I’m a freak. And right now I can’t forgive Victor for putting me through it, for dropping me off into a life that he and I both knew I wasn’t fit for and expecting me to conform. I never wanted it to begin with. And that’s precisely why it never worked.
The tears begin to well up in my eyes. I let them fall. I don’t care.
I sense Victor’s presence behind me, but I swing around to face him with anger twisting my features before he has a chance to touch me. And finally, some of the things I’ve wanted to say to him after all this time come out in a storm of angry words.
“You f**king left me!” I shove the palms of my hands against his form-fitting white dress shirt. “You should’ve just killed me! Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through?!” Rage-filled tears shoot from the corners of my eyes.
“I’m sorry…,”
I feel my eyebrows draw inward harshly. “You’re sorry?” I let out a quick, short breath. “That’s all you can say? You’re sorry?”
Deep down I know that none of this is Victor’s fault, that he only did what he did to protect me. But the bigger part of me, the part that isn’t ready to believe one hundred percent that there’s no hope for me, wants to blame anyone but myself.
The tears begin to choke me.
“Every single night,” I say, pointing sternly at the floor with my index finger, my face contorted with anger and blame, “every hour of every day, I thought about you. Only you, Victor. I lived every single day with hope, believing in my heart that you were going to come back for me. Another day would pass and you never showed, but I never lost hope. I thought to myself: Sarai, he’s watching you. He’s testing you. He wants you to do what he said, to try to be like everyone else, to blend in. He wants you to prove to him that you’re strong enough to take on any circumstance, to adapt to any lifestyle, because if you can’t do something as simple as live a normal life, there’s no way you can live a life with him.” I bite down on my bottom lip and try to stifle the tears. I shake my head softly. “That’s what I believed. But I was stupid to ever think that you had any intention of coming back for me.” A tear-induced shudder rolls through my chest.
Victor, with tormented eyes, which I never thought he could possess, steps closer. I step back, shaking my head over and over, hoping he’ll get the hint that I’m not ready for him to be too close. I want to be left alone in my pain.
“Sarai?” he says my name softly.
“Don’t,” I refuse him and put up my hand. “Please spare me the excuses and the reasons, which I-I know I can’t blame you for—I’m selfish, all right? I know this! I already know you did what you had to do. I already know….”
“No, you don’t.”
I look back up into his eyes.
He steps closer. This time I don’t move away, my mind paralyzed by his words regardless of how few or uninformative they were. He cups my elbows within the palms of his hands and unfolds my arms from over my stomach. His fingers brush lightly against the sensitive skin on the underside of my arms, downward until he finds my hands and takes a hold of them.
“I left the Order primarily because of you, Sarai,” he says and the rest of me is paralyzed. “When Vonnegut found out that I had been helping you, he knew…,” he pauses, appearing to be sifting through his mind for the safest words, “…he knew that I had been compromised.”
I throw my hands up in the air. “Speak English! Please just say whatever it is you’re trying so hard to tiptoe around! Please!”
“Vonnegut knew that I had…developed feelings for you.”
I freeze and my lips snap shut. My heart is beating erratically inside my chest. My tears seemed to have dried up in an instant, only those wetting my cheeks left to linger.
“Being Vonnegut’s Number One operative, his ‘favorite’, the last thing he wanted to do was have me killed. He ordered that I be relieved of duty, taken off the wire for a time until I…came to my senses.”
I give him a what-the-hell-is-that-supposed-to-mean look.
“You might call it brainwashing,” he says.
He waves it off. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is that he was going to give me one chance to prove that my feelings for you were just a fluke and that it would never happen again. Very few ever get second chances in the Order.”
“A fluke?” I sit down on the edge of the coffee table. I look up at him and say, “Sounds to me like Vonnegut wanted you to prove that you aren’t human, that you’re still his obedient soldier who’s incapable of human emotion. What a deranged bastard.”
He nods and crouches down in front of me, interlacing his fingers, his elbows propped on the tops of this thighs.
“Vonnegut ordered me to kill you,” he says gently, holding my gaze. “To prove myself. I told him that I would, that I wanted to, to prove that I was trustworthy, and he let me go. Of course, I had no intentions of killing you. I left that day and went into hiding. Niklas, knowing only the Order his entire life, decided to stay. I thought maybe he just needed some time to figure things out, to decide what was best for him. I kept out of Niklas’ sights as well—if he didn’t know where I was, he couldn’t deceive Vonnegut or feel that he had to choose between us. But then I heard from Fredrik that Niklas had been contracted to kill me and has been looking for me ever since.”
“What a bastard,” I say, shaking my head in disbelief and then backtrack. “You said primarily. Other than me, why did you leave the Order?”
“It was a long time coming,” he says. “When I had to kill my father to save my brother, I knew then it was time for me to leave.” His strong fingers caress my softer ones. “You gave me the final motivation I needed to finally do it.”
I reach out and touch his lightly unshaven face with all of my fingertips. He continues to watch me, his eyes probing mine through the small, confined space between us, thick with passion and understanding. I lean in and kiss his lips.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” I say softly.
He brushes his lips against mine, his touch spreading through my body and down into my toes like a shot of smooth whiskey.
“I wasn’t testing you, Sarai.” He kisses me again.
He comes back over to me and I slip his dress shirt the rest of the way off, sliding it down over his muscled arms.
“You won’t get pregnant,” he says and urges me to slide off the counter and follow him into the shower. “At least not by me.”
A little taken aback, I leave it at that.
He closes the shower door and begins to wash my hair. I bask in his closeness, the way his hands explore my body with such careful precision and need.
For a long time, I forget that he is an assassin, whose hands have taken many lives without thought or remorse or regret. I forget that I, too, am a killer, whose hands took a life just hours ago.