Seeds of Iniquity

by J. A. Redmerski

  I get up from the chair and look down at Nora.

  “When this is over,” I tell her in a calm voice, “I will kill you. On principle.”

  “Those are bold words,” she says with no emotion on her face. “Threats like that—”

  “Oh, it’s not a threat,” I cut in. I point my finger at her. “You don’t fuck with somebody’s loved ones; innocent people who never asked to be related to, or involved with someone not-so-innocent like the rest of us. Only cowards shoot somebody from behind. If you wanted something from one of us, then you should’ve called that person out from the start and dealt with it head-on.”

  I take my pack of cigarettes up from the table, shuffling one into my fingers and then slide the pack into my back pocket. Fishing my lighter from a front pocket, I set the end aflame and take a quick drag.

  “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.”

  “And how does she know so much?” Dorian says.

  “She is not a leader,” Victor says with a trace of uncertainty. “At least I doubt she is.”

  “OK, what do we know about her other than nothing?” I ask, pacing the floor. I stop and look back at them, holding up a hand, gesturing. “I mean let’s just assume that what we think we know about her is true: her father cut off the tip of her finger and it’s a sensitive subject; she has a conscience despite wanting us to think she doesn’t; she’s very skilled not only in fighting and manipulating us into talking, but she got herself out of the cuffs without anyone seeing her—she’s an escape artist.”

  Silence fills the room as the gears in our brains begin to churn. But none of us comes up with any theories.

  “She had to have been watching us just a few months ago,” Dorian says, “for her to know about what went down with Gustavsson and Seraphina. Unless she’s getting this information from someone on the inside, I honestly don’t see how she’d know about any of that.”

  “I agree,” Victor says. “It is believable that she could obtain information about our pasts through many different means over several years. She could have broken into The Order’s files—James Woodard can do that, I don’t see why she couldn’t pull it off. But to know anything about Fredrik and Seraphina—.”

  “Then who could be the mole?” I ask. “If there is one.”

  “Time will tell,” Victor says and leaves it at that.

  We call it a night just before midnight and Victor has men take in a small cot for Nora to sleep on. And a bucket for her to piss in, compliments of me because there’s no way she’s leaving that room to be escorted to a restroom. We watch on the screen as the men go inside, to make sure she doesn’t slip something past us like she did with the cuffs—this time we’re expecting it—and to make sure she doesn’t kill them. She�
��s cooperative and doesn’t attack anyone or try to escape. But then again, I believe her when she said before that she wouldn’t even be here if she didn’t want to be. It worries Victor too, but he won’t say it aloud.

  “What if there are more people like her?” I ask as I undress in our room on the top floor of the building. “It scares me, Victor, I won’t lie.”

  Victor’s thumbs and index fingers break apart the last button of his dress shirt and he slips it over his muscle-defined arms, laying it carefully over the back of a chair.

  “That will be the only thing keeping her alive after she’s told us where to find Dina Gregory and the others.”

  He walks toward the bed, his bare feet moving over the carpet, the ends of his black dress pants hanging loosely over the tops of them.

  I’m sitting on the side of the bed, reaching behind me to unclasp my bra.

  “So you’re gonna kill her when this is all over?”

  “Yes,” he says, breaking apart the button on his pants. “We will need to find out what else she knows first, and who is in on this with her. We will use her the same way she is using us, and once we have what we need, I will eliminate her.”

  Eliminate. Victor still, every now and then, talks like he still fills contracts for The Order under Vonnegut. It bothers me sometimes, how he slips back into that cold and calculated man with buried emotions, but I never say anything. I know firsthand how hard it is to strip one’s self completely of their past.

  I lay down against the bed wearing only my black lacey panties. Victor steps out of his dress pants and his boxer-briefs and stands naked and fully erect at the foot of the bed. I can’t think about sex right now. I mean…OK, I can think about it, and it’s difficult not to with him looking at me like that, but the timing isn’t right—there’s too much going on. Then again, that’s precisely why he’s all for it—sex is Victor’s escape from everything else. And I’m more than happy to let him take his frustrations out on me.

  “And what about Fredrik?” I ask. The bed moves beneath me as he makes his way on top of it. “Are you sure you can kill him? Or that you’d want to?”

  He begins to slip my panties off with both hands. “Yes, I can kill him,” he says, his hands making a trail down the backs of my thighs, breaking my skin out in shivers.

  I gasp when I feel his fingers inside of me; every inch of my body is ravaged by a cruel but blissful shiver. Oh my God, I’m gonna die before he makes me come. And then my stomach flutters when he crawls atop me, kissing his way up toward my mouth. His warm lips fall softly on mine and his kiss steals my breath away.

  “I don’t want to kill him,” he says breaking the kiss shortly after. My eyes roll into the back of my head as his fingers continue to explore me below. “But I will do what I have to do.”

  It never takes Victor long to make me wet. It never takes him much effort to make me ache with need, to make my insides quiver with anticipation, frustration.

  My eyelids break apart slowly and with difficulty; my thighs clasp around his chiseled waist.

  “What do you think…”—I shudder and my lips part as he pushes his hard length slowly and deeply inside of me—Oh my fucking God—“…think she wants you to…confess, Victor?” My words sound more like breath now. My heart is racing. My thighs tremble around his firm body.

