted to say. I will listen. I owe you that.”

She steps right up to me, places her palm on my beating heart. And she smiles, softly, innocently, the way she used to. But behind it I sense the devil within.

“Oh, you owe me more than that.” She waits, allowing her words to sink into me.

“You didn’t kill me,” she finally goes on, speaking in a gentle tone, “because you thought I’d had an affair. You killed me because you were looking for a reason all along. I’d remembered what you told me about that woman, Marina. Of course, I didn’t know the story the way you told it here tonight—you kept things from me because of what you are—but still, you told me more than what you were supposed to.”

“Yes, I did,” I speak up. “There were many things I did and said that I should not have.”

Artemis’s hand slides down my chest and away from me.

“Yeah,” she says, agreeing with deep regret, “and because of that, because you loved me, and stepped in a hole so deep you couldn’t see over it, you knew the only way to pull yourself out was to end my life. You knew that if you didn’t kill me, that The Order would kill you. But most of all, Victor, more than anything”—she points her finger at me—“more than anything, you needed to kill me for yourself. Not because you worried about what Brant Morrison would think of you, or report about you; not because your life was hanging in the balance by The Order—you killed me because you needed to, because you hated what your love for me did to you.” My ears ring and my head snaps sideways as her full palm smacks against the side of my face; the skin burns like fire, but I resist the urge the reach up and touch it.

Artemis glares coldly, unforgivingly. She leans forward and says, “And just so we’re clear, I never had an affair. The baby I told you I aborted was yours, Victor.” She pulls away.

“I know,” I say, at first under my breath. Then I raise my eyes, and my voice. “I did not believe it then, because I had had a vasectomy, but—”

“You didn’t want to believe it,” she cuts in sharply.

I shake my head. “No. I did not want to believe it.”

I feel her fingers digging into the flesh of my jawline; her warm, sweet breath on my lips. “Thinking that it wasn’t possible I’d been carrying your child,” she goes on, squeezing, “making yourself believe that I’d cheated on you, it all made it easier to do what you would’ve done anyway.” I see her eyes sweep over my mouth. And then she touches her lips to mine. “You would’ve killed me that night no matter the situation—even if I was still carrying your child.” She squeezes harder, nearly breaking the skin with her fingernails, and then she releases me abruptly, pushing my head backward.

“Say it, Victor,” she demands. “You would’ve killed me even if I was still carrying your child.”

For the first time since I had forced myself not to, I look right at Izabel; my face full of regret and apology and shame. “Yes,” I answer Artemis without looking away from Izabel. “I still would have killed you.”

Tears seep from the corners of Izabel’s eyes. A suffocating silence blankets the room like a stifling heat.