The Swan and the Jackal

Chapter Nineteen

Fredrik

Getting out of the cold and the small space inside the car—Izabel said she needed more room to breathe after what I just told her—we found a quiet place to sit together inside the Desert House of the conservatory. The bench is tucked away between rocks and yucca plants and cacti. It’s very warm in here, a stark difference from the frigid temperature outside. Izabel and I removed our coats and draped them over our laps before we sat down. And I pulled my black beanie off and shoved it inside my coat pocket with my keys.

“Why do you keep looking at me like that?” I ask her about those sad green eyes filled with heartbreak and pity.

I won’t accept pity. Surely she knows that.

“I just…well, I just know how much you loved Seraphina,” she says with soft, pain-filled words. “I mean, I never knew the whole story, but I knew—I know—enough to know that this can’t be easy for you. I-I just can’t imagine—how is this even possible?”

I look down at my hands.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” I say with defeat. “I didn’t know the extent of any of this until last night.” I look over at Izabel to my left. “She finally remembered her past, or what she believes is her past. Izabel, I had no idea—I don’t even know what I’m saying. I’m as confused about all of this as much as you are.” My gaze falls to my hands again, draped between my opened legs, my elbows propped on the tops of my thighs. I fondle my thick, dark textured ring under my fingertips uneasily, briefly remembering the engraving I had placed on the inside that reads: The Jackal. To always remind me what the darkness inside of me was born from. In case I ever want to forget.

“What do you mean that she remembered?”

Hesitating, I look out at the desert flora, searching for signs of visitors who might be on their way inside to tour the room.

“Cassia—Seraphina—has had amnesia since I took her from the shelter after the fire…

One Year Ago –New York City

I had been tracking Seraphina for two weeks after seeing her on a news broadcast in Times Square, walking behind the reporter in a small crowd. I knocked a steaming hot cup of coffee onto my laptop when I saw her face flash across the screen. Six years I had been searching for her. Six years—since the night she killed the last of three innocent women because of me—I thought—, injected me with drugs, set my house on fire and dragged my body into the large field behind it so that I wouldn’t burn to death. I never saw her again after that night until a year ago. I thought she was long gone by then. Dead, even. Because it wasn’t like Seraphina to simply vanish. She liked the game. She lived for it. I expected her to leave me a trail of bodies—all women with blonde hair—to hunt her down. So, when I saw her that night after all that time, something dark and predatory triggered inside of me. Anticipation. Vengeance. Lust. Love…

I left Baltimore that day and went to New York City.

Two weeks later, I found her where I should’ve thought to look all along, working as a singer in an upscale Jazz and Blues bar and restaurant. There were no traces of a ‘Seraphina Bragado’ anywhere that I could gather in New York, or anywhere else, for that matter. I had been using The Order’s resources to run her name against everything for six years. She didn’t even have a birth certificate or a credit card under that name. But that didn’t really surprise me much because she was employed by another order, and like all of us, we never use real identification. But I had no idea that the reason I couldn’t find anything on Seraphina was because she was living under ‘Cassia Carrington’. She had an apartment in New York. She paid bills. She had a close friend who lived across the hall from her. And she was employed. Living a normal life out in the open and seemed to have been for a very long time.

Finally, after years of searching, I thought I had her.

I went to the bar that night, dressed in my finest suit, the way she always loved to see me dressed, and I had a plan.

The bar smelled of sweet cigars and bourbon and women’s perfume. I was intoxicated by the atmosphere. I had always loved places like this where the finest wines are served and the entertainment is classy and sophisticated. Seraphina, despite her profession as a killer, or her dark sexual needs that only matched my own, was quite a classy and sophisticated woman—when she wasn’t killing people, or sharing blood with me during sex, of course.

I chose a table, small and round and darkly-lit, just off to the left of the stage so that I’d be in sight, but not the first face she saw when she stepped up to the mic. A small handful of instruments occupied the stage behind where she would be standing, and two more tall microphones were positioned behind and to one side of hers where the backup singers would be.

Already it was bringing back so many memories of when we were madly in love for two short years.

I had never been so anxious—my stomach had collapsed into a rock-solid ball of hot muscle burning through my insides. My throat was painfully dry no matter how many times I sipped from my whiskey glass just to wet it. But I kept my composure flawlessly, not letting on to anyone sitting at the tables around me that deep inside I was ready to explode with anticipation and need that only Seraphina would understand.

