Behind The Hands That Kill

THREE

My fingers are finally starting to move again; the blur is beginning to clear away from my eyes, but little good it does when the people who kidnapped us are wearing black masks over their faces. And despite the minimal movement in my hands, I am in a small cell with iron bars, and without a key or a lock pick, I can do nothing to free myself.

The stone floor is warm and moist against my bare back; I am wearing no shoes. The air is humid and reeks of mildew. Wet straw. Remnants of animal feces and urine. It smells like a farm or a zoo or a circus, which leads me to wonder what kind of animal was in this cage before me, if it died in here, and if I will be treated with the same cruelty.

Izabel. Where is she?

I struggle to move my eyes in search of her; I still cannot lift my head. I feel myself straining—every part of me—but the effort produces no results. The drug is taking too long to wear off; I feel trapped in my own skin, and I would rather be dead than to feel like this.

I close my eyes and sleep—sleep always speeds up time.

I wake to a scraping sound, and the distant clatter of voices. Arguing. Cursing. But the people are not in the same room; I think they are behind a door, somewhere to my left. I can feel my toes now. I can move my legs, my hands, my head—but I refrain; as much as I want to get up from this filthy stone floor, or at least raise my head to look for Izabel, I remain still. Because although I cannot see him, although I have only ever heard two distinct voices since the hotel room in Caracas, I know there is a third person. A man. I saw the masked figures look at him on two separate occasions, giving away his authoritative presence. I can sense him watching me now, I can feel his eyes on me; I can smell his cologne, his sweat—he is close, right behind me, sitting in the dark on a metal chair on the other side of the bars. I had heard the chair legs scraping lightly against the floor moments ago. It was the sound that initially woke me.

“Fifteen years,” the man says, breaking the silence, “seems like a long time, doesn’t it, Victor?”

I hear him get up from the chair, I can hear his footsteps moving slowly over the stones, but he stays behind me in the shadows. I hear the snap of a lighter, and seconds later the potent smell of cigar smoke reaches my nostrils. I am thankful for it; it suffocates the stench of animal.

There is no reason to pretend any longer—he knows that I am awake.

“Kidnapping does not suit you, Apollo,” I say; my bones feel like they have not been used in days as I struggle into a sitting position.

Apollo’s laughter is as deep and suave as his voice; he puffs on the cigar, taking his time.

“And stupidity doesn’t suit you, Victor—you know why you’re here.”

Yes, I do—revenge for what I did fifteen years ago. Not to mention the substantial bounty on my head.

I push myself into a stand with difficulty, my legs still do not feel like a part of me; my breath is heavy and uneven; my head spins. I reach out and grab the vertical iron bars to steady myself, shaking off the remnants of the drug, but it clings to the back of my eyes and the crevices of my brain like spider webs.

“So how much did they tell you my head is worth?” I’m looking down at my bare feet; yellow straw helps to cushion them against the floor.

“Oh, now let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Apollo scolds, playfully. “I’d like to get the questions about that girl of yours out of the way first.”

“What questions?” I ask, pretending.

Apollo laughs; the darkness illuminates briefly with a soft orange glow as he takes another puff of his cigar.

“You always were the unpredictable type,” he says, takes another puff. His voice draws closer as he steps out of the shadows and into the light of the moon beaming in through three high windows. “OK, so if you’re gonna pretend you don’t give a shit about her, then I’ll just get to the point.” He steps up to the bars—I could reach him if I wanted, but if I do anything stupid, Izabel will pay the price.

Apollo smiles craftily amid his dark skin; smoke floats in a cloud around his head. Dark eyes stare back at me with a sort of sick delight—it looks very much like revenge, despite his claims. Short black hair. Sharp cheekbones. Perfect skin. He looks so much like her—Artemis, his twin sister. It bothers me a half a second longer than I like.

“By all means,” I tell him, urging him to ‘get to the point’. But then I try to do it for him. “Let me guess,” I begin. “You want something from me first. Information. Money. Something you cannot get from Vonnegut. And if I do not give it to you, Izabel will die.” I look him straight in the eyes. “Is that about right?”

He smiles.

“Not necessarily,” he answers, and I detect the satisfaction in his voice—it is not often that I am wrong about these things, and he is enjoying the rare moment.

Apollo drops the cigar on the floor and crushes it with an expensive black dress shoe.

