The Swan and the Jackal (In the Company of Killers #3)

by Redmerski, J. A.

  Shaking my head gently, I answer, “No. Nothing new, anyway.”

  I can feel his gaze on me, seeking my attention. I yield to it and look at him.

  “I’ve told you before, Cassia, that even if you think you’re repeating yourself, that I want you to tell me what you remembered, what you saw while I was gone.”

  I swallow again and glance down at my hands.

  “Just the fire,” I say. “I was daydreaming. Yesterday. And the flames licking the ceiling bled through my memory, just like last time.”

  “Was she there?” he asks and it hurts my heart.

  It always hurts my heart when he asks about that woman.

  I nod slowly, reluctantly. “Yes.”

  He remains quiet and incredibly still, waiting for me to go on, to tell him everything I saw down to the last detail. But I don’t want to this time. I want him to lay next to me and hold me in his arms like he did not long ago. I had never felt so safe. I want to feel like that again. Right now. Not because of my enigmatic fear of Fredrik, but because of the fear I feel when I see that woman’s face in my memory. A woman with jet-black hair and sinister dark eyes. A woman I always tell Fredrik that I do not know, that I can’t remember, but the truth is that I don’t want to remember. And the more he presses me, tries to help me regain the memories of my life before the fire, the closer I get to knowing what she did to me. As much as I fear her without even knowing her, I know she must’ve done something horrible, unspeakable.

  I would rather leave my past far behind if it means that to know it again, it would haunt me for the rest of my life.

  But worse than that, I fear more than anything that once I remember and I give Fredrik the answers that he seeks, he’ll find her and forget all about me.

  “Tell me, Cassia…tell me what you remember.”

  I look beyond him, past his tousled dark hair and deep blue eyes, past the attractive scruff of his face that I often feel prickling against my cheeks even when he isn’t touching me, and I let the memory blur into focus.

  The Fire…

  The screaming in the apartment building wakes me. I shoot up from the bed, my face drenched in sweat, my lungs beginning to burn from the smoke filling the tiny room. It takes me a moment to realize what’s happening and still it’s not even the smoke that makes it all apparent. It’s the screams. I realize that if I was the only person in the building, I never would’ve woken up at all. I look down at the bed and imagine myself lying there, curled within the white striped sheet, flames engulfing the mattress, licking the walls and the headboard and slithering toward my long blonde hair spread out against the pillow, fast, like a desert snake moving in a sideward motion over the top of the sand.

  I don’t remember standing from the bed. How did I get here? I ask myself.

  The screams in the hall are getting louder. I hear crashing and pounding just outside the door, but it’s not my door that someone is beating on. And the crashing noise I can’t make out, but I think it’s the ceiling caving in. I see from underneath the door the lights flicker in the hallway and then go out.

  The screams cease and I feel my heart in my throat.

  Then as if time skips, I’m not standing in front of the bed anymore. I’m climbing out the window and making my way down the fire escape.

  I slip and everything goes black.

  Quiet.

  Though I still hear my breath expelling from my nostrils unevenly as if my sinuses are clogged. The sound of my heartbeat I hear and feel in my head, racing, beating violently through the veins in my temples.

  But everything else around me is quiet; the sirens and horns fading quickly into the background.

  Then I hear a voice. A woman’s voice. At first it sounds distant as though she’s talking to me from behind a wall, or across the length of a giant field. But her voice is getting closer.

  “I told you I’d find you,” the voice says with a hint of cruelty, mockery, satisfaction.

  I try to open my eyes but the lids are too heavy. The tips of my fingers scratch against a hard, coarse surface. I move one hand around, pressing my palm fully against the surface, trying to decipher what it is and why I’m lying face down on it. My body solidifies and I recoil into myself as I begin to cough, my cheek scraping roughly against the hard material that is beginning to feel like concrete or asphalt. I taste the smoke in my lungs, I feel it burning my esophagus and the back of my throat and my nostrils.

