The Swan and the Jackal

Chapter Four

Cassia

I love this spot, the way my back almost fits into the corner of the wall. The length of my spine running along the space where one wall meets the other. Sometimes I try to press myself against it so that my spine will touch the cool sheetrock, but my arms and shoulders are always in the way.

Something is always in the way—the shackle binding my right ankle, secured to a chain that stretches across the length of the room so that I can walk about. The ivory-painted walls unaccompanied by even the smallest of windows. The bottom of the concrete staircase on the farthest side of the room, at least six feet out of my reach. The door at the top of them that I know is always locked from the outside, so even if I could make it out of these bonds, I’d never see the other side of it. But more than anything in the way are the unanswered questions that constantly elude me.

Answers are the keys to my freedom.

Freedom to be able to feel the sun on my face whenever I want. To be able to sit underneath the stars and stare into their infinite silence. Or, when I hear the rain pounding against the roof, I’d love the freedom to go outside and dance in it, to splash about the puddles like I used to do when I was a little girl.

But I happen to like where I am, confined in a sunless, starless, rainless room with only my thoughts for company on some days.

I guess it’s the price I pay for being in love with the Devil.

I’m not ready for freedom yet. Fredrik needs something from me that I can’t give him. But I still try. Only when I can will he give my freedom back. And only when I can, will I accept it.

Fredrik frightens me. But he isn’t cruel. He is an enigma, that man, and I’ve never known another man like him. But then again…I can’t remember.

I hear the door at the top of the stairs clicking open and I wrap my bare arms around my thinly-covered legs, drawn up against my chest. I’m wearing the sheer cotton white gown that Fredrik bought for me, which covers my legs and doesn’t leave me exposed. He would never leave me exposed. He is kind to me. Most of the time.

His feet must be bare because I don’t hear the bottoms of his dress shoes tapping against the concrete as he descends the steps. But I can hear the fabric of his dress pants touching as he moves down them, and I see his shadow cast against the wall growing larger. My heart begins to thrum against my ribcage to the composition of desire and fear. Because when it comes to him, the two always come hand in hand.

“Cassia.” His voice is deep and sensual, like water moving over rocks, all-consuming, yet delicate. “I’ve asked you not to sit on the floor.”

He steps out of the shadow and into the light before me, his tall height towering over me, casting its own shadow in the small space that separates us. I always feel controlled by his shadow, as if it’s another entity in and of itself, another part of him which watches me when his back is turned.

“I’m sorry,” I say looking up at him. “I just like it here.”

He offers his hand to me and hesitantly I reach up and take it, placing my small fingers into his large ones. His hand collapses around mine as he carefully pulls me to my feet, the chain secured to my shackle clanging in the quiet. My slim gown tumbles down to just above my ankles when I stand up all the way. Fredrik looks me over with the sweep of his dark blue eyes, like he always does, searching for imperfections on my clothing or on my skin. I don’t know why he does this. It’s not as if I’m an object of fascination in which he feels some obsessive compulsive need to retain perfection of. He told me once when I asked, that he was making sure no one had tried to hurt me while he was gone. Greta would never hurt me. She’s like a mother to me. I think Fredrik should have more confidence in her.

Fredrik walks with me toward the bed on the other side of the room, turning me around by the shoulders when we get there and guiding me to sit. Only after my bottom presses against the soft mattress, does he take a seat on the armless chair next to the bed beside me, where he always sits when he comes here.

“I’ve missed you,” I say softly, placing my hands within my lap. “I was worried something had happened to you.”

“Nothing will ever happen to me,” he says in an unemotional voice. “Not unless I let it.”

I smile softly and drop my gaze momentarily.

“Has Greta treated you well?” he asks, verifying further that he doesn’t fully trust her.

Nodding once, I look up and meet his eyes. A shiver runs down my spine when I look into the depths of them. I’ll never understand how any man can turn a woman’s insides into warm mush with just a look.

“She always treats me with kindness,” I say with promise. “I like her very much.”

Fredrik nods.

