“What did you tell them?” Victor asks sternly.

She looks up at him. “T-They asked about recent information, anything that Dina said to me about Sarai, or Izabel, or whatever her name is. They wanted something current. I thought really hard about the conversations that Dina and I had about her and the one that came to mind was when you guys were here. She talked about training. Maga or something like that.”

My eyelashes sweep my face and I shake my head solemnly. I remember telling Dina that I was learning Krav Maga.

I shoot up from the recliner.

“I can’t f**king do this!” I yell. “Victor, I’m sorry. I-I just screw everything up. You were right. This isn’t the life for me. I wanted it to be so badly, but I can’t do this. I’m going to get everybody killed!” I’ve momentarily forgotten that he apparently used me to test Fredrik’s loyalty. Maybe not forgotten, but I’ve pushed it aside for now because my idiot actions are more unforgivable that what Victor has done.

Victor takes my hand and guides me to sit back down.

“Did you tell Dina Gregory where you were training?” Victor asks in a calm voice.

“No,” I say, looking up at him. “I was careful not to give away detailed information. I didn’t even tell her where I was living. The three of us were just talking in the kitchen. Dina wanted to know what I had been doing. It was just casual conversation.”

Fredrik looks at Victor.

“Stephens has probably had men scoping out every Krav Maga studio from here to Florida since that day. It would explain why it took them nearly three weeks to find which one she was training in.”

“Wait—,” Amelia speaks up as if a horrible thought just came to mind. “Is Dina all right? Please tell me she’s OK. I wanted my house back, but I really liked that woman. She was kind to me.”

“Dina Gregory is fine,” Victor answers and Amelia and I are both relieved.

Amelia lets out a thankful breath, but then just as quickly her body locks up again and she’s looking at Fredrik with desperate eyes, craning her neck toward him. “B-But you can’t stay here. You have to leave.” She looks at us. “All of you.”

“That was my next question,” Victor says. “Why didn’t they kill you?”

“They expected you to come back,” she says. “Or to at least contact me by phone.” Her eyes dart to Fredrik again. “I couldn’t answer.”

Fredrik nods, accepting her explanation and her apology, letting her know that he understands.

She looks back to Victor.

“After a while, I pretended to hate all of you,” she goes on. “I complained about how I was pissed that Fredrik would dump that old bat on me like that. Then I talked shit about you,” she adds, looking back at Fredrik. “By the time I was done filling their heads full of bullshit, they thought I could be used to find you, to lure you here. I was just a woman scorned, who wanted to get back at Fredrik. That’s what I was shooting for, to gain their trust so they wouldn’t kill me. I was afraid, Fredrik. I think they would’ve killed me if I didn’t think to do that.”

Fredrik nods again. I feel like he’s about to place his hand on her knee to comfort her, but he can’t bring himself to do it, that the gesture makes him feel awkward. Instead, he offers her more assurance by way of words.

“You did the right thing,” he says kindly. “And you’re right, they would’ve killed you.”

He stands up and turns to Victor.

“The only unanswered question left,” Fredrik says, “is how did they know to look here.” He puts up both hands in a surrendering fashion. “I swear to you that it wasn’t me.”

My body stiffens. My eyes dart back and forth between them, trying to gauge their expressions. The tension in the room deepens, nearly drowning me in it, but I soon realize that the tension belongs only to me as I subconsciously prepare for some kind of showdown between them. But the more I watch, the more I feel that Fredrik is telling the truth and that Victor believes him.

“I know it wasn’t you,” Victor finally says.

I’m stunned. And confused. And a little stung by Victor’s immediate trust.

“How the hell do you know that?” I ask sharply.

“Because if Fredrik was going to give you up, it wouldn’t make sense that he tell them where Dina Gregory once was. Weeks ago.”

I snarl and cross my arms.

“You used me to test Fredrik,” I snap. “You left me alone with him to see if he’d betray you by telling Stephens where to find me.” I glare at him accusingly, unforgivingly. This isn’t the time or place to confront him about this, but I can’t hold it back any longer.

Victor steps up closer and reaches out both hands, intent on placing them on my arms. I start to step away and refuse him, but the recliner blocks my path. His warm hands fall upon my skin, his long fingers curling around my biceps. He peers down into my eyes and I see sincerity and determination in them.

“That is not what I did,” he insists. “You have to trust me on this. And you have to trust Fredrik. He’s not the enemy.”

“So easy to judge and trust,” I say with an edge in my tone. “Then why did you leave me alone with him like that? What did you mean by the things you said about trusting my instincts before you left?”

Victor’s hands fall away from mine.

“We have to get out of here,” he says.

