That sounds promising. Victor is more often right about his hunches than he is wrong, which is why for now he’s choosing not to say anything to the rest of us until he knows for sure.
Dorian stands.
“OK, boss,” he says and takes a deep breath.
He drinks the last of his coffee down and leaves the room, snagging the apple from the table next to the coffee pot on his way out.
“I hope he doesn’t kill her,” I tell Victor. It does worry me because Dorian’s middle name is Trigger-Happy, and even if his ex-wife’s life is on the line, I’m not so sure he can control his anger.
Niklas ignores us and sits down in the chair that Dorian just left.
Victor steps up next to me in front of the screens; the cool, thin material of his white dress shirt brushes against my arm. He moves his arm behind me, fitting his hand at my waist, his long fingers spread about my hip. I always welcome and crave his touch, no matter where or how or who’s watching, but right now it makes me uncomfortable. I feel the need to glance over at Niklas again, to see if he’s watching, or bothered by it, but I think I’m just being paranoid; my guilt is getting the best of me.
My eyes fall on the screen when Dorian enters the room with Nora. He walks straight over to the table where she now sits in her usual chair, and he places the apple in front of her.
Nora wrinkles her nose at it, and then raises her eyes to Dorian.
“An apple?” she says with disappointment.
“It’s something to eat, isn’t it?”
She smirks.
Dorian sits down at the other side of the table, resting his elbows on top of it, steepling his hands.
Nora smiles charmingly, one side of her mouth lifting higher than the other.
“So let’s do this,” Dorian says, motioning a hand.
“Eager, aren’t we?” she taunts him.
“No, I think tired-of-your-shit is more like it.”
She laughs gently and crosses one leg over the other, folding her hands together on her lap, looking tall and regal and stunning.
“Your reputation is accurate,” she says. “Cocky, mouthy, impatient—you’re almost as bad as Niklas Fleischer.” She leans forward. “Tell me—how does a guy like you; gorgeous, dangerous and obvious because of the trail of bodies you tend to leave behind, not end up on everyone’s radar?”
“What do you mean?” he asks, confused, curious.
“What I mean is that you were the most difficult to find any information on. Of course, I doubt your real name is Dorian Flynn—mine isn’t Nora Kessler; I made it up when I got here; Kessler just now.” She grins and rests her arms on the table like Dorian. “I followed you for months—worked at a restaurant not far from your apartment in Manhattan; that one you like so well that serves your favorite clam chowder. Of course you wouldn’t recognize me because I looked very different then”—a look of realization crosses Dorian’s features and Nora’s smile lengthens when she notices—“yeah, you’re getting it now aren’t you?”
“You were my waitress,” he says, growing more confused. “I remember you…your hair was darker and shorter…your makeup was different…you talked like a New Yorker.” He appears conflicted and uncomfortable.
“Oh don’t be so hard on yourself,” Nora says. “I’m good at what I do. I could’ve sat down in the booth with you and engaged you in conversation and you wouldn’t recognize me later unless I wanted you to.”
My mind is running away with me now, hundreds of images flashing across my thoughts, trying to pick her face or her voice or any part of her out of the thousands of people I’ve come into contact with. Could she have been there, in Mexico with me at some point? It doesn’t seem likely—I doubt she even knew who I was until after I fled Mexico with Victor. But none of that stops me from relentlessly trying to spot her face in any part of my past.
I glance over at Victor, and then Niklas, and judging by the deep looks of concentration on their faces, they’re doing the same thing.
“I lifted your fingerprints from your glass,” Nora says. “You used to be Adam Barnett of Katy, Texas. Arrested multiple times as a juvenile and spent most of your teenage life in the system. Cared for by adoptive parents until they couldn’t deal with you anymore and later gave you up—nothing everybody else here doesn’t already know, I’m sure. I kept searching. But your info trail ended abruptly at the age of sixteen. It was like you fell off the face of the planet. No driver’s license or work record, no tax information, not even a credit card purchase—under either name. The point is that”—her eyes harden with focus—“you’re in a way like me; a person with no real identity. And I wonder why that is?” Her question is heavy with accusation, as though she already has a good idea of the answer—considering the reason she’s here, she probably does.