  My teeth clamp down on his bottom lip gently as he rocks his hips against me with slow, but aggressive abandon; my hands clutch the sides of his face before I dig my nails into the skin on his back.

  “I have no idea,” he whispers hotly onto my mouth.

  His tongue tangles with mine and his kiss is deep and hungry and warm.

  “But what if—”

  “Be quiet, Izabel”—he thrusts harder, causing me to lose my breath—“and let me fuck you.”

  Fifty-percent of the time I always do what Victor tells me—this is that fifty-percent of the time.

  10

  Izabel

  Niklas joins us again in the surveillance room the next morning. It feels awkward being this close to him after what he said yesterday; awkward for both of us, I think. He’s an even bigger asshole than he was before; won’t even look at me much less say two words to me. Maybe he’s embarrassed and this is his way of dealing with it; I don’t know. Right now Niklas is the least of my worries.

  James Woodard stands by the door with the blood results in his hand.

  “No match,” he announces and tosses the print-out on a nearby table. “Nora is officially a fictional woman.”

  The news doesn’t surprise any of us.

  I turn to the screens with my arms crossed, dressed more for the occasion today in a tight black one-piece jumpsuit and a pair of military boots with good floor-grip, in case I have to fight Nora again. A dress was the worst thing I could’ve worn yesterday—I know Woodard got more of a view than I ever wanted him to.

  “I think she actually pissed in the bucket,” Niklas points out.

  My face scrunches up, but I look anyway. Thankfully, the cameras aren’t in any position to prove it.

  “Well, she’s gotta go sometime,” Dorian says.

  Victor continues to watch Nora as she paces the room on her tall legs and in her tall heels. She doesn’t look anxious or agitated, as I know I would be, being locked in a windowless room for this long, but instead she just looks bored. Add patience to her list of skills—Woodard isn’t the only one in this room who feels inadequate.

  Victor turns away from the screens, the light from them casting a glow around his back.

  “Woodard,” he says, “I need to speak with you for a moment.” He drops his arms at his sides and heads for the exit.

  Woodard follows promptly.

  “Victor, what is it?” I ask.

  Light from the hallway spills into the room. He stands in the doorway and looks back at me. “I have some things I need him to check out,” he says simply.

  I nod and they leave together.

  Dorian and I glance at one another, sharing the same suspicious expressions. But Victor taking one of us off to the side to speak to privately isn’t anything new. It just never fails to make me incredibly curious, and Victor doesn’t always feel the need to share with me what was said.

  I glance over at Niklas. I know he can feel my eyes on him, which is why he doesn’t look back.

  The only sounds in the room are Nora’s heels moving across the floor coming from the speakers, and Dorian’s breath blowing the steam rising from his paper coffee cup.

  “So,” I say to Niklas, trying to break the unease, “do you think you know any more about her today?”

  “No,” he says, but doesn’t look at me.

  He continues to stand in front of the screen on the right with his arms crossed, dressed in a pair of jeans and a dark gray button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. And his biker boots; he always wears those. I don’t think he even owns another pair of shoes.

  Disappointedly, I turn away and watch Nora instead.

  “I guess I’m going in there next,” Dorian says, and doesn’t seem at all eager—I think he’s more worried about what he might do to her.

  I pull out the wheeled chair on his left and sit down next to him.

  “We’re gonna get Tessa back,” I tell him. “Just like Dina and James’s daughters. I really believe that.” I have to believe it, otherwise I’d be a mess by now.

  Still facing the screen, Dorian makes a small breathy noise; a smile appears in his eyes. “Most women divorce their husbands and hate them for life because of an affair,” he says, and then glances over at me briefly, the smile now lifting the corners of his lips. “Tessa divorced me because I didn’t want to move to Wisconsin.”

  My brows crumple in my forehead.

  “Wisconsin?”

  He laughs under his breath. “She hated New York. Wanted to live closer to her family. I don’t do well outside of a city”—his shoulders and head appear to shudder—“get in places like that where you
can actually hear yourself think and you start to overthink.” He glances over once more, his eyes meeting mine. “Doing the shit that I do, you don’t want to think about it too much, y’know?”

  I nod slowly. “Yeah, I guess I do know.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he goes on, “I’m not haunted by the things I’ve done, but then maybe that’s why—I haven’t thought about it enough.”

  He laughs suddenly.

  “But I did have an affair,” he says and it catches me off-guard. He shakes his finger at me as if to make a point. “She cheated on me first though. After that it went back and forth—we cheated on each other out of spite for three years before she divorced me. Hell, I never would’ve done it the first time if she hadn’t”—he takes a quick sip of his coffee—“but Wisconsin was the nail in the coffin.”

  I look over at Niklas again. He’s the same quiet, motionless figure standing there as he was before, but I can’t imagine he’s not thinking about Claire, especially considering the topic.

  I avert my eyes before he notices.

  “Whoever’s coming in next,” Nora says looking up into a camera, “be sure to bring me something to eat. I’m famished.”

  “Famished?” I echo with annoyance. “What, does she think she’s British?”

  The door opens then and Victor walks back into the room alone. The three of us turn to look at him, hoping he’s in the divulging mood. But he isn’t. I stand up from the chair.

  “Dorian,” Victor says, “you go in next. I’ve put Woodard on something that may or may not be a break in her identity. I need to find out first before I talk to her.”