“You really are slipping, Faust,” he says, shaking his head. “It amazes me—never thought I’d see the day; the legendary Victor Faust, Golden Boy of The Order, one of the most dangerous men alive”—he chuckles, shaking his head again—“and now look at you”—he points at me in a disgusted fashion—“in a cage, like an animal, and it all started with that girl back in Mexico.” He turns his back to me and walks away from the cage. “Now I don’t know too many details about when you went rogue from The Order; I don’t even know if the shit that I heard is true: about how you helped that girl and risked your life for her—hell, I even heard you almost killed your brother to protect her.” He turns to face me, something dark and serious in his eyes. “That’s fucked up, bro. You know that saying about blood being thicker than water? It’s true. Family comes first.” He should know—Apollo was betrayed by his own flesh-and-blood brother, Osiris. He is still bitter about it, I see.

“Falling in love with someone makes them family too,” I say. “Then it’s just a matter of which family member deserves your defense—my brother deserved a bullet at that time, not unlike your brother fifteen years ago, if I remember correctly.”

Not liking my answer, but unable to argue with it, Apollo tracks back to what he was saying before. “Anyway—I don’t know too much about when you went rogue, but it’s pretty fucking plain to me that you’re here, in this situation, because of that girl. And now you just admitted to being in love with her. Thought I was gonna have to break that out of you.”

I thought he was too—I did not even realize until now that I had said it out loud. So much for pretending Izabel means nothing to me in hopes they will not harm her. Apollo is right—I am slipping. But I knew that already. I have known that for a long time. Only now do I realize just how severely.

Other things are becoming clear to me as well: the real reason I was commissioned for the hit in Caracas.

“I take it you had a big hand in the job here?”

Apollo smiles.

“So then,” I go on, “I was brought to Venezuela under false pretenses just to get me where you wanted me.” I should have sensed something misleading about this job. I hope Apollo does not see that realization on my face, but I get the feeling that he does.

Apollo nods, and a smirk pulls one corner of his mouth. “You’re slipping, just like I told you,” he says, proving my assumption.

“Yes. I admit it. Vonnegut should have taken a page from the handbook of the SC-4—they are true soldiers. Emotionless. Loveless. Merciless. In a way I envy them.” I look away, lost in my thoughts, feeling regret for thinking them at all. If Izabel knew how often I thought of Nora…I have wanted to tell her, but for a long time I feared she would not understand. I had planned to tell her in the hotel, but the moment was…interrupted. Maybe it was for the best. Maybe none of that matters anymore now.

I look up at Apollo again, shaking the thoughts from my mind.

“So how many of your family are left?” I ask.

Apollo drags the chair he had been sitting on before, out of the shadows, and places it near my cell. He sits down, props his right ankle on his left knee, and folds his hands loosely within his lap.

“Me. Osiris,” he says, and casually gestures one hand. I get the feeling there are others.

“What about your sister, Gaia?” I say. “You were close with her.”

“Killed last August,” he says. “Pissed off boyfriend, or some such shit.”

I nod.

There is a pause, and then Apollo says, “Do you ever think about her?” shifting the subject to the one I was brought here for.

“Artemis?” I ask.

“Yeah, Artemis—who the fuck else would I be talking about?”

“What does it matter?” I say.

“It’s just a question. Do you still think about my sister?”

“No.”

Apollo seems only mildly surprised—I cannot tell if he believes me. I am a skilled liar by default—except when it comes to Izabel—but if I am slipping as much as Apollo believes me to be, then he will probably know that I am lying about this. I do think about Artemis from time to time. She was the only woman who ever came close to being as important to me as Izabel is.

The memory, to this day, haunts me.

My eyes sprang open and my hand instinctively went for my gun on the nightstand. But the sweet, hysterical laughter, and the thin, delicate fingers digging into my sides, brought me into reality quickly.

“Happy Anniversary,” Artemis said, nuzzling her head into the side of my neck; she sat on my waist, straddling me on our bed; her hands still worked futility to tickle me.

I smiled up at her, reached up and cupped the sides of her face within my hands and pulled her down to kiss me. Her lips were soft, careful, as if she worried she might break me. She had always been that way with me; I thought it both amusing and endearing at the same time.

“One year ago today,” she said, her mouth inches from mine, “I met the only man in the world who can put up with my shit.” She kissed my forehead, then straightened her back and rose into a sitting position atop me.

“Are you going to let me up?” I asked. I could easily get away, and she knew it, but I enjoyed giving her more power over me than she really had.

I felt her thighs tighten against my hips; she grinned.

“No,” she said, “I want you to stay in this bed with me for the rest of your life.”

“If that is what you want,” I said, matter-of-factly, “then that is what you will get, my love.”

I felt myself growing beneath her; the palms of my hands moved up her thighs and I clutched her hourglass hips within them.

Curiously, Artemis cocked her head.

“What?” I asked.

She sighed lightly, looked away from my eyes for a moment long enough to make me wonder if she was ever going to answer.

“When you call me that,” she began, “sometimes it feels…”

“It feels what?”

