The Swan and the Jackal

Chapter Twenty-Six

Fredrik

“How is she?” I ask Greta over the phone, sitting in my car at the airport after just arriving back in Baltimore.

“Well, from the video feed,” Greta says, “she’s doing just fine. But I don’t feel right about this, Mr. Gustavsson. Cassia knows I’m here and it must be confusing to her why I haven’t been down to see her yet.”

“She’ll understand.”

Greta hesitates, likely rearranging the words she had been about to say, and says instead, “Will you be returning soon?”

“Yes. I’m already back in town. I have a few things I need to take care of and then I’ll head that way. Expect me no later than midnight.”

“Yes, sir.”

This is it.

This is the moment in which I have to make a decision. I can’t go back to that house until I figure it out. I can’t because one look at her and my mind and emotions and decisions will be dictated by her and all my reason will leave me.

My hands tighten around the steering wheel as I stare out the windshield at the cold evening where exhaust swirls chaotically from the tailpipes of running cars. I watch people come and go from the airport parking lot, dragging their wheeled suitcases behind them through a lightly dusted snow-covered sidewalk. Businessmen. Couples returning from vacation or arriving here to spend the holidays with family. All normal rituals catered to by normal people. I’ve never dreamed of being like they are. You have to know a normal life before you can miss it and dream about having it again.

The only life I miss is the one I lived with Seraphina.

I leave the airport and find myself in the same diner I was in a few nights ago, and for the same reason—I can’t go home. And the very same waitress who served me that night is also here on this night. She steps up to my table with a bright white smile and average-sized breasts and long, dark hair pulled into a ponytail at the back of her head.

“Back again so soon?” she says, holding an order pad in the palm of her hand. “Can I start you off with some coffee?”

“Yes, thank you.” I smile slimly and lay my arms across the table.

Watching her walk away, I study the perfect shape of her body—the curve of her hourglass hips, the roundness of her ass, the naked skin on the back of her neck where little strands of chocolate-colored hair have broken free from the ponytail holder.

But all I can see is Cassia.

Before the waitress comes back with the coffee, I’ve already left the diner and am heading straight for my house.

It’s just after ten o’clock at night. There are two lights burning on the upstairs floor—the kitchen and likely the television in the den. I stare at the house for a long time, thinking about Cassia. About Seraphina. About how any of this could’ve ever happened.

I’ve made a decision.

I’m going to help Cassia. No matter what it takes, I’m going to help her get better. I remembered on the drive home what I had read in the files Izabel gave me:

The treatment to help Carrington cannot be successful if Carrington is not the personality that I’m treating.

But Cassia is here now and she has been for a year—more than a year because she’s been living as her true self for a while, made a life for herself in New York. That has to mean something. That has to be good news. I will get her the best care in the world.

I’m going to help her.

I step out of the car and into the cold air, walking briskly up the sidewalk toward the front porch. But before I put my key in the doorknob, my instincts start going haywire. Greta never once peeked through any of the curtains while I sat in the driveway in the running car. I’ve not seen her shadow moving through the lights in the house. She’s not eager to open the door for me.

The pit of my stomach grows into a heavy knot.

My mouth has run dry of saliva.

My heart is heavy.

I open the door carefully and peer inside the dimly-lit house finding it eerie how quiet it is; only the low volume of the television in the den making any kind of noise.

“Greta?” I call out carefully.

No answer.

Then I hear the pipes squeaking and I recognize it right away as the shower being turned off. Letting out a heavy sigh of relief, I finally close the front door behind me and make my way into the kitchen, dropping my car keys on the counter. Slipping off my long black coat, I drape it across the seat of a barstool. Then I prop my hands on the counter and drop my head in-between my rigid shoulders, looking down at the black marble counter.

“I thought you’d never come back,” I hear Cassia’s voice behind me.

Raising my head slowly, I turn it to see her standing there where the hallway wall and kitchen meet, dressed only in one of my button-up dress shirts. Her long blonde hair is wet, laying against her back.

But something’s very wrong with this picture. Everything is wrong with this picture and that voice in the back of my head is roaring in my brain.

Leery of her—confused, shocked, concerned—a gamut of emotions keep me stone-still, with my hands still braced against the bar, my shoulders as stiff as rock.

She walks toward me and I still can’t will myself to move, and then she passes me up and moves around the bar.

“Where’s Greta?” I ask carefully.

