Seeds of Iniquity (In the Company of Killers, #4)(26)

“Claire came out of the shower wrapped in a towel, her hair was wet, pinned up at the back of her head. She blushed as I watched her walk half-naked across the room, a crooked smile on my lips as I lay on the bed with my hands fitted behind my head and my feet crossed below.

“ ‘You’re too much,’ she said with a smile in her voice, glancing over her bare shoulder, shy about letting the towel drop the rest of the way.

“ ‘How so?’ I asked with a grin. ‘Because I like to look at you naked?’

“She blushed again and turned to face the closet, pulling down a blue dress from a hanger.

“ ‘You shouldn’t be afraid to show off what you’ve got, love,’ I told her. ‘Especially not in front of me. Go on, drop the towel.’ My smile deepened as her blush reddened.

“Claire didn’t drop the towel. And I knew she wouldn’t. She was self-conscious though she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and I liked to let her know it every second of every day I spent with her.

“The little blue dress fell just above her knees. It drove me crazy. Everything about her drove me crazy.

“As I lay in bed, she walked toward me with a familiar dazed look on her face—and then she hit the floor and seized for several minutes.

“I had gotten used to it after eight months. Claire had seizures at least every other day, sometimes every day. It interfered with her life. She couldn’t drive. She couldn’t do a lot of things, or rather she was afraid to. When she met me, she started to come out of her shell. I drove us everywhere. And if she had a seizure in public I took care of it.”

“How long had she had seizures?” Nora asks.

“Why do you care?”

“It’s just a question.”

I shrug, making a face as if I don’t know, but then answer, “Said she’d had them since she was a little girl.”

Nora nods. And I continue.

“But after eight months of being in love and taking care of Claire, it didn’t go unnoticed that I wasn’t taking care of my mission. Ten months later, I still hadn’t found a shred of information on Solis. Claire never spoke his name, not even when I tried to get her to talk about her family, her past lovers, about anyone in her life—she told me a lot, but never mentioned anyone named Solis. I started to think she didn’t really know him at all, and that maybe this was all a mistake.

“None of that mattered though.

“All that mattered to The Order was that I was spending too much time with the decoy and not producing any results. Bastards.

“I started to worry that they’d take me out of the mission and send in someone else to get the information. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew that I needed to keep Claire safe. And I knew that for both of our sakes, I couldn’t give The Order the suspicion that I was in love with her. If Vonnegut ever thought that to be true, he would’ve had us both killed.”

I pause, signing heavily.

“Eleven months after I met Claire, things came to a brutal f*cking end.

“It turned out that The Order wasn’t the only organization looking for Solis. And I wasn’t the only operative who had Claire as an assignment. Somebody else was looking for her too, but to them Claire was more than a decoy. She was a hit.”

I stare off at the wall, letting the white brick blur out of focus. I’m reliving it all now for myself, not for Nora. I barely even see Nora in front of me anymore.

“My cell phone chimed next to me on the passenger’s seat of my car. I glanced over and saw that it was Claire and answered immediately.

“ ‘Hey love,’ I said into the phone, a smile etched on my face. ‘I’m almost there to pick you up.’

“A gunshot sounded in my ear; the voices of men, the shuffling of shoes, a scuffle—things breaking and Claire screaming.

“I shouted her name into the phone as my boot pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor.

“The phone went dead.

“I dropped it on the seat and the tires on my car tore their way recklessly down the highway, weaving through back streets and blazing through stop signs in the late evening.

“She was dead when I got there, her body lying on the floor between the sofa and the coffee table. Two other men had also been shot. Victor met me at the door.

“ ‘I couldn’t get here in time,’ he said, but I hardly heard a word. I couldn’t take my eyes or my mind off Claire.

I rounded my chin defiantly and tried so f*cking hard to contain my anger and pain, hoping not to let my brother on to my feelings for Claire.

“ ‘Niklas,’ he said almost apologetically, but then he stopped and he led me outside because he knew the house was bugged. ‘Did you have…feelings for her?’

“I laughed. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said, but I couldn’t look him in the eyes. ‘Just call a f*ckin’ cleaner and get rid of her. Are those men from the other organization?’

“It stung me to say the words ‘get rid of her’, and made it that much harder to hold it together.

“Victor nodded. ‘Yes. Claire received a phone call after you left the house. From a man. We did not catch his name and they weren’t on the line long enough to get a trace.’

“ ‘What did they say?’ I was getting nervous; I was afraid that Victor would tell me something I didn’t want to hear: maybe Claire had something going on with this man, maybe she wasn’t who I believed her to be—it would’ve killed me that much more to know something like that about the woman I loved more than anything.