The Swan and the Jackal

Chapter Eighteen

Fredrik

“Yes?” I answer her, though at this point, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to force anymore of an answer than those three letters.

My life is over. Everything I ever thought I knew about Seraphina, about our life together, the love that we shared, it’s all over. Because now I know that there’s no way I can help her, there’s no way I can bring her back to me. She’s a danger to me, to herself and everyone around her. Even Cassia. Most of all…Cassia. Seraphina was disturbed when I met her eight years ago and when I fell in love with her. But I never knew the extent of her illness until now. I never knew that she suffered traumatic experiences as a child just as I did.

I never knew.

But she and I are very different despite our somewhat similar pasts. I don’t kill innocent people. I, while although a sadistic bastard and torturer and killer, have limits and standards. I know when to stop. I feel guilt for my mistakes. But Seraphina, I know now, doesn’t understand guilt or remorse.

How could I ever have been so wrong about her?!

How could I ever have been so blind?!

Love.

Seraphina was right all along. To be in love is to be dead already because eventually it kills us all.

Cassia raises her head from my leg and pushes her naked body up propped on one arm. She looks into my eyes.

“Talk to me,” she says and kisses my cheek. “Are you OK?”

I force a very light smile around my eyes and I nod in answer.

Then she lowers her eyes and I feel sadness and worry consume her emotions. Reaching out my hand, I raise her chin with the tip of my finger.

“Now you talk to me,” I tell her gently. “What’s on your mind?”

She swallows nervously and looks up, her brown eyes soft with worry. “Will you still protect me from her when you finally find her?”

My heart is dead. Black. No more. But not for Cassia. It just barely beats for her, though for how long it can hold on, I’m unsure.

I lean over and press my lips against her forehead, cupping the back of her head in the palm of my hand, and I hold it there with my eyes shut tight.

I’m going to have to do the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life soon. But for now, I will give Cassia whatever she wants from me.

“I will always protect you from her,” I say, pulling away slowly. “Seraphina will never hurt you again. I will make sure of that.”

Cassia gives me a warm, thankful look and lays her head back down on my lap.

We sit in silence for the longest time, me combing my fingers through her hair, until eventually she falls asleep. I move out from underneath her carefully so as not to wake her, and I cover her with the blanket after locking the shackle back around her uninjured ankle. I noticed the key was on the nightstand beside her bed all along and realized that I never brought it back up with me the last time I stormed out and left her alone. That was how she was able to get the shackle unlocked.

She never tried to escape, and I doubt that she ever will, but I can’t take the chance.

I leave Cassia alone and go back upstairs where I sit on the sofa in my boxers, staring into the darkness thinking about all that transpired. And I remain this way until the light of a new day burns through the curtains and pools on the floor beside my bare feet.

“Fredrik, what is it?” Izabel says into the phone, detecting the urgency in my voice.

“I just need to talk to you,” I say after finally breaking down and admitting to myself that I should talk to anyone at all. But if it’s going to be anyone, it can only be Izabel. “Are you back from Seattle? When and where can you meet me?”

“Yes. I got back this morning. Niklas and Dorian stayed behind to finish up. The other order sent only two men—easy-peasy.”

“OK, where can we meet?”

“Why don’t I just come to your house?” she asks warily. “I can be there in two hours.”

“No,” I say walking to my front door to let Greta inside. “We need to talk somewhere else. Anywhere but here.”

“Fredrik, you’re really starting to worry me. First you—”

“Can you meet me in Druid Hill Park?” I cut in. “Same parking lot we met before the Vanderbilt hit last month? Two hours.”

Izabel pauses.

“All right, I’ll be there.”

Running my finger over the screen, the call ends. Greta walks past me offering a rather skittish smile. She’s always been afraid of me, but after unlocking Cassia from her bonds without my permission, she likely didn’t want to come here today at all.

She sets her purse down on the kitchen counter, dropping her keys in the top of it afterwards. She starts in on cleaning immediately, bending over to retrieve a spray bottle of kitchen cleaner from underneath the sink and avoiding eye contact with me at all costs.

