The Swan and the Jackal (24 page)

I stare out ahead of me, the words lost on my lips, my mind lost in the memories as if the events just happened all over again. I can hear Izabel’s soft breaths expelling gently from her nostrils she’s sitting so close. I can almost hear her thoughts, loud with confused ideas and broken sentences. She wants to say something,
needs
to, but can’t quite figure out yet what to say.

“Didn’t you tell her who she was?” she asks after a long pause, turning on the bench toward me. “If she couldn’t remember, didn’t you tell her her name?”

I shake my head once. “I almost did a few times, but I was so intrigued by the fact that she couldn’t remember. Intrigued by her strange, delicate personality. The darkness inside of me wanted to understand her, to study her. I had never seen such frailty in a woman before, and to see it in someone like Seraphina—of all people—I was intrigued.”

“What did you do then?” Izabel asks almost breathily beside me as she hangs onto every one of my words.

 “I tortured her”—I pause, bearing the pain of the memory of what I’d done—“And the whole time I tortured her, my conscience was telling me that she was innocent. I ached for her as I drew blood. But I didn’t stop. She was still Seraphina, after all.”

“Why don’t you just tell me who you think I am?” Cassia cried from my interrogation chair as I stood behind her next to my tools. “Please! Please! I don’t know what you want from me!” Sobs racked her body, covered by nothing but a pair of white panties and a matching bra.

“It’s not going to work like that, love,” I told her, stepping around the chair with a long razor in my hand. Her eyes grew wider than the sockets that contained them when she glimpsed the silver blade dangling from my fingers. “You’re going to tell me on your own, who you really are. I want to hear you say it, love. I’m the one in control of the game now.” I stepped right up to her side and peered down into her shrinking, tear-soaked face. “And I can do this for six more years,” I taunted. “Until you remember. Until
you
tell me your name.”

“My name is Cassia! Cassia Carrington!” she screamed so loud her voice momentarily went hoarse. She strained against the leather restraints that held her against the chair at her ankles, wrists, torso and forehead.

I positioned the blade in my fingers and started my cutting on her legs…

“Cassia’s admission of her name shocked us both, though I ignored that while I tortured her. She had remembered something about her life so soon. Just days before, when I took her from the street in front of the shelter, she couldn’t remember
anything
. But she had remembered her name—though not the name I wanted—and it took absolute terror to make her see it again. I knew then that it was how I was going to draw Seraphina out and bring her back to me. With fear. And pain. And eventually…,” I stop and swallow down the guilt of my transgressions.

Izabel’s hand touches my shoulder.

“Eventually what, Fredrik?” she asks in a soft voice.

Eventually, with sex,
I want to say but can’t bring myself to admit aloud because I feel as though I’ve taken advantage of her even though she wanted it every time. I feel guilty and ashamed for defiling a girl so fragile and innocent. I feel unworthy of someone like Cassia because she is so kind and compassionate and pure. And each time I was inside of her, I hated myself more and more.

Still facing forward, I say distantly, “That doesn’t matter.”

With quiet reluctance, Izabel accepts my refusal to tell her.

Her hand slides away from my shoulder at the same moment the small family from outside earlier, enters the spacious room. Izabel and I both make note of their presence, as they do ours, choosing to walk in the opposite direction of us.

“What’s wrong with her?” she asks, meeting my gaze. “She seems very…I don’t know, traumatized. Jesus, Fredrik, as much as I hate her for what she did to you, I can’t help but feel sorry for her, too.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” I say with a pang of helplessness.” I lower my head, propping it in my uplifted hands. After a moment, I raise my head again and slap the palms of my hands down on my legs. “I could’ve dealt with anything. I was prepared to kill her, Izabel, even as much as I loved her. I was prepared. Shit, I’d been preparing for it since she left me in that field. I was ready to confront anything she threw at me. But not this.” I shake my head, my gaze fixated on a spot on the ground between my shoes. “I never imagined anything like this.”

“Why did you choose to tell me any of this?”

