Seeds of Iniquity (In the Company of Killers, #4)(28)

“Good luck with my brother,” I say, smoke streaming from my lips. “And with Gustavsson—I actually look forward to that show.”

And then I walk out after I hear the lock clicking from the inside of the massive door.





9


Izabel





Niklas doesn’t join us back in the surveillance room after he leaves Nora. None of us expected him to. I feel terrible for him, and I really had no idea that he actually cared about me at all. He didn’t have to tell Nora anything; no one he loves has their life on the line. Because she’s already dead.

I don’t know what to think, or how to feel anymore when it comes to Niklas. He did try to kill me, after all. But can something like that ever be forgiven? Can a person just sweep a heartless and wicked thing like that under a rug and let bygones be bygones? I don’t know that it can. Or that I want it to. But it doesn’t change the fact that I feel awful about what he went through.

And I feel guilty.

I feel guilty because I’m alive and Claire isn’t.

It was so much easier when I hated him…

“Have you heard any word from Gustavsson?” Dorian asks from his chair in front of the screens.

Victor shakes his head.

“Nothing. I left a message on three of his phones. No response.”

“I’ll try to get in touch with him,” I speak up, “but Victor, he’s more likely to answer your calls than mine. You still hold onto this idea that he hasn’t let go of his bond with me, but I’m telling you that he has. I feel it. I know it. But I’ll try.”

Victor nods.

“I suppose my brother is right,” he says looking at no one. “Gustavsson may have to be dealt with. He is my friend, but since Seraphina, he is not the same man I once knew. And some broken men are just too broken to be put back together.”

Those words coming out of Victor’s mouth sends a chill up my back. Because once Victor has it set in his mind that he has to kill someone, he does it. Only on two other occasions has he ever changed his mind that I know of: first with me when I was on the run with him from Mexico, and then later with Niklas when he thought Niklas had betrayed him. He didn’t go through with killing me because our relationship was complicated, because he was confused by his feelings, and his conscience got the better of him. He didn’t kill Niklas because at the last moment he realized that Niklas was never his enemy. But he was willing and prepared to kill his own brother, a brother he loves so much that he killed their father just to protect him.

Fredrik may be his friend, but Victor’s bond with Fredrik is nowhere near as tight as the one with his brother, or with me.

I’m afraid for Fredrik. And I hope it doesn’t end the way I feel like it’s going to.

Nora waving up at one of the hidden cameras, catches our eyes. “Yoo-hoo!” her voice funnels through the speakers in the room.

“Turn on the mic,” Victor tells Dorian.

Dorian drops his feet from the table and reaches out, covering the computer mouse with the palm of his hand.

“I’ll be needing something to sleep on,” she says in her confident, demanding tone. “We’ll pick the rest of this up tomorrow.”

Victor leans over, bracing his hands on the table in front of the largest screen and says into the mic on a small stand in front of him, “That would be wasting time. Forty-eight hours was little time to begin with.”

Nora smiles cunningly and pushes her silky hair away from her shoulders and out of her eyes.

“Actually, it’s a lot of time for something as simple as confession, if you really think about it.” Her smile broadens. “The only reason you’re feeling pressed for time now is because one of you still hasn’t shown up. Am I wrong?”

Victor doesn’t flinch. “No, you are correct, but just the same, we would like to get as much of this out of the way as possible.”

She walks back and forth in front of the camera slowly, her arms crossed, her tall black heels tapping against the floor. Then she stops and looks back at the camera and repeats, “We’ll pick up where we left off tomorrow.”

Victor nods at Dorian, indicating for him to shut the mic off.

He turns back to us.

“This will give us time to use whatever we have to figure out who she is,” Victor says.

James Woodard comes into the room then, his face reading the same dead-end news as before.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he says, his chins jiggling with the shaking of his round, balding head. “Except with organization leaders, like with Vonnegut. I can’t find a shred of anything on this woman. She’s like a ghost, sir. A-And I gotta say that I feel a little inadequate. I-I’m supposed to be able to find anything on anyone. I’ll understand if you want to f-fire me.”

“No one is going to fire you, Woodard,” Victor says, still looking at the screen, standing tall in front of it in his black suit. “And besides, if I had to relieve you of your duties, it would unfortunately not be with a pink slip.”

Woodard swallows uneasily; anxiety filling his eyes and making them even rounder in his sweating face.

We start brainstorming without Niklas.

“Maybe she is a leader,” I say, going back to what Woodard said earlier. “I don’t see how anyone can not have some kind of trail.”