Seeds of Iniquity (In the Company of Killers, #4)(66)

I’m beginning to think it can’t.





21


Izabel





With my gun in-hand, I open the door to the room where Nora has been caged for over two days.

She looks up at me from the chair.

“Let’s go,” I tell her with the backward tilt of my head.

“Where to?” she says curiously as she stands up in her leather pants and blood-stained face and blonde hair. She had slipped the silk blouse back on as well, despite the cuts on her back.

“You know where,” I tell her calmly.

Nora walks toward me on her bare feet—her high-heels have been tossed against the floor—and she makes a face as the pain in her back and wherever else Fredrik hurt her, argues her decision to move.

“Why don’t you just shoot me in here?” she asks.

I don’t answer, playing it off as unimportant, but the truth is that before I kill her there are a few things I want to say to her, things that I don’t want anyone else to hear.

We walk the hallway slow and deliberately, Nora in front of me, me at her back with my gun down at my side, and I lead her outside the back of the building in the darkness and in the quiet.

“On your knees,” I tell her, pointing the gun toward the ground beside a dumpster.

Without question or argument or an ounce of fear, she goes down on her knees, already knowing to put her back to me.

“I would ask why you won’t beg for your life,” I say, pointing the gun at the back of her head as I stand a few feet away, “but I already know the answer.”

“What’s the answer?” she asks, looking at the brick wall in front of her.

“You would never plead for your life.”

I curl my index finger around the trigger.

“And you would be right,” she confirms.

The ocean and the distant sound of cars rushing over the freeway are faint, but are the only sounds to be heard. The stench of the dumpster just feet from Nora, and the other five lining the back of the nearby buildings make the air foul. A single light shines in the distance from a pole, beaming down on the entrance to a parking garage, but the only light here is from the moon, making Nora’s dark figure appear like a shadow, except for her blonde hair that blankets her back and shoulders like a disheveled mess of white straw.

I look at her for a long time, almost feeling like I should force her to face me, because if I’m going to execute her I should have the courage to look her in the eyes. But I don’t. I’m not brave enough to look someone in the eyes and then take their life from them—not like this. An unarmed woman. On her knees. Behind a building. Beside a stinking dumpster. It would haunt me forever.

Time passes and I don’t realize how much until Nora begins to turn her head at an angle to get a glimpse of me behind her.

“Something tells me you’re not afraid to kill me,” she says, “so, what’s the holdup?”

I pause and say, “I wanted to ask you something first.”

She laughs lightly.

“Oh sure,” she says sarcastically with the shrug of her shoulders, “because I’m so inclined to answer your questions before you blow my brains out.” She looks back once with a smile and turns to face the wall again. “Go ahead and ask whatever you want, but you can expect only one kind of answer from me.”

“What kind would that be?”

“The truthful kind,” she says.

“That’s the only kind I want.”

“Then by all means”—she twirls the hand with the marred pinky finger in the air beside her—“ask away.”

Hesitating for a long, tense moment, I think about my question and what her truthful answer could mean.

“Do you think a man like Victor Faust can ever truly be in love?”

Nora is very quiet, as if my question has stripped the sarcasm from her and replaced it with intrigue. Then she turns her head to the side again, allowing me to see the outline of her nose and cheek in the moonlit darkness that shrouds her.

“That’s a bold question,” she says. “And one that I think you already know the answer to.”

“Maybe so, but I want to know yours.”

“You mean,” she says as if to correct me, “you want to know the reason behind my answer.”

“Whatever—just tell me.”

I sense her smiling, but I don’t see it on her face, and I don’t get any spiteful or pleasurable feelings from her—just honesty.

She looks back at the wall in front of her again.

“Anyone can be in love, Izabel,” she says in an even voice, “and I can tell by the look in that man’s eyes that he is in love with you”—(I want to be pleased with that answer, but I’m not because I know that’s not all of it)—“but a man like Victor Faust,” she goes on, “can’t stay in love forever. Like Fredrik’s type can’t live without love, Victor’s type can’t live with it. And the more that it gets in the way of his duties, and the more human you make him become, the closer you push him to his breaking point.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” My gun hand is trembling. “Are you saying that no matter what, he’s going to put an end to us?”

“No,” she says, “but if you want to keep him and what you have with him in-tact, you need to lose what’s left of your personal life, your humanity. Your love for Dina Gregory. Your school-girl jealousy. Your conscience. It’s enough that he loves you and has to protect you, but he won’t—he can’t—continue to protect and take into consideration everything you drag in with you from the outside.”