Already dressed in a pair of jeans, a thick black sweater and my more laid-back Converse shoes, I slip my arms down into my coat and prepare to leave.

“I’m going to be gone for a few hours,” I say, adjusting the neck of my sweater around the inside of my coat. “Under no circumstances will you unlock Cassia from that chain. Is that understood?” Lastly, I pull a black knit beanie over my head.

Greta nods with little eye contact. “Yes, Mr. Gustavsson.”

Swiping my keys from the counter, I hold them in one hand while double-checking for my wallet in the back pocket of my jeans.

Greta sprays the countertop and begins wiping it down.

“By the way,” I add, “Cassia might confide in you about the things she remembered.”

Greta looks up from her work, surprised. “She remembered?”

“Apparently.” I step up closer, seizing her nervous gaze. “But I don’t want you talking to her about it. Not unless she brings it up herself. And even then, say little in return. Let her do the talking if she needs to, but that’s as far as it goes. Do you understand?”

The confused look on Greta’s heavily lined face deepens, but she agrees with another tense nod of acknowledgment.

“Will you be here for dinner?” she asks as I’m making my way to the front door.

I don’t stop to answer and I step out into the cold winter air, heading straight for my car.

I stop for coffee and gas and then a newspaper, trying to find things to do to waste two hours. And to think. Mostly I think. How much do I tell Izabel? Not everything, but enough to—I’m regretting this meeting already. There’s nothing that Izabel can even do but give me advice, and since when was I ever the type of man who needed advice? I’ve never confided in anyone in my life other than Seraphina, and Willa before her when I was just a boy under the thumb of evil men. But now…now I’m desperate and I’m closer to no one in this world more than Izabel Seyfried. Victor Faust may be my friend and someone I believe I can trust, but he’s a man, and I’ve never been able to develop the type of bond with any man that I have with very few women.

My past with men forbids such bonds.

Two hours drag by endlessly and I spend the last half hour of it waiting in the parking lot of the park with the engine running to keep warm. The sky is gray and covered by thick winter clouds that will start dumping snow on everything at any moment.

Note to self: When this is all over, move south.

Izabel’s black Mercedes pulls into the parking lot. She parks next to me.

“Shit, it’s cold,” she says shuddering while hopping in the passenger’s side of my car and closing the door quickly.

I pass her a hot coffee in a cup with a lid.

“You know me so well.” She smiles and her big green eyes brighten thankfully as she takes the cup into both hands to warm them. Pursing her lips she blows on the steam rising from the small opening in the lid and then takes a careful sip, hissing when the liquid burns her lips.

“So, what’s this all about?” She sets the cup in the cup holder in the console between us. Then she adjusts her long, white coat, pulling it from underneath her bottom and then hides her keys away inside the pocket. Her long auburn hair is pulled into a silky ponytail at the back of her head.

I hesitate for a rather lengthy amount of time, dropping my hands from the bottom of the steering wheel and into my lap. My head falls back against the leather headrest.

“Well, before you say anything,” she says quickly, “I want you to know that I did tell Victor I was meeting you here.”

“I didn’t expect you not to tell him.” I smirk over at her and then jest, “What, you think I planned to kill you?”

Izabel laughs lightly and nudges me in the shoulder with a half-fist.

“I tell Victor everything, you know that,” she says with a smile. “Besides, you wouldn’t kill me.”

I raise a brow and one side of my mouth. “Oh really? You must think you’re special. Got news for yah, doll.” Her whole face breaks into a grin. “OK, you are kind of special,” I admit, but then point at her and narrow my eyes and say, “But don’t let that shit go to your head. I’d still kill you.”

She smiles, rolls her eyes and rests her head against the headrest for a moment.

Then she says, “Is this your way of breaking the ice?” Her head falls to the side so she can look at me. “Because I get the feeling whatever it is you have to tell me is something serious.”

“It is.” I nod.

“Well,” she says, looking forward at the windshield, “just remember the reason I told you about Victor.”

“I know,” I say. “Because you keep nothing from him.”

She raises her head and back from the seat and turns around a little to face me.