He sits up straight and crosses one leg over the other at the knee, lacing his strong fingers together within his lap. He’s wearing a long-sleeved shirt with little black buttons down the center and the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His feet are bare, just as I suspected, his legs covered by long black dress pants that drop over his ankles. He has strong, manly feet. Large feet. Just like his hands. I don’t know why I’m always drawn to look at them, such a seemingly unimportant part of a man’s body, but I’m always compelled. It’s as if every inch of him was made to perfection and deserves to be admired. Even his flaws are perfect to me; the deep, but thin scar that runs three inches from behind his earlobe and around the back of his head, the larger scar along his abs that dips down into the left side of his rigid oblique. The tiny mole on the back of his neck, just at the top of his spine. They are all perfect. Or, perhaps I’m just besotted for the first time in my life, and I don’t know any better. All women experience nature’s trickery at least once. Whether it’s with the man next door, or the actor one dreams about but knows she’ll never have.

Mine turned out to be my captor.

I straighten my back somewhat so that I don’t appear to be slouching. My fingers fumble restlessly in my lap. Fredrik looks at me—he never took his eyes off me to begin with—and I know what’s coming next. The part of his visits that I dread. I sigh and break our eye contact, staring toward the wall far behind him and letting it blur out of focus.

“Have you remembered anything?” he asks softly.

I swallow down my nervousness and interlock my fingers together tightly so that I don’t look so afraid.

Shaking my head gently, I answer, “No. Nothing new, anyway.”

I can feel his gaze on me, seeking my attention. I yield to it and look at him.

“I’ve told you before, Cassia, that even if you think you’re repeating yourself, that I want you to tell me what you remembered, what you saw while I was gone.”

I swallow again and glance down at my hands.

“Just the fire,” I say. “I was daydreaming. Yesterday. And the flames licking the ceiling bled through my memory, just like last time.”

“Was she there?” he asks and it hurts my heart.

It always hurts my heart when he asks about that woman.

I nod slowly, reluctantly. “Yes.”

He remains quiet and incredibly still, waiting for me to go on, to tell him everything I saw down to the last detail. But I don’t want to this time. I want him to lay next to me and hold me in his arms like he did not long ago. I had never felt so safe. I want to feel like that again. Right now. Not because of my enigmatic fear of Fredrik, but because of the fear I feel when I see that woman’s face in my memory. A woman with jet-black hair and sinister dark eyes. A woman I always tell Fredrik that I do not know, that I can’t remember, but the truth is that I don’t want to remember. And the more he presses me, tries to help me regain the memories of my life before the fire, the closer I get to knowing what she did to me. As much as I fear her without even knowing her, I know she must’ve done something horrible, unspeakable.

I would rather leave my past far behind if it means that to know it again, it would haunt me for the rest of my life.

But worse than that, I fear more than anything that once I remember and I give Fredrik the answers that he seeks, he’ll find her and forget all about me.

“Tell me, Cassia…tell me what you remember.”

I look beyond him, past his tousled dark hair and deep blue eyes, past the attractive scruff of his face that I often feel prickling against my cheeks even when he isn’t touching me, and I let the memory blur into focus.

The Fire…

The screaming in the apartment building wakes me. I shoot up from the bed, my face drenched in sweat, my lungs beginning to burn from the smoke filling the tiny room. It takes me a moment to realize what’s happening and still it’s not even the smoke that makes it all apparent. It’s the screams. I realize that if I was the only person in the building, I never would’ve woken up at all. I look down at the bed and imagine myself lying there, curled within the white striped sheet, flames engulfing the mattress, licking the walls and the headboard and slithering toward my long blonde hair spread out against the pillow, fast, like a desert snake moving in a sideward motion over the top of the sand.

I don’t remember standing from the bed. How did I get here? I ask myself.

The screams in the hall are getting louder. I hear crashing and pounding just outside the door, but it’s not my door that someone is beating on. And the crashing noise I can’t make out, but I think it’s the ceiling caving in. I see from underneath the door the lights flicker in the hallway and then go out.

The screams cease and I feel my heart in my throat.

Then as if time skips, I’m not standing in front of the bed anymore. I’m climbing out the window and making my way down the fire escape.

I slip and everything goes black.

Quiet.

Though I still hear my breath expelling from my nostrils unevenly as if my sinuses are clogged. The sound of my heartbeat I hear and feel in my head, racing, beating violently through the veins in my temples.

But everything else around me is quiet; the sirens and horns fading quickly into the background.

Then I hear a voice. A woman’s voice. At first it sounds distant as though she’s talking to me from behind a wall, or across the length of a giant field. But her voice is getting closer.

“I told you I’d find you,” the voice says with a hint of cruelty, mockery, satisfaction.