She sighed again, a bit deeper this time; then her dark eyes fell on mine with a sense of urgency that made me uncomfortable.

“Forced,” she finally answered, and I blinked, stunned. “I don’t know, it just…I don’t know.”

“Speak your mind,” I told her, moved my hands up and down her bare thighs in hopes of comforting her. Of course I could have asked the obvious question: Are you insinuating that I do not love you, Artemis? But I needed to stay as far away from that topic as I could.

Artemis frowned, pouted, the way she always did when she was trying to get me to baby her. I liked it—that childlike frown, and babying her. I reached out and grabbed her around the waist, pulled her down on top of me, and with a little less aggression than she had with me, dug my fingertips into her sides.

A peal laughter filled our small apartment bedroom; she kicked and screamed. “Please stop! Victor please! I’m going to pee—PLEASE STOP!”

Of course, I didn’t stop.

And, of course, she did pee.

When I saw the look on her face—I was on top of her by then—that blank, horrified expression that could only be caused by pissing one’s self, I finally stopped tickling her, and I roared with laughter. I laughed so hard and for so long that tears steadily seeped from the corners of my eyes.

“Victor!” Her size-seven foot hit me square in the chest and sent me flying across the bed.

It made me laugh even harder—I thought I might piss myself, too.

I snap out of the private reverie.

Laughter. Smiles. Tickling. That was a time so long ago, when I was the one still wet behind the ears, despite my progression in The Order. Still so young. So incredibly foolish. But most of all, vulnerable. Needless to say, I learned from that mistake.

Or so I thought I did.

“Judging by that look on your face,” Apollo says, “I don’t believe you.”

I look over at him.

“Yes,” I answer with honesty this time, “sometimes I still think about Artemis.”

The woman holding me hostage in this room looks over at me, expecting some kind of response, knowing it’s the moment she’s going to get one. A shift of my facial expression? The tensing of my shoulders? The holding of my breath? How about all three?

“I don’t want to hear this,” I tell her, looking away from the speaker on the desk where I’ve been listening to Victor talk to some guy for several minutes now.

“You don’t have a choice,” she says.

She’s wearing all black, every part of her covered but her head and her hands. Black boots that stop just below the knees. Black bodysuit that zips up the front from her navel to just beneath her chin. Black hair pulled into a tight braid that drops to the center of her back. Black eye shadow. Even the gemstone on her only ring is black.

“Does it bother you?” she asks, stepping toward me with a gun in her right hand.

“What exactly?” I can’t look her in the eyes.

The soft sound of laughter finds my ears.

“That the man you love,” she begins, drawing closer, “loved someone before he loved you.”

I laugh lightly, though it’s fake. And forced. Swallowing my pride, I keep the woman in my sights, but keep my eyes on the wall beside her.

“Why would that bother me?” I say, pretending that it doesn’t. “It would be ridiculous—everybody has a past.”

I can sense the woman smile, I can feel her eyes on me, studying me, laughing quietly at me like a bearded woman in a freak show circus.

Then I feel the cold metal of her gun press against my temple.

“Go ahead. Shoot me. I have a feeling before this is all over, you’re going to anyway.”

There’s a pause, and then she says as if she’s bored, “As much as I’d like to, me killing you wasn’t part of the plan.” Not sure I’m comfortable with the emphasis she put on ‘me’.

“Well, if using me to get Victor to talk was part of your plan”—smirking, I turn my head to look her in the eyes, despite the barrel of the gun—“then you’re going to be disappointed.”

She smiles, and the gun falls away from my head.

“That’s probably true,” she says. “Because a man like Victor Faust—specifically Victor Faust—is incapable of choosing a woman over his nature.”

She has no idea what Victor would do for me—I know, but I don’t want her to know, or this could end badly for both of us.

“But surely you knew about Artemis,” she says. “Or did he have you believing he’s never been in love with anyone but you before? Think you popped his love cherry, huh?”

I want to smack that mocking look off her gorgeous black face, but she’d probably retaliate with a bullet in my glowering white one.

“I don’t care what Victor did in his past, or who he loved.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yeah.” I nod, pursing my lips defiantly. “Pretty sure.”

She smiles. Ah! I hate that!

“I wonder if you’ll change your mind before you walk out of here—if you walk out of here.”

Both of my brows rise curiously. “So then it’s a choice?” I ask, leery of the prospect, and the conditions surrounding it.

Her smile melts into a mysterious smirk; she looks at me sidelong, without moving her head, to follow my movements, which are few.

“That’ll be Victor’s decision,” she answers, cryptically, and for some reason I can’t figure out, a chill moves up my spine.

The woman walks back over to the desk, fits her thumb and index finger on the volume knob of the computer speaker, and Victor’s voice fills my tiny cell of a room.