“Because I don’t know what to do. I had a plan and it changed when I finally found her. So then I devised another plan, and just like the one before it, I’ve had to toss it entirely and start from scratch.” I sigh deep and long and then straighten my back out of a slouch. “It’s a mind-fuck of a problem and I don’t think I’ll be finding the answers I need to deal with something like this on Google.”

The voices of the couple and their small child become more pronounced as they slowly draw nearer.

I stand from the bench, slipping my coat on. Izabel does the same.

“Fredrik,” she says in a quiet voice, “Did you want my advice because you don’t know what to do, or are you really just looking for validation of the choice you’ve already made?”

I frown faintly, but choose not answer. Because I’m not sure of the answer.

“I can’t be with someone like Cassia,” I say instead. “She and I are too different. Someone like her deserves someone better than me.”

“What does that mean?” Izabel says carefully, though I get the feeling she understands something in what I just said more than even I do.

I think about it for a moment, but she helps by saying, “You said ‘someone like her’. You didn’t say Cassia. Why didn’t you say Cassia?”

I understand now and it just makes my mood darker.

“Because when this is all over, there’s a chance she won’t
be
Cassia anymore.”

Izabel looks at me with benevolent eyes.

“Then I guess in the meantime you should love the one who’s there,” she says just as the family approaches from behind.

Love? Was that an accusation, or simply an observation?

Izabel looks at me with a soft, understanding face, but then the moment is disrupted—thankfully—by the family who are now too close for us to talk anymore.

We walk down the pathway side by side, heading for the exit. Izabel glances over at me and adds, “Just out of curiosity, what did you plan to do to Seraphina when you found her?”

“
Everything
,” I answer and leave it at that.

We make it back outside in the frigid air and head quickly to our cars parked side by side in the parking lot.

“I won’t say anything to Victor,” she says, standing at the door of her car, looking over the roof of my car at me. “Technically you’re on leave, so this is all personal. He’ll understand.”

I nod, shivering beneath my coat.

“Thanks, doll.”

“But when Victor calls you back to the field, if you’re still considered out of commission because of this, I’ll have to tell him why.”

“I know,” I say softly.

“For now, I’ll look into Cassia Carrington,” she says. “If you couldn’t find anything on Seraphina Bragado, maybe I’ll have better luck with her other name.” I nod. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

She pops open her door and starts to get inside, but stops and looks back at me once more. A sort of unnamed grief rests in her features.

“And if you need me for anything else…
anything
, Fredrik, you know I’ll do it.”