  I cough again violently and try to catch my breath as my body goes still. I sniffle once feeling the drainage behind my eyes and it burns like a hot poker is being shoved into my nostrils. I cry out in pain and then lie still, trying to breathe only through my mouth. My lips are dry and cracked and bleeding, and they too taste like smoke.

  Tears seep from my eyes and my body shudders against the cool, hard surface like a quivering ball of muscle and bone. I think I’m going to die here. Wherever here is.

  I’m freezing.

  “You should’ve known better, Cassia,” the voice says and it sounds like she’s right behind me.

  Determined to place a face with the voice, I try desperately to pry my lids apart, but like everything else inside of me, my eyes are burning.

  “Who are you?” I ask weakly and my voice cracks. I need water. I need something to wet my mouth. Anything…

  She laughs quietly and the cruelty in it frightens me to my bitter core. I feel heat on the side of my face, the side not pressed against the hard surface. And then I hear her voice again and I know that she’s right there, hovering over me with her mouth near mine, tracing a path from my earlobe to the corner of my lips.

  I feel her lips on mine, so warm and soft and tender. My body is cold, so cold, and her lips so warm that I don’t have it in me to protest. I feel her tongue slip into my mouth and gently tangle with mine. My eyelids, heavy before, now slam shut and leave me absolutely no control over them anymore.

  “You’ll always belong to me, Cassia,” the woman whispers onto my mouth. “You owe me.”

  The coolness of her hand grazes the skin on my stomach and she slides her hand into the front of my thick cotton pajama pants. I feel her fingers hook inside of me harshly, painfully, and my eyes spring open to see her face looking back at me with malice and menace, her dark eyes swirling in the blue hue of the night sky, her slim outline illuminated by the streetlamp several feet behind her. Her hair is jet black, cut short around her oval-shaped face, each side following the curvature of her jawline. She is beautiful. She is evil.

  I’m afraid.

  And then in a whirlwind the vociferous sounds of the frantic city catch up to my ears again. I begin to choke, coughing so terribly that I think my lungs are going to come up with the black-tinged saliva I expel into my hands. I roll over onto my back and stare upward at a starless black sky, rolling with winter clouds and brisk with winter wind. My body shakes so harshly that it feels like my bones are going to shatter like glass if I can’t control it. My head falls back to the side and I see a pile of boxes. The leg of a couch. A black trash bag with a hole ripped in the bottom and some kind of fabric pushing through it. A cracked mirror with a weathered wooden frame. A red milk crate full of random things: old beat up boxes of food, a bottle of anti-freeze, a crushed soda can.

  The woman is gone. I thought I heard her tall black boots crunching in the snow behind me when I went into the last coughing fit.

  My body aches. I think my leg is broken. It’s a wonder how I didn’t feel it before. I grit my teeth and screw my eyes shut tight as the pain sears through me. I hear more voices approaching. Cops. Firemen. No…it’s an EMT.

  My eyes open and close from pain and exhaustion, but I try to fight the sleep. I want to see what’s going on around me. I want to see if the woman is still close by. While the paramedics are tending to me, I don’t pay them any attention, not even when they ask me questions looking to see how alert I am. But I look beyond them, toward the street filled with red and blue flashing lights that bounce o
ff the nearby buildings. A crowd has gathered on the other side, all bundled in thick winter coats, pointing upward with their gloved hands at the building still engulfed in flames behind me.

  But there is one tall, dark figure amongst the crowd that appears out of place. He stands with his hands in the pockets of his long, black coat. He is calm, unaffected by the chaos in the streets.

  He is you.

  You look at me instead, across the street and through moving bodies and vehicles that pass by and temporarily block our path. Your eyes pierce through me like…like nothing I’ve ever felt before. All I know is that my stomach feels hot and that I’m afraid, yet I still want to look back at you.

  I-I don’t know why, but…but my heart is breaking. Tears sting the backs of my eyes and my chest feels like it’s falling in on itself, like a star burning up its last breath before it collapses into a black hole.