“Look at what I do,” Dorian says exasperated, pressing his back against the chair. “I’m not supposed to be easy to find or to figure out. If I were, I wouldn’t be any good and I’d probably already be dead by now.”
“This is true,” she says with a nod, “you are good. You’re good because I couldn’t find anything. I was getting worried you wouldn’t get to play the game with everybody else because I had nothing on you, nothing to force you to confess”—she smiles wickedly—“but then something extraordinary happened, something I never expected. When Tessa first saw me she said something that really got my attention before she was chained to the furnace. Do you want to know what she said?”
Dorian looks nervous.
Nora looks increasingly sly.
Niklas’ eyes actually meet mine for a brief moment of question, but fall away just as quickly.
Victor stands stock-still, looking into that screen as if what he’s about to hear is the most important thing he’s going to hear all day.
“What did she say?” Dorian asks reluctantly, turning his blond head slightly at an angle and narrowing his eyes on Nora.
Nora smiles sweetly.
“She said, ‘I won’t tell you anything’, before she was even asked any questions.” Nora pauses, cocking her head to one side. “Now that’s not something an innocent person, uninvolved, would usually say in a time like that, is it?”
Dorian’s fist slams against the table, knocking the apple onto its side. It rolls awkwardly a little ways before stopping near the edge.
“Tessa is innocent,” he rips the words out angrily, “and if you hurt her—”
“Oh, I’ve already hurt her,” Nora cuts him off snidely. “I hurt her enough to get what I wanted out of her, but what happens to her later will depend on what happens in this room today, as you’re already aware.”
“She has nothing to do with anything,” Dorian growls, growing more incensed, trying so hard to keep his murderous rage contained.
“Anything, meaning what exactly?”
Dorian hesitates, seeming in search of words—words of truth, or maybe words that just sound like truth.
“Look—Tessa knows what I do, all right,” he says, appearing to give in a little. “She’s smart; she knew I was leading a double life. She found my guns. She started following me, thinking I was into some drug shit. I was afraid she was going to get hurt, so I told her the truth.”
“And what is the truth?”
Dorian raises both arms out at his sides, opening his hands palms-up. “That I’m part of an underground organization.”
“What kind of underground organization?”
His eyes harden and he shakes his head in perplexity.
“This kind,” he says, pointing downward.
Puzzled, I look to Victor. “So, that’s his secret, that he told his ex-wife about us?” While that’s a bad thing and Victor won’t like it, I still feel about as confused as Dorian looks.
“No, there’s something more to this,” Victor says cryptically, staring at the screen.
Nora shakes her head and sighs.
“So you’re sticking with that story then?” she asks.
; Dorian blinks confusedly.
“Yeah. I am. I don’t know what else to fucking tell you.”
“How about the truth?” Nora suggests.
“That is the truth.”
Nora very casually reaches out and takes the apple into her hand. She squeezes her index finger and thumb around the base of the stem and twists it until it pops off. Then she rubs the bottom of her black silk blouse around the red skin, giving it a nice shine before bringing it to her lips. Dorian watches her with a cold, calculating intensity as her perfect white teeth sink into the peel with a long and slow cruuunch. She takes her time chewing slowly. She swallows and takes another bite, taking her time with that one as well. It’s as if she’s waiting for something, giving Dorian a little more time to change his story.
I’m nervous as hell; that gut feeling of mine doing a number on my stomach.
Victor hasn’t flinched, and neither has Niklas since the brief second we made eye contact—he looks just like his brother in this moment, and it’s a bit intimidating.
Nora stands up.