The band came out on stage quietly and took their positions, and then the backup singers, dressed in matching lacy black dresses that hugged their bodies down to their knees.

Seraphina came out last.

She was beautiful. The most beautiful thing I had ever seen, just as she had always been since the day we met. Only this time long, flowing blonde hair draped her shoulders, fixed perfectly so that each side fell in a silky blonde wave and ended in a half-curl just below each breast. Not a strand of hair was out of place. She wore a short cream-colored dress adorned with feathers and diamond-like flower sequins laid out in an intricate pattern about her hips and thighs. And tall high-heeled cream-colored shoes with sparkling silver glitter around the heels and the soles.

I was mesmerized by her. I had never seen her with blonde hair and only a hint of makeup of natural rose-colored shades, or dressed in something so light and soft. Seraphina had always dressed in black. Wore her hair black. Colored her eyes and lips darkly. It was as if an angel had replaced the devil right before my eyes.

I had no idea just how true that thought was. Not then.

The music began to play and immediately the familiarity of it struck me numb. My hand tightened around my whiskey glass. My shoulders went rigid and I stopped breathing in the moment.

The lyrics to Wicked Game came through her lips, so sultry and soul-filled. Exactly the way I remembered her singing it to me years ago. Did she know I was there? Had she seen me enter the building, or walk through the room in search of the perfect table? Had she known I was in town all along and had found her? It was possible. Seraphina was a master assassin and spy. She was at the top of her game, difficult to hide from and impossible to escape once she’d found you. She had always been a step ahead of me.

But the more I watched her, the more I began to reject that idea.

A few times she made eye contact with the crowd, in between closing her eyes to emphasize particular lyrics. She moved her slim, curvy body in time with the slow beat, gestured her ring-covered hands out in front of her every now and then.

That anxious, hot ball that was my stomach had begun to set my chest on fire when the song went on and on and she never noticed me. I wanted to stand up and look her straight in the eye, but I didn’t. I sat there appearing as calm as everyone else who was just there to enjoy the entertainment.

By the time the last chorus came, I thought surely I was going to have to move to another table so that she’d see me.

But then finally she did.

Her soft brown eyes locked on me from across the short distance. And then she looked away.

Seraphina didn’t know me.

Even if she had been pretending, I would’ve detected it, the smallest hint of recognition. She had none. I was to her the same as any man who sat in the audience that night, making love to her with my thoughts, drinking from her soul as she poured it out across the audience in teasing amounts through her voice.

I was baffled.

And heartbroken.

I may have wanted to kill her—because I knew I had to—but I still loved her intensely, and when the only woman I have ever loved looked me in the eyes and didn’t know who I was, I didn’t know what to do anymore. With myself. With anything. It was hard enough to live the past six years of my life without her, but I at least had hope that she was still out there and that we would be together again someday. But after this, my plan—there was no plan any longer.

After that night, I began following her and watching her even more closely. I went as far as breaking into her apartment on the third floor of her building and bugging her home.

Seraphina, living as Cassia, was as normal as anyone. The conversations she had with her friend from across the hall were about work and bills and rent and men, to which only the friend had much input on men. Seraphina was single, and according to the friend, had been ‘manless for far too long’ and needed to ‘loosen up a little’. The two of them even had sexual relations which, I admit, excited me as I listened to them through the audio feed in Seraphina’s bedroom. But they were just friends, letting off sexual steam because it was readily available and neither of them expected anything more from one another. Having sex with women wasn’t out of the ordinary for Seraphina, anyway. She did it often when we were together, though only with me involved. Men—that’s another story. I had been the only man she’d ever been with. Until Marcus from Safe House Sixteen. Again, that’s another story…

But this Seraphina wasn’t my Seraphina. She was nothing like her, and without the black hair and heavy, dark makeup, she hardly even looked like her. I began to think that maybe she had a twin that I never knew about. But I quickly rejected that idea, too, once I thought of her up on that stage, singing that song with the same notes and emotion that she had sang it to me.

She was Seraphina, after all, but she wasn’t herself.

And I was determined to find out why.