“I admire you for that,” I tell her. “That you’re honest with him.”

“I have to be. One, I love him. Two, if I’m not honest with him, he might kill me someday.”

I smile. “I doubt Victor would ever kill you.”

She looks at me in a sidelong glance. “You haven’t been around him much lately. All that power.” She laughs. “He scares me a little.”

The smile in her eyes tells me that she’s full of shit.

“Look, you’re like a brother to me,” she says getting serious again. “And if you ever asked me to keep anything personal about you a secret, I wouldn’t tell Victor, or anyone else. But I just wanted to give you a heads-up before you start talking, so you can be sure that whatever you’re about to say is something I should know, or not.”

“I know,” I say, “and I appreciate you looking out for me, but I’m only senseless on Wednesdays. I know what I’m doing.”

“Umm, Fredrik”—she smirks and tilts her head thoughtfully—“this is Wednesday.”

I sigh. “Yeah. I know.”

The smile drops from her face in an instant as she realizes just how serious this is, and how I know full well that I’m risking a lot by telling her anything.

Finally, I pick my cell phone up from the dashboard console and run my finger over the screen to open the live video feed from my basement. Izabel watches me intently while I wait for the video to appear. I watch it for a moment first to see if there’s anything out of the ordinary. Cassia is alone in the room for now, pacing the floor and dragging the chain around her ankle behind her. She’s wearing a thick blue robe over her nightgown that drops to her calves. She looks lost and anxious. I wonder briefly if Greta has been down there with her yet and then conclude that she must have because she had to have taken her breakfast.

I hesitate, collapsing my hand around the phone, and contemplate this whole thing quietly one last time, making sure I want to open the lid on this issue.

I hand Izabel the phone.

Reluctantly, she takes it from my hand and peers down at the screen. After watching a moment, and looking back and forth between me and the feed, she asks, “Who is she?” and then she looks at the screen again.

“Her name is Cassia.”

Another long pause.

Izabel looks up from the phone and at me for a longer time.

“OK,” she says simply, waiting for me to explain.

“That’s a live video feed,” I say. “From my basement.”

Her eyebrows crease with confusion.

“You have a girl in your basement? I don’t understand.”

I sigh heavily, having a difficult time trying to figure out how to tell her. What do I start with? What do I leave out? I have to be careful because Izabel is smart and will pick up on gaps in my story easily.

“I’ve been using her to help me find Seraphina.”

“Using her how?” Already Izabel looks disapproving. “What does she have to do with Seraphina? How long have you had her down there? Wait—.” She stops abruptly and looks at the screen one more time. When she raises her eyes to me again, full of suspicion and criticism, she says, “Is that a chain around her ankle?”

“Yes,” I admit.

Izabel tries to shake off her initial feelings of disapproval to give me the benefit of the doubt. “OK, so you’re interrogating her. She’s involved with Seraphina’s life of betrayal and murder and God knows what else. I get that.” She sets the phone down in the console.

I can tell by the look of uncertainty on her face that she’s not so sure any part of the excuse she just came up with is valid.

“No,” I admit with hesitation. “Cassia is an innocent girl. I’ve been keeping her prisoner in my basement for about a year now. Since five months after the Hamburg and Stephens job went down in New Mexico.”

Izabel freezes.

“A year?” she says aghast. “And she’s innocent? Fredrik, what the hell is wrong with you?”

I shut my eyes softly. “Just calm down and let me explain.”

She takes a deep, concentrated breath and just looks across the small confined space at me. “Victor was right,” she says and it makes my head snap around the rest of the way. “When he sent you home from Seattle, Victor told me that he had suspicions about your involvement with Seraphina, that it’s what’s been distracting you. I didn’t even know she was still alive until the other night, Fredrik.” She shakes her head gently. “Hell, the only reason Victor told me anything at all was because I was so worried about you and the way you’ve been acting lately. But Fredrik, you can’t do this to this girl, no matter what part she plays in Seraphina’s life. Not if she’s innocent. You need to let her go.”

