We are alone in the vast space. Just the three of us. Me, the Devil and one of the Devil’s henchmen, though truly I don’t know which one of them is which.
I raise my head.
I smile weakly up at them, fixating my attention mostly on Niklas.
“This is your last opportunity,” Niklas announces standing next to Stephens with a gun in his right hand, held down at his side. “I won’t bother with sending my brother another video of you being interrogated. It’s apparent that seeing you in such pain isn’t enough to stir him out of hiding.”
“Kill me,” I say, still with a smile. “It’s what you’re gonna have to do.”
Niklas’ chest rises and falls, but his eyes never leave mine. I gaze into them, searching for whatever I can find left in him that might still be like his brother, the man…I think I’m falling in love with.
The man that I thought, for a brief moment in time, might have felt the same way.
Time seems to stop. There is no sound or movement or air on my face, just an infinite silence suspended in the last moment of my life.
And as I feel my eyes begin to close, in the same frame of motion, Niklas raises the gun out beside him and pulls the trigger. The shot rings out and blood spatters from the other side of Stephens’ head. The chair beneath him falls over onto its side as the weight of his massive body slumps against it.
Stephens falls to the floor. Dead.
I feel the softness of my lashes finally sweep my face as my eyes close and my own body, overwhelmed by relief and exhausted by everything, begins to fall over, too.
Niklas fits his arms underneath mine, catching me before I hit the floor.
“I’ve got you,” I hear him say. “I’ve got you.” His voice seems farther away now, though I can feel myself pressed against his chest and the wind on my face as I’m being carried through the warehouse.
“Give her to me,” I hear Victor say from outside, and it’s the last thing I hear.
Victor
The Plot – Three weeks ago…
Niklas sits across from me at the elongated table covered in scattered paperwork and coffee stains and photographs of future hits. His brown hair is disheveled, and the edges of his eyes are red as he had far too much to drink last night. He moves his hands across the stack of various photos of Edgar Velazco, a notorious Venezuelan gang leader who we’ve been commissioned to kill.
He shakes his head with aggravation and leans his back against the chair, bringing up both hands and running them over the entirety of his face.
“We can’t put this on hold,” Niklas says, looking across the table at me. “We have a location on Andre Costa. We need to deal with it now.”
I don’t look up from scanning the text in front of me.
“Things have changed,” I say evenly. I move a sheet of paper on top of another. “Sarai is my priority. It was unexpected, I know, but I can’t change what she did.” I look directly at him, hoping that he will understand and not argue with me on this. “Niklas, I won’t abandon or compromise what we’re achieving here. The contract on Edgar Velazco will be fulfilled. Before the deadline.”
He sighs again and lowers his eyes for a brief moment. Then he reaches out and removes a cigarette from the pack lying on the table in front of him. Putting it between his lips, he sets the end aflame with a flick of his lighter.
He knows I dislike it when he smokes inside, but I suppose I need to cut my brother some slack, seeing as how he has done so much for me, and for Sarai, in the past several months.
“No disrespect, brother,” Niklas says as smoke streams from his lips, “but what are you going to do about her? You can’t juggle both lives, and you know it. And we can’t use our resources forever for babysitting, not when it’s someone like her who isn’t so easy to keep up with. She’s as reckless as I was at twenty-three.”
I nod. “Yes, you’re right about that,” I say. “She is more like you than I care to admit.”
Niklas grins and flicks his ashes in the little plastic ashtray.
“Oh come on, brother, I’m not so bad, am I?”
I don’t need to answer that question and he knows it.
He takes another short pull from the cigarette and sets it down on the edge of the ashtray.
“So then what are you going to do?” he asks.
He leans his back against the chair again and interlocks his fingers fitted behind his head.
“Are you sure you want to know the answer to that?” I ask.
That seems to have piqued his curiosity.
“Hell yes, I want to know.” His hands come away from the back of his head and he leans over forward, resting the length of his arms across the tabletop. He looks worried. “What have you done?”
I pause and answer, “While at Fredrik’s house, after a lot of pleading, and Sarai threatening me with her safety, I agreed to help train her.”
“What?”
“Yes,” I confirm it for him because he seems to need the confirmation. “She’s adamant about killing Hamburg and Stephens herself. I could do it but—”
“You should do it, Victor.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head, “I gave her my word—”
“I will approach Hamburg,” he begins. “I will gain his trust by falsely selling you out to him. He’ll believe that I’m just an unforgiving brother who has been commissioned by my own Order to kill you since you went rogue and betrayed us all. All for the sake of one girl. A girl who, it is no secret to people like me, Hamburg wants dead now more than ever.”
I’m already nodding in agreement before he’s done explaining, a vivid image of the scenario playing out in my mind.
“When the time is right,” he continues, “I’ll lead Hamburg’s men straight to Sarai…”
Niklas goes on about the plot to initiate Sarai and at the same time, get Hamburg and Stephens where we want them.
“But I don’t want her hurt,” I say. “If we do this, you have to give me your word that you will not let anyone go too far. That you will not go too far.” I narrow my gaze on him.