Cassia opens the fridge and peers inside, but I get the feeling it has nothing to do with any real interest in anything that’s in it.

“Was that her name?” she says so casually that it sets my nerves on edge.

Then she closes the fridge with a beer in her hand and looks right at me. Popping the cap off on the edge of the counter, she places the bottle to her lips and takes a small drink, never taking her eyes away from mine.

“Where is Greta, Seraphina?” I ask once more and inhale a deep breath, trying to contain my calm façade.

Seraphina smiles, but it’s a casual, innocent smile and not one of malice.

She sets the beer on the counter.

I finally straighten my back and let my hands fall away from the bar and down at my sides.

“I’ve missed you so much, love,” she says and it wrenches my heart. “I’m not sure how you found me, or what I was doing downstairs with a chain around my ankle, but you found me fair and square and I always knew you would.”

She walks back around the counter and steps right up to me—the scent of her skin intoxicating and familiar, her closeness even though still a few feet away, enough to make me relent, to want to push her violently against the wall and bury myself inside of her.

My heart is breaking.

I swallow hard and say, “Yes, I found you,” but it’s all I can get out.

Seraphina steps closer, placing the palms of her hands against my chest and her warmth sinks through my shirt and right into my skin.

“I was going to run,” she says softly as her head slowly descends toward my heart. “I was going to leave, but I’m tired of running, Fredrik. I just want to be with you again. Where I belong.”

My arms have collapsed around her body and I didn’t even know it until looking down and seeing them there.

I shut my eyes softly and take her in, all of her, because it’s been so long since I’ve felt her this close to me, was able to inhale her scent and feel the heat of her body against mine.

But I force myself quickly back into reality.

I pull away from her gently.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, looking up at me with a slightly tilted head.

“Where is Greta?” I repeat.

“She’s in the basement,” she says as if it really doesn’t matter. Then she smiles and grabs me by the hand. “Come with me, love.” She pulls me along and reluctantly I follow her past the den where the television is glowing against the dark walls and then toward my bedroom.

That voice inside is screaming, but I continue to shut it out, my mind too perplexed and excited and regretful and relieved to do anything else.

Seraphina practically dances into my room.

She stops at the bed where she looks back at me while fitting her fingers around the buttons of my shirt she’s wearing, breaking them apart. Then she stands before me naked, the dress shirt pooling around her bare feet.

I shake my head. “No,” I say, taking a step back. I want her. I want her more than anything right now, but my conscience is beating the shit out of me. “I’m not doing this with you, Seraphina.”

“Why not?” She approaches me, her slim, shapely hips swishing seductively as she moves, snake-like, the way only Seraphina could ever move.

Dragging her fingertips down my chest, she searches for my buttons next, but I carefully place my hands on top of hers and push them away.

“You can cut me, love,” she whispers, turning her back to me so that I can see the scars I put there, and just imagining it makes me hard. “I know it’s been a long time. How have you managed?”

I step away from her when really what I want to do is give in, to feel her underneath me again, to taste her love for me again.

But I can’t. All I see in front of me is Cassia. Maybe it’s the long, blonde hair, or that she’s wearing no makeup, I don’t know, but all I see is Cassia. And I could never hurt her like that.

“What’s wrong with you?” Seraphina asks, starting to get impatient.

She looks up into my tortured eyes with her perplexed soft brown ones and then she steps closer, her mouth turned downward, her expression full of remorse.

I can’t do this.

“Fredrik?”

“I…Seraphina, I can’t do this.” My hands come up and I spear my fingers through the top of my dark hair and then hold them there. “You betrayed me.” I feel my voice rising, the anger inside of me rising. “I loved you. You were everything to me. My dark angel. My salvation. My sanity.” I’m the one with tortured eyes now, I know. I look right at her. “I’ve looked for you for six years. SIX YEARS!”

My hands fall away from my head and become half-fists in front of me.

She steps even closer, her hands out in front of her too, reaching for me in her slow and careful steps.

“I know, Fredrik…I know and I can never forgive myself.”

“You betrayed me!” I feel my face twisting in anger.

“I know!” Seraphina’s eyes begin to glisten with moisture. “But I betrayed you because I loved you! Not because I loved someone else!”

“YOU DESTROYED ME, SERAPHINA!” My voice rips through the house.

She flings herself into my arms.