I try to open my eyes but the lids are too heavy. The tips of my fingers scratch against a hard, coarse surface. I move one hand around, pressing my palm fully against the surface, trying to decipher what it is and why I’m lying face down on it. My body solidifies and I recoil into myself as I begin to cough, my cheek scraping roughly against the hard material that is beginning to feel like concrete or asphalt. I taste the smoke in my lungs, I feel it burning my esophagus and the back of my throat and my nostrils.

I cough again violently and try to catch my breath as my body goes still. I sniffle once feeling the drainage behind my eyes and it burns like a hot poker is being shoved into my nostrils. I cry out in pain and then lie still, trying to breathe only through my mouth. My lips are dry and cracked and bleeding, and they too taste like smoke.

Tears seep from my eyes and my body shudders against the cool, hard surface like a quivering ball of muscle and bone. I think I’m going to die here. Wherever here is.

I’m freezing.

“You should’ve known better, Cassia,” the voice says and it sounds like she’s right behind me.

Determined to place a face with the voice, I try desperately to pry my lids apart, but like everything else inside of me, my eyes are burning.

“Who are you?” I ask weakly and my voice cracks. I need water. I need something to wet my mouth. Anything…

She laughs quietly and the cruelty in it frightens me to my bitter core. I feel heat on the side of my face, the side not pressed against the hard surface. And then I hear her voice again and I know that she’s right there, hovering over me with her mouth near mine, tracing a path from my earlobe to the corner of my lips.

I feel her lips on mine, so warm and soft and tender. My body is cold, so cold, and her lips so warm that I don’t have it in me to protest. I feel her tongue slip into my mouth and gently tangle with mine. My eyelids, heavy before, now slam shut and leave me absolutely no control over them anymore.

“You’ll always belong to me, Cassia,” the woman whispers onto my mouth. “You owe me.”

The coolness of her hand grazes the skin on my stomach and she slides her hand into the front of my thick cotton pajama pants. I feel her fingers hook inside of me harshly, painfully, and my eyes spring open to see her face looking back at me with malice and menace, her dark eyes swirling in the blue hue of the night sky, her slim outline illuminated by the streetlamp several feet behind her. Her hair is jet black, cut short around her oval-shaped face, each side following the curvature of her jawline. She is beautiful. She is evil.

I’m afraid.

And then in a whirlwind the vociferous sounds of the frantic city catch up to my ears again. I begin to choke, coughing so terribly that I think my lungs are going to come up with the black-tinged saliva I expel into my hands. I roll over onto my back and stare upward at a starless black sky, rolling with winter clouds and brisk with winter wind. My body shakes so harshly that it feels like my bones are going to shatter like glass if I can’t control it. My head falls back to the side and I see a pile of boxes. The leg of a couch. A black trash bag with a hole ripped in the bottom and some kind of fabric pushing through it. A cracked mirror with a weathered wooden frame. A red milk crate full of random things: old beat up boxes of food, a bottle of anti-freeze, a crushed soda can.

The woman is gone. I thought I heard her tall black boots crunching in the snow behind me when I went into the last coughing fit.

My body aches. I think my leg is broken. It’s a wonder how I didn’t feel it before. I grit my teeth and screw my eyes shut tight as the pain sears through me. I hear more voices approaching. Cops. Firemen. No…it’s an EMT.

My eyes open and close from pain and exhaustion, but I try to fight the sleep. I want to see what’s going on around me. I want to see if the woman is still close by. While the paramedics are tending to me, I don’t pay them any attention, not even when they ask me questions looking to see how alert I am. But I look beyond them, toward the street filled with red and blue flashing lights that bounce off the nearby buildings. A crowd has gathered on the other side, all bundled in thick winter coats, pointing upward with their gloved hands at the building still engulfed in flames behind me.

But there is one tall, dark figure amongst the crowd that appears out of place. He stands with his hands in the pockets of his long, black coat. He is calm, unaffected by the chaos in the streets.

He is you.

You look at me instead, across the street and through moving bodies and vehicles that pass by and temporarily block our path. Your eyes pierce through me like…like nothing I’ve ever felt before. All I know is that my stomach feels hot and that I’m afraid, yet I still want to look back at you.

I-I don’t know why, but…but my heart is breaking. Tears sting the backs of my eyes and my chest feels like it’s falling in on itself, like a star burning up its last breath before it collapses into a black hole.

And then I wake up in your home and I barely remember my name much less anything else about me.