Another two weeks passed and I was on my way to her apartment again one cold night in December when I heard police, ambulance and fire truck sirens blaring clamorously between the old buildings of the street she lived on. I smelled smoke. As I picked up my pace, my hands buried deep in my coat pockets, I hurried toward the building as a hot, orange glowing light burned against the surrounding structures. People were standing around on the sidewalks, watching and pointing, all huddled in night robes and big coats and scarves tossed messily around their necks. I stood among them, watching with a quiet horror as Seraphina’s apartment blazed with licking flames into the cold, dark, night sky. The fire had started from her apartment and was quickly spreading to the rest of the building as the fire department worked swiftly to put it out.

I felt dead inside, like something had crawled inside my soul and died there. I thought she was dead. That apartment was engulfed in flames. But then, from the corner of my eye, and past all of the shuffling emergency response workers clamoring to and from within the street, I saw her lying on her side on the frigid sidewalk surrounded by two EMT’s and a pile of old furniture and boxes probably left outside after a recent vacancy in the complex.

I sucked in a quick breath, relieved to see that she was alive. And for a moment, I could’ve sworn, just before she was hoisted onto a stretcher, that she saw me from across the street, even through the darkness and the gathered crowd. And I could’ve sworn that she knew who I was for a fleeting moment. I could sense it, like a predator can sense fear.

My heart skipped two beats and rattled boisterously behind my ribs.

She saw me and she knew me.

The game was back on. Or so I thought.

Nearly thirty minutes later, when I had resolved in my mind that I was going to end up following her to the hospital, Seraphina was helped out of the ambulance by the EMT’s. I faintly heard her rejecting their recommendation that she go with them to the hospital for further tests. Waving her hands about in front of her, she told them no, and then she left, walking in the opposite direction of the burning apartment complex and slipping into the dark shadows cast by the surrounding buildings.

Stepping off the sidewalk, I made my way through small pockets of gawkers and followed her.

The farther away she got, the quieter everything became. The sirens and the voices began to fade into the background. The emergency lights bouncing sporadically off the buildings were reduced to vague flashes in the distance. Where was she going? I began to wonder if she even knew herself.

With the blanket the EMT gave her draped over her shoulders, Seraphina continued with a severe limp, down the dark sidewalk heading deeper into the outskirts of the city. I kept my distance, staying in the shadows so she wouldn’t see me. Did she know I was following her? And if so, where was she leading me?

Fifteen minutes turned into thirty. Forty-five. Nearly an hour of walking endlessly, up one block and down another, through traffic and past stores, I knew she had no idea where she was going, or even where she was. And if she was just fucking with my head—which was always possible—she was doing a damn good job of it.

I followed her all the way to a homeless shelter, where instead of even going inside, she sat down in front of the building on the cold, hard concrete of the walkway and wrapped the blanket tighter around her shivering and bruised body.

She raised her eyes when I stepped up in front of her.

“Hello,” she said cautiously.

I tried searching her eyes for the same recognition I thought I saw in her earlier, but it wasn’t there.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

She looked up at me again, afraid to make eye contact. She pressed her bare knees together and clasped her hands around the knit fabric underneath the blanket. Puffs of breath moved through her lips. She wore no shoes.

“I’m just sitting down,” she said with an absence of understanding in her own answer.

Leery of her, and halfway expecting her to slice my ankles open with a knife hidden beneath the blanket and then run away grinning back at me, I took a step back and crouched down in front of her, the ends of my long, black coat touching the sidewalk.

Black streaks of soot were smeared across her reddened cheeks. The whole right side of her face was one large series of scratches, as if someone had grabbed her by the head and scraped her face against the asphalt until it bled. She shook from the cold and from her fear of me.

“P-Please just leave me alone,” she said, looking up to keep me in her sights, but trying not to make eye contact.

“Sera—.”

I stopped myself and said instead, “What’s your name?”

She frowned.

“I don’t know you. Please just leave me alone.”

“Do you know your name?” I asked. “If you can tell me your name, I’ll leave you alone.”

She couldn’t.

A large part of me still didn’t believe her. I believed she was suffering from amnesia, yes, but I was still convinced that once she remembered who she was, the game of a lifetime would be back on and pick up where she and I left off six years ago.

And I wasn’t about to lose it this time.

After coaxing—and manipulating her, taking advantage of her obvious vulnerability—I talked her into going home with me, and once I brought her to Baltimore, she became my prisoner. I would make her remember who she was and have her in my grasp the moment she did.