Seeds of Iniquity (In the Company of Killers, #4)(60)

“So Tessa wasn’t hurt either?” I ask.

“Nope,” James answers.

“Where is she now?”

Victor steps up closer and answers, “I had them take her back home. She didn’t need to be brought here. She doesn’t need to know anything about us.”

“She thought I was a CIA agent,” James says with slight laughter, but a proud air. “As far as my daughters, well they weren’t so easy to convince. They were just scared out of their minds—they think I’m into Real Estate. So, I guess Nora had no choice but to tie them up somewhere.”

I look right at Victor.

“Then she really was working alone,” I say about Nora.

“It seems that way,” Victor says with a nod.

“I’m really thirsty,” Dina says, squeezing my hip with her hand. “Is there anything around here to drink?”

I hug her again.

“Of course,” I tell her and grab her hand. “I’ll take you to get something.”

I smile faintly at Victor as I walk Dina out of the meeting room and toward the tiny kitchen down the hall.

Fredrik passes us on the way as he heads in to see Victor. He says nothing to me, or even makes eye contact.

“Oh, he’s a looker,” Dina says quietly with big eyes as she looks back at his tall height in that expensive suit. “The thing I hate the most about being old is that men like that don’t look at me anymore.”

Oh, Dina, if you only knew what that particular man is capable of.

“Well, I think you’re beautiful,” I tell her, squeezing her cool, weathered hand. “Besides, men today are probably a little freakier than you were used to.”

“Hey, I used to be kinky,” she says with a grin.

“Dina!” My face twists all sort of ways and my cheeks begin to burn. “I do not need to know that.”

We both laugh together and slip inside the break room, which is really just a room with a leather sofa and matching chair with a marble coffee table and two end tables, a flat screen television mounted on the wall and a kitchenette area in one corner. Victor looked at Woodard funny when he asked him to put a break room in the building (“A break room? This isn’t exactly factory work, Woodard.”), but in the end, and after Woodard explained to me what a break room was and I liked the idea, we both got what we wanted. And I’m not the only one of us who uses it often—Niklas sleeps in here sometimes with his boots kicked up on the arm of the sofa. James brings his laptop in here and watches old stuff on TV Land. Dorian…well, he was always the one who kept the fridge stocked. Victor—OK, he doesn’t come in here at all except to find one of us.

Dina has a seat on the sofa while I grab two of Dorian’s sodas from the fridge.

“So, other than beautiful blonde women threatening to kill me to get to you,” Dina begins lightheartedly, “what else has been going on with you, Sarai?”

Dina’s the only person I allow to call me by my old name. I tried to get her to call me Izabel once, but she flat-out refused, said I grew up with her calling me Sarai and that she’d die calling me Sarai.

I hand her a bottle of soda and sit down next to her, pulling one leg up onto the cushion.

“It feels weird having conversations with you about my life,” I say. “It’s not like I can tell you about the last person I saw die, as casually as I can talk to you about getting the wrong order at a drive-thru.”

“I know,” she says and takes a drink, “but what’s going on with you and that handsome, mysterious man of yours?”

I take a drink and then look off at the wall behind her.

“Things are good,” I say, trying not to let onto the truth—I’m not even sure what the truth is; what’s going on between me and Victor isn’t exactly your typical trouble-in-paradise kind of situation.

Dina and I talk for a while about simple things. She tells me about what’s going on with the characters on her favorite television shows, but I just listen mostly because I never watch TV and really have nothing to add. We talk about the small garden she planted behind her newest house and how the only vegetable growing are the cucumbers. I don’t garden and wouldn’t know how to grow the easiest of vegetables, so again, I mostly just listen to her talk. And she goes on about sales at the department stores she likes to shop at and how she got a thirty-dollar blouse for nine dollars—I don’t know much about sales because with the money Victor gives me—and that I earn myself—I don’t have to pay attention to sales.

And while Dina talks about a variety of totally unrelated things over the course of the next thirty minutes, there’s one thing I notice she mentions in every topic—Arizona.

“I used to watch that show every night before bed in Arizona,” she had said. “I had my recliner by the window and I’d always open it and let the heat in while I watched my show.”

And then:

“I didn’t really do much gardening in Arizona.”

And later:

“I hit the thrift stores every weekend when I lived in Arizona. I got some really good deals.”

Finally, after the fifth mention of Arizona, I ask her the inevitable:

“Do you miss home, Dina?”

She smiles faintly and sets the soda bottle down on the end table.