“But I love you! I’ve always loved you! Why can’t you forgive me?” With her arms bent between us, her fingers grasp desperately at my shirt. “If you loved me so much, why couldn’t you forgive me?!”

“I DID!” I thought I pushed her away, but I guess it was just my mind that did it—I’m holding her now instead. “I forgave you a long time ago, Seraphina. For years, I kept telling myself that when I found you I’d kill you.” A tear falls from both of her eyes and trails down her cheeks. “But I knew, the deepest part of me knew, that I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. I would’ve tortured you. Yes, I would’ve done that much. But I couldn’t kill you.”

Her hands move up to the sides of my neck and her touch sends a warm shiver through my body as if I’d just downed a shot of whiskey.

“But I’m here now,” she says, looking into my eyes with all of her dark passion and love and sincerity—all of the things about her that I’ve hungered for for so long. “I’m here now and we can be together again. We can be like we used to be.” She grasps my shirt tighter with emphasis. “We are a one of a kind pair, Fredrik. There is no one else out there like us. Apart, we’d die alone. Together, the way we were meant to be, we can be happy again.”

Like the angel on my shoulder telling me to do the right thing no matter how sweet the wrong thing tastes, I see Cassia again. Cassia’s face in front of me speaking with Seraphina’s delicious, poisonous lips.

And I know that nothing can ever be the way it was.

Finally, I manage to pull away from her, shaking my head not only at the words coming out of her mouth that I want nothing more than to believe, but at myself for giving them too much thought.

Her bright brown eyes narrow suspiciously.

“Who is it?” she asks with acid in her voice.

Stunned by her sudden change of attitude, I just look at her.

“Who is what?” I finally say.

“Was it—”she rears her head back, her eyebrows thickening in her forehead—“was it the old woman? Did you forget about me and replace me with an old woman?”

“No,” I say with my hands out at her, trying to calm her down.

But I’m stunned again when instead of shouts and anger and accusations, she cries.

Seraphina falls to her knees, her face buried in her hands.

“I’m so sorry, love,” she says in a shuddering, tortured voice. “I shouldn’t have left you. I shouldn’t have given myself to that man—I can’t even remember his name.”

“Marcus,” I say it for her and I’m no less bitter about it today than I was six years ago.

“It’s my own fault,” she says. “I was afraid of love. I was afraid of you.”

I kneel on the floor beside her and pull her against me wrapping my arms around her. This isn’t the Seraphina that I remember. This isn’t the woman I fell in love with. Seraphina was strong and proud and the only time I ever saw her cry was that night she killed that woman in my interrogation chair because she thought she was someone else.

Because she thought the woman was Cassia.

“Seraphina?” I say softly into her wet hair. I squeeze her tighter and stroke her back. “It wasn’t Greta. I didn’t fall in love with Greta.”

Seraphina lifts her head from the crook of my arm and peers into my eyes.

I take her face into both of my hands and lean in kissing her softly on the forehead.

She appears confused. Worried.

“I fell in love with Cassia,” I say.

Her whole body becomes rigid underneath my hands. Her eyes widen and lock in place as if she’d just seen the most traumatizing thing ever.

Then she shoves me away and jumps to her feet so fast that all I can do is jump back to mine.

“CASSIA?!” she roars. “You love Cassia?!”

I reach out grabbing her by her upper arms.

“YES!” I scream into her enraged face plagued by the worst betrayal. “You are Cassia! Don’t you see?! Please tell me that you understand!” Tears are burning the back of my throat and the backs of my eyes, but I won’t let them fall.

I shake her again, roughly, as if I could shake Cassia back to the surface again, but I know deep down that I’ve lost her.

I’ve lost her.

I’ve lost both of them, every part of the only woman I’ve ever loved or ever will love.

I’ve lost her…

“She betrayed me, Fredrik!” Seraphina shoves her body against mine, but I hold her still. “I spent years of my life in a goddamn mental institution because of her!”

“You are her!” My hands tighten around her arms so harshly that I know I must be hurting her. “You. Are. Cassia!” I want to make her understand. I just want her to be normal, to be…she can never be normal.

“Don’t do this to me again,” I say through an anguished voice, though I don’t know what I’m saying—it’s my heart talking, not my rational mind.

She breaks away from me and runs toward the bedroom door, but I grab her around the waist before she gets too far away and I wrench her back into my arms.

“Let go of me!” she screams.

