Reviving Izabel

CHAPTER TEN

Victor

Fredrik’s housekeeper arrives back at the house early in the morning. I’m awake just after dawn, having my coffee on the rock patio in the backyard when she enters the house. She sees me through the sliding glass door when she makes her way into the living room and then joins me outside.

“Would you like breakfast, señor?” she asks in Spanish.

I set the file consisting of my next job face-down on the wrought iron coffee table.

“Gracias, but I won’t be eating,” I tell her and then gesture toward Sarai walking through the living room in search of me. “But she will be.”

“I will be what?” Sarai asks as she steps through the opened glass door. She walks across the rock patio with bare feet, wearing another one of Fredrik’s t-shirts—it bothers me immensely that she’s having to wear his clothes rather than mine, but the only ones I have with me are those on my back—and a pair of loose running shorts. Her long, auburn hair is disheveled having just awoken and crawled out of the bed.

She sits on my lap and I fit my right hand between her thighs.

“Breakfast,” I answer.

Sarai yawns and stretches her arms above her before laying her head against my shoulder. I fit my left hand behind her at the waist to keep her balanced on my lap. The smell of her freshly-washed skin and hair sends my senses into overdrive.

She makes a subtle face, halfway rejecting the idea.

“You should eat,” I urge her.

Raising her head from my shoulder, she looks thoughtful for a moment and then turns her attention to the housekeeper. “Sure, I’d like some breakfast, if you don’t mind,” she says in Spanish.

For a moment, the housekeeper looks surprised that Sarai speaks to her in her native tongue, but she’s over it just as quickly.

The housekeeper nods and heads back into the house.

“I think I’ve put this question off long enough,” she says. “Where do we go from here, Victor? What am I going to do?”

I had been thinking about this very thing since I found out that she was in Los Angeles and after what she had done. I stare off toward the pool, lost in thought, my last desperate attempt to sort out the answers in my head. But they are as broken and unsettled as they ever have been. All except for one.

“Sarai,” I say, looking back at her, “you can’t go home. I knew this the first time I sent you back to Arizona. The situation wasn’t nearly as dire as it has become, but now that things have changed, you can never go home.”

“Then I’m staying with you,” she says and for the first time in my life, I can’t bring myself to protest such an issue. Not with her, or even with myself. The largest part of me, the flawed human part, wants her with me and I’ll stop at nothing to make sure that it works.

But I know it’s not going to be easy.

“Yes,” I say, running the palm of my hand across her smooth thigh, “you’re staying with me, but there are many things that you must understand.”

She gets up from my lap and stands in front of me, one arm crossing her abdomen, the other propped atop it at the elbow. Absently, she brushes her fingertips across the softness of her face as she stares out at seemingly nothing. Then she looks down at me and shakes her head with a perplexed look in her eyes. “I expected you to put up more of a fight. What’s the catch? Regardless of what happened between us last night, or what has been going on between us even when we were apart, I still never thought you’d agree to take me with you.”

“Would you like me to put up a fight?” I give her a wry smile.

She smiles back at me and her arms drop back at her sides. “No. Definitely not. I-I just….”

I bring one leg up and rest my foot on the opposite knee.

“I never imagined that I’d be in a situation like this,” I say. “I cannot lie to you and tell you that I think it’s going to work. It very likely won’t, Sarai, and you have to understand that.” Her face falls just slightly, enough that I know my truthful words have discouraged her more than she’ll let her expression reveal. “I cannot change my ways,” I go on. “Not only because it’s all I know, or that it’s what I’m best at, but also because I don’t want to.” I look her straight in the eyes. “I will never stop doing what I do.”

“I would never want you to,” she says with a level of intensity. She pulls the nearby empty chair around and places it in front of me before sitting. “All that I’m asking, Victor, is to stay with you. I will do whatever you expect of me, but I want you to teach—”

I put up my hand and stop her right there.

“No, Sarai, I won’t do that, either. It won’t be like that.” Her expression darkens and she looks away from my eyes, stung by my refusal. “I’ve told you before, I was practically born into this life. It would take you nearly the rest of your life to learn to do what I do, and even still it would not be good enough.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” she asks with a trace of resentment in her tone. “I want to be with you wherever you go, but I don’t want to sit by and do nothing, sipping on martinis on the beach while you’re out killing people. I’m not useless, Victor, I can do something.”

“There are many things that you can do, yes,” I cut in. “But doing what I do is completely out of the question. Why do you want this so much?” My voice had begun to rise with the question as I suddenly felt desperate to understand the answer.

The palms of her hands come down on the tops of her bare thighs creating a light slapping noise. “Because it’s what I want.”

“But why?”

She throws her hands up beside her and yells, “Because I enjoy it! All right?! I enjoy it!”

I blink a few times, completely stunned by her admittance. Truthfully, that was the last thing I expected her to say. A part of me knew that Sarai was more than capable of taking a human life and be able to sleep soundly every night afterwards, but I never anticipated that she would enjoy killing.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. I need more information.

I lean forward, raising my back from the chair and I come face to face with her. “You enjoy killing?” I ask, though it comes out more like a statement. “So, if you were asked to take someone’s life, would you do it without question?”

“No,” she says, her brows drawing inward. “I wouldn’t kill just anyone, Victor, only men who deserve it.”

Men? This side of Sarai is becoming more intriguing. I wonder if she even realizes what she just said. Men. Not people in general, but men.

I pull away from her and rest my back against the chair again, cocking my head to one side thoughtfully.

“Go on,” I urge her.

She leans back as well, pulling both of her legs up and resting her feet on the seat, letting her knees fall together to one side.