“Izabel,” I say softly, hoping I can make her understand without telling her too much, “Cassia doesn’t want to be let go. She’s terrified of Seraphina. She wants to stay with me.”

Lines deepen in Izabel’s forehead as her brows draw inward.

It takes a moment to get her words together, but she says, “Wants to stay with you? Jesus, Fredrik, she has a chain around her ankle. She’s locked in a basement.” She motions her hands, emphasizing the words, trying to make me understand how ridiculous they sound. “If she wants to stay with you, why would you keep her locked up?”

“It’s just a precaution. In case she tries to escape.” Even to me my own words sound contradictory and stupid.

And judging by the forced smile in Izabel’s eyes, she thinks so, too.

But then her expression shifts suddenly as if a reasonable explanation just crept into her mind. “You’re in love with her,” she accuses and it shocks me a little—I hadn’t expected that, of all things. “You don’t want to let her go because you’re in love with her. It makes sense. And I can see something in you, Fredrik—I could sense something was different about you, and it didn’t feel like anything…bad. Just different.”

I want to say, Izabel, you’re way off the mark here, because what she’s saying is ridiculous, but at the same time it’s a way out. If she thinks the only reason I’m keeping Cassia prisoner is because I’m in love with her it will seem less cruel and Izabel could possibly force herself to live with my decision and keep my secret, even if just for a little while longer, until I can get everything straightened out.

“And she must be in love with you,” she goes on, her face lighting up with realization the more she puts the pieces together. “Stockholm syndrome. Makes perfect sense.”

It actually amazes me how much everything she just said does make sense.

Only thing is, none of it is true.

Izabel leans over the console and pushes herself into view. “But Fredrik, this is crazy, even for you—“

“Oh, well thanks for that,” I cut in with a faint smirk, trying to lighten the mood.

She smiles.

“You know what I mean.”

Of course I do, but I couldn’t help myself.

Then just as quickly as I had managed to inject a joke, I go back to the darkness and turn my eyes away from her, staring through the windshield at the cold, gray day.

“You know that Victor—hell, even I—will help you find Seraphina.” She rests her body against the seat again, still facing me. I don’t look back at her. “I know you think this is something you feel you have to do on your own—I completely get that—but it doesn’t have to be that way. Not at the cost of that innocent girl. Fredrik, why do you need her to find Seraphina?”

My shoulders rise and fall with a heavy sigh and my gaze strays toward my lap where my fingers fidget restlessly. And then after a moment of quiet contemplation, I tell Izabel the same story that Cassia told me last night about how she and Seraphina met. Izabel listens the entire time with parted lips and an ever-growing look of horror and sadness slowly twisting her features. I try not to look at her eyes at all because I can sense how much the story is affecting her personally. And I begin to feel regret for telling her, Izabel of all people, who lived nine years of her life under the rule of a notorious Mexican drug lord who molested and raped and kept her prisoner long enough to turn her into the killer she is today.

By the time the story is over, Izabel can’t speak for what feels like an hour but is just mere minutes. I see the raw emotions eating away at her brought on mostly by the things that Seraphina went through, the memories of her own life with Javier Ruiz and all the things from her past that she—just as I do with my similar past—tries every day to shut out of her mind. But also like me, no matter how hard she tries, the deepest scars never fade.

“Fredrik…,” she says softly and then turns her head to face me, “…you have to let that girl go. You have to, now more than ever.”

I shake my head no, though I didn’t mean for her to actually see me do it—it was a reflex. I can’t let Cassia go, and I won’t, no matter how hard Izabel presses me.

Why did I tell her any of this? What could I have possibly gotten out of it?

I feel her hand on my forearm as I grip the steering wheel. Her fingers tighten around my bone. “You listen to me.” Her voice becomes sharper, determined, and I finally look back into her eyes. “Look what she’s been through. Think about what you just told me.” She shakes my arm. “That cold bitch—regardless of the horrific things she went through—killed this girl’s mother and father. She was traumatized as a child because of what your ex-wife did to her. She went through something that no one, goddammit no one, should ever have to go through, and now she’s being kept a prisoner, chained inside a basement like an animal, and what makes it sicker is that she thinks she’s in love with you!” Her rising voice fills the car, her fingers are digging into my arm over the top of my coat sleeve.