“No. Not until you tell me who you are.” I hold her close with her back pressed into my chest, my arms tight around her warm, naked form, my lips near her ear.

I want to cry.

“You know who I am! Now let me go!”

“Tell me your name.” I can’t open my eyes. I just want to savor this moment with her.

I just want to savor it.

My hands are shaking. My heart is alive again, but I know not for long. It’s afraid. Afraid of what’s going to happen to it when it knows she’s gone forever, when every part of her is gone forever.

I squeeze her tighter, clutching her naked body against mine as if it’s the last time I’m ever going to see her again. The tears are burning. Fucking burning!

“I’m Seraphina! You know me, Fredrik! I’m your wife! The only woman who has ever loved you!” Tears roll through her body and her struggling begins to subside. “Please….”

Suddenly she melts into me, surrendering not only to me but to the pain my words have caused. The weight of her body begins to drop as she slides down.

“Why would you love her,” she says through uncontrollable tears, “of all the people in this world, why Cassia?”

I hold her tight and we’re both sitting against the floor, her still wrapped in my arms, but now wanting to be here. I stroke her hair and kiss her temple and still the fucking tears are burning.

“Because she is you,” I say softly into the side of her face. “And because you are her. I can help you if you’ll let me, but you have to let her go. You have to let Cassia go.”

Please let her go…

“I killed that woman in the basement,” she says about Greta and even though I had a feeling she did, it’s still difficult to hear her admit it. “I killed her because she wouldn’t set me free.” She sniffles back her tears. “I strangled her with the chain around my ankle. And then I took the key from her pocket to unlock myself.”

“You didn’t have to kill her,” I say calmly, but I am anything but calm inside.

I continue to stroke her hair.

“Yes I did.”

“Why? Why did you have to kill her?”

She turns around, her fingers clutching the sleeves of my shirt.

“Because she kept calling me Cassia.” Her voice is calm and distant as though she’s remembering it. “And because she wouldn’t set me free.”

She looks up into my eyes and it takes everything in me not to break down in front of her.

“I love you, Fredrik. I always have. You’re the only person in this world that I’ve ever loved.”

I choke back my tears and crush her against me. She cries into the side of my neck. I picture the two years that we were together, two short years that felt like forever. How she helped me and molded me and made me a better man and loved me. I picture how she loved me.

“Tell me your name,” I say once more, hoping that this will be it, that she’ll understand. “Just tell me your name and everything will be OK.”

The silence between us seems like an eternity as I wait for her answer. My heart has stopped beating. My breath is caught in my lungs.

Please let her go…

“My name is Seraphina,” she says and my heart fades to black and my breath releases in a long, drawn-out breath of anguish and sorrow.

Reaching for the knife just inches away underneath my bed, and with a heavy black heart, I move it between us and bury the blade in her chest. The burning tears finally burst through to the surface, and I let out a cry I never knew I could make. The warmth of her blood flowing onto my hand and onto my chest, I can feel it but I’m afraid to look at it. For the first time in my adult life as an interrogator and torturer, I don’t want to see the blood because it hurts too much.

Her head falls back, bobbing unsteadily on her neck as she looks at me. A tiny trickle of blood seeps from one corner of her mouth. I lean in and kiss it away as sobs roll through my chest.

I haven’t cried like this since I was a boy.

“I’m so sorry…I’m so sorry it had to be this way,” I say through troubled breaths and a burning throat. “You’re the only death I’ll truly regret until the day I join you.”

She reaches up her hand weakly and touches the side of my face. I do the same, letting my hand leave the knife and touching her cheek instead. Blood smears across her face from my fingertips.

She chokes and coughs up more blood.

“Don’t regret,” she says, but I don’t know which one she is. “You saved me.”

“Cassia?” I can’t see through the tears in my eyes.

She smiles faintly and strokes my bottom lip with her fingers and I know that it’s her. Cassia.

I kiss her bloody lips and embrace her tighter, feeling the handle of the knife pressing against me. Her eyes are getting heavier, her body weaker, her arms limper. I push her wet hair over her forehead where more blood stains her face, but I can’t stop touching her, caressing her, being here with her in her last moment. Our last moment.

“I always loved you,” I whisper onto her lips. “Everything about you, Cassia. And I always will.”

Her hand falls away from my face and her head falls back limply on her neck. And when I see her dead eyes staring up at the ceiling I choke on my burning tears and crush her body against me, wailing until my chest hurts.