“Men like Hamburg. Men like Javier Ruiz and Luis and Diego. Men like that guard I killed last night. Willem Stephens, for the simple fact that he works for Hamburg knowing what Hamburg does. Men like John Lansen and all of the others who I met at those rich parties when I was with Javier.” Her gaze pierces mine harshly. “Men who deserve to have their throats slit.”

The gravity of her words, the determination in her face, it quietly stuns me into submission for a brief moment. Is it possible that I have not one, but now two killers in my midst who share a similar penchant for bloodlust? And just as his face crosses my mind alongside hers, I hear Fredrik’s car purring into the driveway. It steals the intense moment away and we both look up.

Moments later, Fredrik, dressed casually in a pair of dark-colored jeans and designer shirt, comes outside to join us. He drops the day’s newspaper on the coffee table and says, “You might want to have a look at that.” Then he glances at Sarai momentarily. “You look nice in my clothes, by the way.”

I glare at Fredrik from the side, but bite back my jealousy before either of them notice.

Sarai and I both glance down at the paper, but I’m the one who picks it up. Unfolding the paper, I scan the black text until I find what he is referring to.

Four bodies were found shot to death in an upscale Los Angeles hotel late last night. Only two of the bodies have been identified and are that of twenty-three-year-old Dahlia Mathers and twenty-seven-year-old Eric Johnson, both of Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

A few sentences down:

Sarai Cohen, also of Lake Havasu City, is wanted for questioning.

I suppose it doesn’t matter which identity she used to check into the hotel, her face is the same on both of them.

Sarai snatches the newspaper from my hands before I can finish.

“No…,” she grits her teeth as her darkening face peers down into the tragic news of her friends. She tries to make eye contact with me, but it lasts only a second before the paper seizes her attention again as if her mind hopes to have read it all wrong the first time. “I told them to leave L.A.! Dahlia said they’d leave—.” Her green eyes bore into mine, full of desperation and fractured by guilt.

I stand up.

Sarai takes the newspaper into both hands and rips it in half right down the center, crushing the leftover halves in both of her fists.

“They fucking killed Dahlia and Eric!” she roars. “They killed them!”

The paper falls from her hands and scatters about the intricate rock patio.

Fredrik just looks at me, waiting for whatever I might do or say. He doesn’t speak but I can tell that he wants to.

“Sarai.” I place my hands on her shoulders from behind. “I will take care of it.”

She swings around at me, her hair whirling around her head before falling back against her shoulders, fury burning in her features.

“THEY ARE DEAD BECAUSE OF ME! JUST LIKE LYDIA!”

Trying to calm her down, I forcefully grab her shoulders from the front and I hold her in place.

“I said I will take care of it,” I repeat with even more intensity and sincerity than before. I lean forward to keep her gaze fixed on mine. “I will do this for you, Sarai. Hamburg and Stephens will both be dead before this week is over.”

I’ve lost her. She’s staring right at me, but it feels more like through me instead. Her chest rises and falls with heavy, uneven breaths. Her pupils appear tiny, like pinpricks through a sheet of construction paper, the green of her eyes appears to have darkened.

“No,” she argues in an eerily calm voice. “I don’t want you to do anything.”

Absently she steps backward and my hands fall away from her shoulders.

“I’m going to do this for you,” I say. “I want—”

“I said no!” She takes two more steps back and then turns around, putting her back to me as she faces the pool.

“I’m going to do it,” she says quietly, resolutely. “I’m going to kill them and I want you to back off.”

“I don’t think—”

She turns her head, her dark eyes catching mine. “If you kill either one of them, I’ll never forgive you for it. This one is mine, Victor! Give me that much!”

“Sarai, you can’t kill them.” I walk toward her. “The only person who will end up dead is you. You’re not capable—”

“I don’t give a shit!” Her objective is unshakable. She walks back toward me. “You either help me pull this off, or I figure it out myself. They die by my hands, not yours, or Fredrik’s, or anyone else’s. Only mine. Teach me. Show me what to do. Whatever the best approach is for someone like me. Help me or I die trying to do it myself. I don’t care either way.”

“I won’t…you can’t,” I shake my head.

Sarai gives up and starts to push her way past me intent on leaving. But I can’t let her go anywhere. I can’t because I know that she meant every word of what she said.

I grab her by the wrist, stopping her in her angry march toward the glass door. Fredrik steps out of the way, watching the scene unfold with an odd glint in his eyes that I can only make out as fascination.

“Let go of me!”

“You’re not leaving.” I hold her wrist tight and grab the other one as she begins to struggle against me.

She wants to take all of her anger out on me, to scream into my face, to curse me with words she desperately wants only to say to Hamburg and Stephens before she kills them, but she can’t do any of it. The anger, as always, gets the best of her and she bursts into tears.

She told me once that she always cries when she’s angry.

The tears roll down her cheeks in rivulets. She tries once more to break free from me, but I hold on tight and put painful pressure on her wrists, hoping to allay her.

“Victor please! Just fucking teach me, goddammit! Even if it’s only to kill the two of them! That’s all I ask! I’ll never ask you to help me again! PLEASE!”

She finally stops struggling and collapses against my chest. I wrap my arms around her small form, cradling the back of her head in my hands and I press the side of my face against the top of her hair. The cries roll through her chest violently, her body trembling in my embrace. These are not cries of sadness and pain, they’re cries of guilt and anger and the dire need to avenge the deaths of people—even Lydia—who might still be alive if it were not for her.

Fredrik looks over at me and I know what that calm look on his face reads. He thinks I should give Sarai what she wants.

But it’s not Fredrik’s opinion that ultimately makes up my mind, it’s my need to protect Sarai that decides, even if by doing so she still might end up dead.

I choose the safer of the two ill-fated paths.

“I will help you.”