Dorian follows suit, keeping his eyes trained on her every move as she walks around the table. She moves toward him, and Dorian wastes no time reaching behind him and pulling his gun from the back of his pants.
He points it at her face and my heart pounds in my chest.
But Nora doesn’t appear concerned.
“I wouldn’t have taken her,” Nora says about Tessa, “if I wasn’t one hundred percent sure you’d do whatever it takes to save her life. Could I have been wrong?” She stands just two feet in front of him with her slender arms covered by wrinkled see-through silk down at her sides.
“I’ve told you what I told Tessa—if there’s something else you’re getting at you’re going to have to be a little more obvious.” Dorian’s anger is rising, but then so is the tension in his shoulders and on his face.
In a flash, the apple hits the floor and Dorian’s gun appears in Nora’s hand, trained on his face.
My hand flies up to cover my mouth, an astonished breath sucked swiftly into my lungs.
Niklas jumps to his feet, sending the wheeled chair rolling away behind him, but he doesn’t go any farther.
“Victor—”
“Just wait,” Victor says to me, still staring at the screen, but even his nerves are beginning to unravel a little, I can tell by how much wider his eyes are now than they were moments ago.
Dorian, attempting to back away from her with his hands up in surrender, trips over his chair and nearly falls, but catches himself just before.
“What the—you crazy fucking bitch!”
A muffled shot zips through the space and Dorian’s body jerks to the right, his left hand coming up to cover the wound on his shoulder; blood seeps through his fingers. He yells out and stumbles backward, tripping over the chair again but hitting the floor this time. Struggling on his way as he backs toward the wall, he looks up at the camera, at us, and I want desperately to rush down there and help him, but I know that I can’t.
“You fucking shot me!” He glares up at the tall blonde beauty standing over him with his own gun; waves of pain rolling through him, manipulating his features. “Stupid bitch! You fucking shot me!”
“Confess,” she demands with the gun pointed at his face again, “or you die and Tessa dies.”
“I did! I confessed!” He finally makes it to the wall and throws himself against it, needing it to hold him up. His long legs in dark pants are stretched out before him with black boots on the ends—between them are a pair of black six-inch heels.
“Last chance,” Nora says, looking down at Dorian over the barrel of the gun and the silencer attached to its end.
Dorian’s wide eyes dart to and from Nora’s face and her finger on the trigger.
It takes us mere seconds to get to the room, punch in the code and burst inside with guns drawn. But Nora doesn’t flinch; she keeps her eyes on Dorian and the gun pointed at his head.
“If any one of you shoots me,” she warns, “there’s an eighty/twenty chance that my finger will squeeze this trigger the rest of the way and that wall behind Dorian Flynn will look like a Jackson Pollock.”
None of us makes a move.
“CONFESS!” Nora says stridently, and although I’m standing far behind her and can only see her back, I know her face is twisted by furious demand.
I look at Victor standing next to me with his gun pointed at Nora. I know he could take her out with a single shot and somehow keep Dorian from getting killed. I know that Victor is better than anyone in this room when it comes to aim and timing and speed. But he doesn’t want to shoot Nora. He wants to know Dorian’s secret as much as Nora wants him to confess it.
Niklas drops his gun to his side—his is the only one without a silencer.
Reluctantly, I do the same.
A thuddup sound echoes through the room.
“FUUUCCCK!” Dorian cries out again as Nora puts another bullet in the opposite shoulder. “Fucking bitch!” he roars, doubling over with both hands covering his wounds, his arms crossed in an X over his chest.
I start to move forward, but Victor pushes me back with the length of his arm jutting out at his side.
“ALL RIGHT! FUCK! ALL RIGHT! I’LL TELL YOU!” Dorian raises his head, pressing it against the wall. His chest rises and falls rapidly underneath his black shirt. Sweat has beaded on his forehead, dripping down the sides of his face. He can hardly keep his body upright as his back begins to slouch farther; only the soles of his boots grounded against the floor, his knees bent, keeping him from sliding down all the way.
