Behind The Hands That Kill (In The Company Of Killers #6)(10)

This is it.

Today, it all ends.

Finally, I make eye contact with the woman I love, still hoping she does not see the guilt, but in my heart I know that she does. There is a brief but distinct flicker in her eyes as she gazes at me; the fact she is no longer attempting to speak is proof that Apollo has her attention.

“Izabel?” I whisper, but not in an attempt to conceal my voice. “You probably know why we are here. Do you know why?”

Izabel nods slowly—she has an idea, but she cannot possibly know what I am about to tell her.

Ignoring Apollo’s amused gaze, I keep my eyes only on Izabel.

I take a deep breath. “We are here because of me,” I say. “And you are…” I cannot finish the sentence; my breath feels like it’s fleeing my lungs; my heart pounds in my ears and in my stomach.

I look away from her, but the sound of her mumbling voice beneath the fabric brings me back, to face her—to face and to accept and to tell the truth.

I owe her that much.

“Izabel…you are going to die today”—my hands begin to tremble and sweat—“…and…and there is nothing I can do to stop it.”

I see Izabel’s chest fall, followed by her eyelids; tears seep from their confines and stream down her dirty cheeks. If only I could kiss the tears away, just one more time.

I am sorry Izabel. I am sorry for the day we met, for not taking you back to Javier Ruiz’s compound, for not handing you over to Izel when she came for you in the motel; I am sorry that my weakness has put your life in peril; I am sorry that because of me you will die long before you have had a chance to live your life. A real life. A life untouched by the pain and the horrors in which suffocate me and the only life I know. I am sorry for falling in love with you. I am sorry for everything.

These words I wish to tell her.

But I cannot.

I cannot because…I am afraid.

I look down at the soiled stones beneath my feet as if they can comfort me somehow. But they turn their backs on me instead, leaving me not even a shoulder.

“No need to scare the girl,” I hear Apollo’s voice distant in my ears—mostly all I hear are my thoughts. “You didn’t have to tell her the truth. And I wouldn’t have said anything, bro. As a courtesy. But whatever. Your f*ckup, not mine.”

“I will tell the truth about Marina—I will tell many truths on this day,” I announce, but then turn my face to Izabel. “But let it be known that I will do this only because Izabel deserves to know the real me.” I look away from Izabel and glare at Apollo. “Nothing that I say is because you want me to say it.”

He smiles.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he says, laughter in his voice. “If you know you’re gonna die—that she’s gonna die—then why dig your grave that much deeper? You’re a f*cking enigma, Victor.” He laughs out loud.

I look Izabel in the eyes again, and all I can think about as she stares wordlessly back at me, is if she will be able to forgive me for all that I have done.

But in her eyes I see nothing but pain; no accusation, no confusion, no more desperation. Just pain. And it tears me up inside.

Apollo wants more than my death as revenge for his beloved twin sister—he wants the woman that I love to know the real Victor Faust; he wants to expose me to the one and only person in the world who can hurt me; he wants the woman whom I love to suffer in place of his sister who loved me deeply, and died because of it.

He wants me to suffer. And on this day, he will get it.

“You have the stage, Victor Faust,” Apollo announces, pulling me out of a guilt-induced trance.

Izabel shakes her head, her way of telling me that I don’t have to do this.

I nod at her once, slowly and with repentance, telling her that, yes, I must.

Softly she closes her eyes.

Softly I close mine.

And regretfully, I open the doors wide to my past, and let in the sterilizing light.





Victor





Two years before Artemis…




Safe Houses, to me, were not exactly what they were meant to be. In the beginning, I used them for their purpose, I hid out in them in various parts of the United States, and the world, while on missions, and I took advantage of their benefits the way many men, and women, would. But when I met Marina in Safe House One, hidden deep in the Oregon wilderness, I got my first taste—since I was a child—of what the outside world was really like. What I was missing from it.

Marina was a beautiful woman of twenty-nine, with a voluptuous figure like a 1940s movie star, and long, curly blond hair like Marilyn Monroe. I had never seen a woman like Marina before; I had never been bewitched before, but Marina, emerging from the doorway of her tiny house like a goddess from a bed of feathers and gold, cast such a spell on me that I came close to losing everything I had worked so hard for.

“Why do you always come to me, Victor?” Marina asked in a voice of silk; she nuzzled against me in her bed; the smell of her perfume mingled with our sex made me want to take her all over again.

Her fingers danced along my chest, over my collarbone, and found my mouth.

I held her hand and kissed her fingers.

“I like coming here,” I told her, and kissed her fingers again. “You make me forget about…everything out there.”