Izabel looks a lot like I do when I need to torture and kill someone to appease the painful memories.

I can’t look at her anymore.

My fingers are white-knuckling the steering wheel.

Finally, I feel her hand loosen and then fall away from my arm.

“I’ll help you,” she says gently. “I’ll do whatever you need me to do, but you have to set that girl free. We’ll put her in a safe-house to protect her until Seraphina is caught—”

“No.”

Silence fills the car.

Consumed by regret and guilt and a plethora of other negative emotions slowly eating away at me, all I can say is, “I’m sorry for what you went through when you were with Javier Ruiz. And I’m sorry that I dragged you into this—I don’t even know why I did—but I’m not letting Cassia go. I need her to find Seraphina. She’s the only way I’m ever going to find Seraphina.”

After a moment, Izabel says somberly, “Then you’re not who I thought you were.” I hear the door click open and a rush of cold air escapes into the car.

“Where are you going?” I ask carefully without moving a muscle.

She swings the door open all the way and gets out of the car. Leaning over and inside with one hand propped on the edge of the door she glares in at me, her eyes full of anger and disappointment and pain.

“If you won’t let that girl go,” she says through her teeth, “I will.”

She slams the door shut, cutting off the frigid air filtering through the car.

“Izabel, wait!” I’m out of the car in seconds and walking around the front and toward her on the other side. “You can’t do that. You have to trust me on this!”

She stops at her door without opening it, crossing her arms tight against her chest as the wind pushes against her long white coat.

Disgusted with me, she shakes her head indignantly.

“I was wrong,” she says. “You don’t love that girl at all. You’re still in love with that crazy bitch. And you’re so in love with her that you’re willing to ruin an innocent girl’s life just to find her. As if what Seraphina did to her already isn’t bad enough! I can’t believe you’d do this, Fredrik!” Her voice cracks.

A small family approaches from the parking lot heading toward the conservatory. Hearing Izabel’s shouts, the father takes his little girl’s hand and pulls her closer between him and his wife. They watch us over their shoulders as they hurry up the walkway.

Izabel and I both wait until they slip inside the building before saying anything more, glaring into each other’s eyes, hers filled with more anger and disappointment towards me than I ever wanted to see.

“I can’t let her go,” I say calmly, one more time.

She turns on her heels and jerks her car door open, intent on leaving me standing here.

“Izabel!” My voice rips through the air.

She stops, standing wedged between the door and the frame, her face consumed by rage, her body rigid and conflicted by its need to get away.

I sigh heavily, and look down at my shoes, letting regret and pain crush me from the inside out.

And then finally I realize why I brought Izabel here, why I need her so badly.

“I can’t let her go…I can’t because Cassia is Seraphina….”

She stares at me blankly, yet behind her eyes is a lake of shock and confusion and denial and she’s drowning in it.

She steps away from the door, but leaves it open, and very slowly walks toward me. I study her quietly as she approaches, trying to decipher the seemingly impenetrable veil of perplexity that consumes her, and all I can make out from it is pain. Though I can’t tell who she’s hurting for: Cassia, Seraphina, me or herself.

The corners of her eyes begin to glisten with moisture. She steps onto the sidewalk and reaches out carefully to touch the side of my face, and the moment she does, that unnamed pain she harbors transfers from her and right into me. Her throat moves as she swallows her tears down. I realize in this moment that I do the same thing.

“Oh, Fredrik,” she says softly, shaking her head.

But it’s all she can say and she drops her cold hand from my face and rests her arm down at her side.

I choke back my own tears because they’re fucking ridiculous and they don’t belong in my eyes. I don’t have that right. I don’t want that right. Then I slide my hands into my coat pockets and straighten my face to look only like Fredrik Gustavsson, the Specialist, the Jackal—anything but the wounded man with the wounded heart who lost his right to weep or to care or to love, a very long time ago.

“I need your help, Izabel.”

She nods several times.

“Tell me everything,” she says.