Neither of us blink for several moments as we stare at each other; the unspoken meaning of her offer playing between us like a tragic, inevitable event too painful to say out loud.

~~~

I stay away from my house for the rest of the day. I have a lot of thinking to do, though it’ll take more than several hours to sort through my thoughts.

By six o’clock, I’ve come up with absolutely nothing. By eight, after driving around aimlessly for as long as I can, I’ve only grown more intolerant of this entire situation. I can’t even think straight. I can’t function enough on my own to form a reasonable sentence, much less a solution.

Because there
is
no goddamn solution.

I know that no matter what happens, all I can do is
let
it because it’s going to, anyway.

“Would you like more coffee?” I hear a soft voice say.

Pulling my fingers from the top of my hair, I raise my head from staring down at my phone on the table. The pretty dark-haired waitress stands beside me with a smile, looking once toward my empty coffee mug.

How long have I been sitting here?

I shake my head. “No, but thank you.”

She leaves me alone in my grief again and a part of me wishes she wouldn’t. The old Fredrik would charm her for a little while, promise her things with my eyes that I know would excite her, and then wait for her after her shift was over. The old Fredrik would take her to the nearest hotel and tie her hands behind her back. He’d fuck her until there were tears in her eyes and she’d beg me not to stop.

But the old Fredrik is gone and the longer I subject myself to this ‘problem’, the more the even
older
Fredrik I feel I’m starting to become. The person I was before I met Seraphina, when I tortured and killed recklessly because I couldn’t help myself. I’ve clung to my more disciplined self, the man that Seraphina helped me to be, all these years because I had hope I’d find her and she’d be in my life again someday. But now that I know it’s not possible, I feel myself slipping back into the life of pure, unadulterated darkness that I led since I was a child and escaped my captors.

If I become him again, he will destroy me.

I won’t be suitable as part of Victor Faust’s new Order.

I will have to leave this place and the life I’ve built with those I've grown to care for, and continue on the lonely, self-destructive path of the Jackal.

Chapter Twenty-One

Fredrik

Greta has been spying on me from different windows in the house since I pulled into the driveway a half hour ago. I couldn’t go inside. I still can’t. Right now I prefer the quiet solitude of the car with the metal walls so close on all sides of me that it feels like my thoughts are better contained by them. They’re all I can hear. Even though I don’t like anything they’re saying.

Aside from my conversation with Izabel and all the things I don’t want to think about anymore, I also think about the women. Gwen from the bar. The waitress from the diner earlier this evening. I think about the last woman I had sex with. And the one before her. It never dawned on me until the woman from the diner that I’m less like myself even more than I thought. And I have been since shortly after I took ‘Cassia’ from the street that night in New York.

I can’t enjoy other women anymore. Not without passionate guilt and regret that sits heavily in my chest for days after.

In the year that I’ve kept Cassia in the basement, Gwen was the first woman I ever brought home. I had intended to bring others before her, to do the things to them that I did to the women Seraphina and I shared, so that maybe it would draw out Seraphina’s memories while she watched on the television screen. It’s why I put a video feed in my bedroom to begin with. But until Gwen, I never could go through with it.

With Seraphina, it was normal.

With Cassia, I can’t fucking do it.

A small sliver of light from the kitchen window blinks out as Greta drops the curtain back into place.

“I have to face this,” I say quietly to myself.

After a long pause, I kill the engine and head into the house.

“She’s asleep,” Greta says when I walk into the kitchen.

I drop my keys on the counter.

“How is she?” I ask, removing my coat.

“She’s good,” Greta says with a warm smile around her eyes. “I think she’s better since she’s remembered who she is. More at peace maybe.”

“She told you then.”

Greta nods her graying head as her face falls.

“It’s awful what she went through, Mr. Gustavsson. And while although I still don’t like it that you keep her locked up like that—nor do I understand it—it may be for the best. Seraphina is dangerous. She needs help, yes, but she’s dangerous.”

I say nothing.

Greta walks around the counter and takes her long, wool coat up from the back of a kitchen chair, slipping her arms into the thick sleeves.

“Why don’t you take the day off tomorrow,” I say. “I have no plans and I’ll be with Cassia all day.”

“Are you sure?” she asks warily.

I raise a brow. “That I have no plans?” I say with offense, “Or that I’m capable of taking care of her for twenty-four hours by myself?”

“I-I didn’t mean that, sir.” She folds her hands together down in front of her.

Sighing, I say, “I apologize,” making note of my misplaced irritation towards her. “Just take the day off. I’ll call you when I need you to come back.”

I reach into my wallet and finger five one hundred dollar bills and place the money into her hand.

“This is just a little extra aside from what I pay you.” She looks down at it faintly surprised, but mostly thankful. “I do appreciate your help with Cassia.”

She says nothing, but words aren’t needed to express the thanks in her eyes.

After Greta leaves, I lock the front door behind her and stand at the entrance of the hallway for a long time before willing my legs to carry me toward the basement door. I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to because of what she’s doing to me.

I make my way down the concrete stairs lit only by a vague swath of light coming from her bathroom. I took my shoes off upstairs so they wouldn’t wake her and the concrete is cold underneath my feet. But the air is warm; heat blasts from the vents in the ceiling making the basement feel somewhat toasty. But Cassia appears comfortable lying there with the blanket only covering her lower back and her bottom and the top half of her thighs. She lies on her stomach facing me with her small, delicate arms crushed beneath her. Her long, flowing blonde hair lays disheveled against the pillow. The chain locked to her ankle dangles off the side of the bed and extends far out across the floor.