  And then I wake up in your home and I barely remember my name much less anything else about me.

  Chapter Five

  Cassia

  Fredrik reaches out his hand and wipes the tears from underneath my eyes. I gently coil my fingers around his strong wrist and I shut my eyes softly to savor his touch.

  “She said that you owed her.” Fredrik’s voice pulls me back into the moment and my eyelids carefully break apart again.

  His hand falls away. He places it back within his lap.

  I look at for a long moment and then back up at his eyes.

  “What?” I’m confused.

  Fredrik tilts his head slightly to one side.

  “You didn’t say that before,” he explains. “That the woman told you just before she left that you owed her. It’s a new memory.”

  I blink, a little surprised, and nod as the realization sets in.

  “Yes,” I say. “She did say that. But I don’t know what it means.” I lower my head with regret and even shame. I want to give him whatever he needs or wants from me. I have since shortly after he brought me here many months ago. Even if it means that I’ll lose him to that woman, I love him enough that I would let him go if it’s what he wanted.

  I don’t know why I love him. I don’t know how it’s possible to love a man who keeps a woman chained in a basement. But then again, there are so many things I don’t understand because I can’t remember anything. So much doesn’t make sense. Actually, nothing makes sense. I feel trapped in someone else’s life. Out of place in the world, and as it goes on all around me, I stay put in the same place trying to recall a life I had before that doesn’t seem to want to be found.

  “Cassia,” Fredrik says kindly and I raise my tear-filled eyes to him. He sighs regretfully. “If you can’t make progress on your own, you know what I’ll have to do.”

  My hands begin to shake within my lap, my bottom lip begins to tremble.

  I shake my head. “No, Fredrik, please—”

  He leans toward me in one swift motion, punishment in his eyes. I ground the palms of my hands against the mattress on both sides of me and push myself backward against the wall.

  “I-I’m sorry,” I say with fear lacing my voice.

  “Do not call me by my name,” he demands. “I can’t have you doing that.” He lowers his eyes and I can tell by that look of pain hidden behind them that his own rule burdens him in some way.

  Fredrik stands from the chair and takes a seat on the edge of the bed closer to me.

  “Come here,” he says gently, holding out his hand.

  I take it with only slight hesitation because even as much as I fear him, I still want to be with him.

  He guides me next to him and I lay my upper-body in his lap, my cheek pressed softly against his firm thigh. His large hand strokes my blonde hair. His touch is gentle and kind and euphoric, but I know too what else those hands are capable of. I’ve seen the things he does to people. Terrible, nightmarish things. The very things he is threatening me with now.

  “I can’t bear to watch again,” I say. “Please…don’t make me watch.”

  His fingers continue to comb through my hair, leaving shivers to dance along the length of my spine.

  “But you’ll have to,” he says in a calm, relaxing voice, “because I don’t see any other way. Your memories only seem to be triggered by traumatic experiences. You wouldn’t know what you know now about the fire if it wasn’t for making you watch.”

  I move my head against his lap so that I can look up at him. His fingers fall from my hair and he brushes the backs of them down the side of my cheek.

  “Tell me about her,” I say in a powdery voice, trying not to force him away like I did the last time I insisted such a forbidden thing. “What did Seraphina do to you? Why do you want to find her so badly?”

  He shoots up from the bed, leaving me to fall against the mattress.

  “I’ve told you—”

  I shoot up after him, stopping him mid-sentence, intent on making him understand, to make him talk to me once and for all. The chain around my ankle clanks loudly as I force myself across the few feet to stand in front of him.

  “YOU TELL ME!” I scream at him, more tears pouring from the corners of my eyes. “PLEASE! I DESERVE TO KNOW!” I cry out. “You’ve kept me down here for a year. Took me away from…from whatever life I had before the fire. I may not remember it, but it was mine.” I point at my chest; my voice and I know my expression, strained by pain and desperation. “You believe I know this woman well enough that I can lead you to her, that somehow I can help you find her. And I’m willing to do that…,” my voice begins to soften. I only want to make him understand, not show defiance.

