The Black Wolf (In the Company of Killers, #5)(2)

“I don’t care what they do to me,” I snapped. “I’m not afraid of them!”

Victor pushed air through his teeth to hush me, his eyes widening in the blue-gray darkness. “They will hear you,” he whispered harshly, grabbing my shoulder again.

“Why are you so afraid, Victor?” I asked, feeling my heart sink into the soles of my feet. “Why won’t you come with me?”

Victor sighed.

He looked at me and I could see in his face something that I already knew, but never wanted to believe: he wasn’t afraid and never had been; he was willing, utterly accepting, and wanted nothing other than to succeed and excel in The Order, to make our father proud, no matter the cost.

“I want to be here,” he said. “Niklas…in time you will feel the same way; you will understand that everything we are put through is going to make us stronger, it will make us men. It will give our lives purpose.” He didn’t sound like my brother anymore, the boy I played roughly with in the field in Germany—the words coming out of his thirteen-year-old mouth were the words of our trainers and his mentor. And our father.

Victor paused, looking once more at the doorway. “You are my brother,” he said with devotion, but then with a sigh he added, “and that makes you my only weakness. It is why it is forbidden to have ties like ours, why we can never tell our secret—because ties make us weak, and weakness gets us killed.”

I shoved away from him and rose into a stand, straining under my own wounded weight.

“Then why don’t you just tell them that I’m your brother? Or turn me in as a traitor—tell them whatever you want!” I lashed out, though I kept my voice to a whisper. “They favor you…Brother”—I couldn’t hide the resentment, the pain, from my voice—“they would believe you, and I love you enough that I’d go along with whatever you told them, and they’d kill me, and then you wouldn’t have to worry about me anymore.”

Victor shot up from the bed, the sheet that had covered him stirred by the brisk movement, falling slowly against the mattress. He stood in front of me, glaring into my eyes. I had never seen him so angry, so controlled by emotion—I thought I was looking into the eyes of a stranger. It frightened me. But mostly it made my stomach swim with guilt.

“I would never, Niklas, in my short or long life, do anything that would cause you harm.” He stepped up closer, his toes touching mine, the warmth of his breath on my face coming from his nostrils. “If you think I could, then perhaps you are not my blood, after all.”

And I knew he meant what he said, I knew that my brother’s loyalty to me would be unwavering for years to come, that he would do everything in his power to protect me, even if it meant risking his position in The Order. And risking his life.

But at eleven-years-old I was stubborn and chose not to listen.

I left his room without anything but my white pajamas. I crept down the hallway, past the guard pretending to be asleep, and walked right out a side door and exited the building into the warm night air.

I got as far as the fence.

No one came.

I slipped through a section in the fence where it met the brick wall of the front gate of the property—I was skinny enough I could push my body through it.

No one came.

I walked as quickly as I could down the street made of broken asphalt.

Still no one came.

I thought I was free. Every step I took, the closer I got to the lights that reflected off the surface of the lake from the small town nearby, I felt like I was going to finally live the way I wanted. Images of when I was boy, playing in the field behind my house with Victor and our friends and our maybe-sister, Naeva, I began to feel like I was reclaiming the life that was taken from me.

But it was the guilt of leaving my brother behind that stopped me in my tracks.

I was a boy, dressed in stark white pajamas, standing barefoot in the center of a moonlight-shrouded street in Portugal, a calm breeze blowing the thin material of my pants against my bony legs; I was hunched over slightly with my arms crossed over my midsection. I was an out-of-place smudge on a painting, the one thing in the picture that did not belong—I didn’t belong anywhere, really. But as I stood there, seeing Victor’s face in my mind, that guilt he’d planted there before when he was so hurt by the things I’d said to him, it grew so much that I suddenly felt suffocated by it. I couldn’t leave my brother in that place.

I couldn’t leave him anywhere.

I turned around and went back the way I came.

The guard pretending to be asleep before, stood in the doorway of the building, waiting for me, dressed in a black T-shirt and black military pants tucked into black military boots; a police baton hung from his fist.

“You could have kept on going,” the guard said. “Why did you come back?”

A loud clunk and click and then a constant mechanical hum sounded from high above me and bright lights spilled out over the rooftop, pooling around me in two brilliant circles that made the grass beneath my feet look white. The spotlights, as if shackling me to the ground by chains, held me still in that spot in front of the building. Two more guards came toward me from somewhere that I didn’t care to look, and stopped in arm’s reach. I kept my eyes trained on the guard in the doorway with the police baton. He had asked me a question and I didn’t know how to answer it, so I didn’t at first.