He turns to Fredrik now and I’m left feeling both livid by his lack of explanation and apprehensive about the current situation because of the urgency in his voice.

“Fredrik,” Victor goes on, “it’s your decision. Take her to a safe-house or leave her here to her fate.”

Amelia’s swollen, reddened eyes widen with alert and dread. She jumps up from the sofa, her blue bath robe coming undone around her waist, revealing a white nightgown underneath.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks fearfully, fumbling the tie around her waist to tighten the robe closed again. She looks right at Fredrik. “What does he mean, Fredrik?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Victor

Sarai blames herself for a lot of things, and in some cases, she is right to do so. It was foolish to speak of her training with Spencer—although vaguely—with Dina and Amelia. But she was careful with the information that she chose to divulge. She was careful, but not careful enough. Sarai is young. Inexperienced. Yet, she is learning, and learning the hard way, when it comes down to it, is really the only way.

“You can’t learn to swim by reading it in a book,” I tell her on the drive back to Albuquerque. I thought it best we take a car back this time rather than risking the airports again so soon. “It is the best way, Sarai. To learn from your mistakes is to make them. Authentically. No amount of training, no rehearsed scenario is going to teach you better than the real thing.”

Sarai sits quietly on the passenger’s side staring out the side window. She won’t look at me. She has hardly spoken since we pulled away from my liaison’s location near Phoenix thirty minutes ago. The moon hangs low in the early morning sky, appearing enormous across the dark expanse of the desert landscape.

“It’s no excuse,” she finally speaks up, although distantly.

“It is an excuse,” I correct her. “This isn’t Hollywood, Sarai. You’re not going to learn the things you want to learn in the time you wish you could. You’ve made mistakes. You’ll make plenty more—”

She snaps around to face me.

“I said it’s no excuse,” she pushes the words through her teeth, her eyes are wide and unforgiving. Unforgiving of herself rather than me. “I’m the one that got myself into this,” she says. “I chose this life. I told you it’s what I wanted. I begged you to help me.” She points her index finger harshly at herself, pauses and grits her teeth. “I chose this life. I’m not a child, Victor. You can’t sit me down and tell me that what I did was OK, that I have a right to make mistakes. Because in this life mistakes get you killed.”

I admire her more now than I did moments ago. Because she understands it. She refuses to take the easy way out by accepting the get-out-of-jail-free card that I offered her. She refuses to be allowed mistakes and though I know she will still make them because she is human, she will learn faster from them than someone who chooses to accept the excuses. Sarai is a defiant girl. She is hard and reckless and fearless to a fault. But she is determined and she is strong. Despite her problem with discipline, and how she still hasn’t fully tapped into that criminal, killer mindset in which is key in helping to keep her alive, I know that she can succeed in this life.

“Do you regret it?” I ask. “Do you regret the life you chose?”

“No,” she says flatly, honestly, her eyes trained out ahead watching as the black asphalt on the highway is swallowed up by the hood of the sedan. “I don’t regret it. And I don’t want out.”

She raises her back from the seat and faces me again.

“I want to kill Hamburg and Stephens,” she says with determination, “and then after that…,” she pauses, but never moves her hardened eyes from mine. I only glance away long enough to check the road. “I have to tell you. It’s something that I told Fredrik. After Hamburg and Stephens are dead, I don’t want them to be the last.”

I felt all along, from the moment she told me she wanted to kill them herself, that they would only be the first in a long line of future assassinations. I could see it in her eyes, the lust for revenge, the hunger for bloodshed. The death of Javier Ruiz by her hands is what sealed Sarai’s fate. The first kill is always the trigger, the instant in one’s life when everything changes, when a person’s character takes on a new, darker form. I know she thought about killing Hamburg every single day from the night she met him. I know because I remember the face of my second kill, the way I hunted him for a week like a serial killer might hunt his next victim. All I saw was his face. All I wanted was to end his miserable life the way I ended the life of my first mark. Because it was what I was bred and trained to do. I longed to feel the praise that Vonnegut bestowed upon me after my first successful mission at the age of thirteen. To see him smile proudly as I had always wanted to see my father do. I longed to taste the admiration that the other boys in the Order had for me. So, from my first kill onward, I devoted my life to my job, giving up my resentment for being forced away from my mother. I killed to please Vonnegut for the majority of my life, until I began to see that Vonnegut took more from me than he ever gave.

Now, I kill because it’s all that I know.

Sarai and I kill for different reasons, we are driven by very different needs, but in the end we are both killers and I know that will never change. We can’t come back from that, and most who kill more than once, don’t want to.

I look back out at the road.

“Does that bother you?” she asks about the truth she just revealed. “That I don’t want them to be my last?”