  He shakes his head, though not as if telling me no, but it seems more like he’s convincing himself not to tell me. Something he has done time and time again in all these months that I’ve been his prisoner. His willing prisoner.

  I lower my voice to a whisper and clasp my thin fingers about his wrists. “Please, Fredrik,” I say and he doesn’t reprimand me for calling him by his name. I look deeply into his hardened, conflicted eyes that refuse to look back at me. “Maybe if I knew more about her…I could remember. I might begin to understand who she was to me, how I knew her and…,” I try to force his gaze but it’s unshakable, “…and what it is that I owe her.”

  This has been the one thing I’ve tried time and time again to make him understand, but he always cuts me off. He would rather make me watch him torture people to death to trigger my memories than to do something as simple as tell me more about this woman who I apparently used to know before I lost my memory in that fire last year.

  “Please.” It’s my last desperate attempt. My chest is heaving with long, deep breaths. My heart is aching with hopelessness.

  He looks down into my eyes from his tall height and I can’t read him. So much confliction. So much regret and anger and emotions I’m not sure I ever want to know. There’s a beast that lives inside this man that I have seen, but I never want to meet it again. Not face to face like others have met it. I feel in the deepest part of me that he holds that beast down for my sake. Because he doesn’t want to hurt me. But I also feel that it’s only a matter of time before it controls the man I know and love. And every time he looks at me, he inches that much closer to succumbing to the beast and letting it take control.

  I feel like I know, because it’s what my heart tells me, that one day I will die by his hands.

  I step toward him and soften my eyes as I reach my hand up and touch it to the side of his face. I smile warmly and push up on my toes, placing my lips against his.

  He gazes deeply into my eyes when I pull away, and still, there’s so much going on inside of him that I can read nothing.

  Fredrik

  I step back and away from Cassia, resolved to end this before it begins. I can’t let her do this to me. Not again. I won’t let her. Seraphina is important to me and I’ll stop at nothing to find her, my ex-wife, the only woman I’ve ever known who I could be the real and true Fredrik Gustavsson with and not have to h
ide. The one woman who was so much like me that it was fate we were brought together.

  Seraphina is the epitome of darkness. And I need her back.

  She and I have unfinished business.

  “Fredrik…,” Cassia says and I raise my eyes to her. Hers are so innocent and pure, so…vulnerable. I want to take her. Now. To press her tight pink flesh against the wall and ravage her little body violently from the inside out. I want to mark her with my blade and lick the blood from her wounds, the way I used to do to Seraphina.

  I force the need away, rounding my chin. Because I can’t. I can’t do that to Cassia. I won’t do that to Cassia.

  I force myself to walk away.

  “Fredrik…please…don’t go. Not yet. Please!” she calls out after me.

  I hear the chain wrapped around her ankle hitting the floor as she tries to catch up to me, but it stops hard when I step out of her walking range and head toward the basement steps.

  I hear her crying. I hate to hear her cry. Goddammit…I hate to hear her cry!

  Slowly, I turn to face her, and she looks back at me with the same light-brown doe-eyes that I have come to admire…that I’ve become a victim of.

  I’ll need to kill tonight. Just so that I can wash this threatening feeling from my dark heart.

  “I’ll be back in four hours,” I say impassively, coldly even. “And you will watch.”

  I leave her standing there, drowning in her own tears, as I ascend the steps and out of the basement.

  Chapter Six

  Fredrik

  If Dorian Flynn wasn’t part of our new Order, and my assigned partner, he’d be the one I killed tonight. I hate this guy. I might just kill him anyway.

  “Tha fuck is this bitch talkin’ about?” Dorian asks, staring down into a magazine with some famous couple posing with a baby on the front. He flicks the center of it with his middle finger, making a short snapping noise and then drops the magazine on the table between us. “Don’t you ever read this shit?”