“I’m an independent contractor for U.S. Intelligence,” Dorian confesses to the shock of everyone in the room—all but Nora, who looks proud and strangely relieved. He looks across the room at us. At Victor. “But it’s not what you think,” he says, fighting through the pain. “I’m not here to betray you, Faust”—he pauses to catch his breath—“I never was…it’s not what you think…”
Victor says nothing. Not even his demeanor appears to have changed, but on the inside I feel it’s a much different story.
“Put the gun on the floor and kick it aside,” Victor tells Nora, his gun still trained on the back of her head.
Nora’s arms raise out at her sides in surrender; the gun sliding down onto her index finger as she releases her grip on the handle. Slowly she takes two steps backward away from Dorian, crouches, and then places the gun on the floor. She rises back into a stand and kicks it gently away from the easy reach of her or Dorian.
With her hands still raised she turns around, a smile dancing on her face, her long, silky blonde hair tumbling over her shoulders and partially covering one brown eye.
“Niklas,” Victor says without moving his hard gaze from Nora, “tie her up. Hands and feet and torso. And make certain there is no way she can get out of it.”
“Gladly,” Niklas says with his trademark smirk and then leaves to get whatever he plans to use to tie her up with.
Minutes later, Nora is bound to her chair so tight by several yards of paracord that the only thing she can seem to move anymore are her fingers, and her head.
No one said anything while Niklas tied her up, and still the air is rife with silence several minutes later. Dorian, clearly in a lot of pain from two gunshot wounds, even manages to keep his discomfort confined to facial expressions and body language.
Two men in suits come into the room behind us and Victor orders them to detain Dorian and take him to cell C.
“But you have to listen to me,” Dorian says as he’s being dragged across the room. “At least let me talk before you kill me, Faust. Give me a chance to explain myself. It’s not what you think!”
Victor still says nothing, and as always, his dark silence speaks frightening volumes that words can never match.
“Wait!” Nora calls out. “Let me tell Dorian one last thing before you take him away!”
The men stop at the door and look at Victor first, seeking
his permission. Victor nods, and then the men, one on each of Dorian’s arms which are cuffed behind his back, turn him around to face Nora; his knees almost touching the floor.
He raises his head weakly to look at her, pain manipulating his features as it moves through his body.
“That ex-wife of yours is very loyal,” Nora says. “Skittish and a little stupid, but loyal. I was surprised.”
“What do you mean?” Dorian says with a sneer. “She told you about me. I mean I understand—what’d you fucking do to her?”
Nora looks at him in a pitying manner.
“Actually,” she says, her lips turning up at the edges, “she wasn’t the one who told me anything—you were.”
Dorian curses her as the men carry him out, struggling in their grasps. We hear him shouting all the way down the length of the hallway until his curses are shut off by the elevator doors.
Nora looks back at us, seemingly helpless in her bonds, but always the most confident one in the room, despite them. I despise this bitch. I want to be the one—like everybody else I’m sure—who kills her when this is all over.
“That leaves just you and the Jackal, doesn’t it?” Nora says to Victor. “And time is almost up. Somehow, I don’t see this ending well.”
“If it doesn’t end well for Dina,” I threaten, “it won’t end well for you either.”
She makes a face that says whatever happens, happens, and shrugs her restrained shoulders.
11
Victor
Woodard follows me down a long stretch of brightly-lit hallway toward the cells; the stench of his thick cologne suffocating the space around us and me within it. The leather soles of his loafers squeak obnoxiously with every heavy step as he tries to keep up. We pass a row of empty cells on the way to the C. This building had once been a juvenile detention center and was perfect for my needs, so I purchased it quickly soon after Izabel and I left New Mexico.
“I don’t know what to say, boss,” Woodard says apologetically beside me, “but there was nothing on Dorian Flynn that I could find. I-I don’t know how that woman could’ve known.”
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