Sarai and I just stare at each other seemingly with nothing left to say, but then she drops her arms and walks toward the office. I follow immediately, shutting us off inside the decent-sized room. An LED lantern glows on a wooden table situated against the wall. A single metal fold-up chair sits beside it, pulled out as if Fredrik had already been sitting here before we arrived. The room is dusty and smells of water damage and something chemical that I can’t place. A single window is set in the wall at the farthest end of the room, covered by dust and a tall metal cabinet that had been pushed against it.

“Why do you keep comparing me to Niklas?” she asks, leaving the anger out of her voice. She appears more hurt now than angry. She crosses her arms loosely, her delicate fingers arched over her biceps.

“Sarai, I…,” I sigh and sit down in the chair by the desk, my legs bent at the knees. I throw my head back gently and then look back at her standing in the center of the room.

I start to finish what I was going to say, but she walks toward me and speaks up before I can.

“I’m sorry,” she says almost in a whisper. “I’m not trying to resist you, Victor. I don’t have some kind of secret plan to do things my own way just to show you that I can. I’m sorry. I was playing it by ear, doing what I felt was right in the moment. That’s all.”

She stops in arms reach before me. I look up at her, the way her long auburn hair drapes her soft, bare shoulders. Her tall height in those heels. The slim curvature of her little body that I can’t seem to get out of my head. She tilts her head to one side. Unable to resist, I reach out and pull her onto my lap, propping her on one leg. I position my left hand on the back of her waist, the other rests on her bare thigh. She looks down at me from the side and then reaches in and brushes the backs of her fingers down the side of my face.

“Victor,” she says in a gentle voice, “I’m not Niklas. I never will be. Look what he did to you. I could never betray you.”

“It’s not about that,” I say, moving the palm of my hand across her lower back. “I don’t mean to compare you and my brother, but the similarities, your recklessness, your temper, your inability to follow my orders—”

“Your orders?” she asks, her brows drawing inward. She shakes her head faintly and then turns on my leg to better face me. Her features are soft, the look in her eyes not at all offended, but at the same time I feel like I’m about to be corrected. “We need to get something straight before we go any further.”

I cock my head to the side, gazing up into her dark eyes. I’ve never been so absolutely captivated by a woman before. Not ever. Not in any way like this. I’m used to always getting my way, to being the one in charge. I’ve never been able to look a woman in the eye and utterly give in to what she wants from me. I couldn’t with Samantha, who I know at one time loved me very much. I left her. I couldn’t give her what she wanted. But when I look at Sarai, the way she gazes upon me with that soft yet very much unyielding look in her beautiful green eyes, I know that no matter what she says to me next, or how much she defies me, I won’t be able to walk away from her.

“I’m not one of your soldiers, Victor. One of your informants, or contacts, or liaisons. Yes, I want you to teach me things. I want to do whatever it takes to stay with you and be a part of your life. But you can’t change who I am. And you can’t treat me like you would one of your men.” She tilts her head to the other side. “I mean sure you can, if you want, but I’m not going to change. Do you understand that?”

What in the hell is wrong with me? Instead of turning me off and dropping her from my lap, her defiance only makes me want her more.

I sigh.

“I don’t want you to change who you are, but you’re going to have to learn to listen to me in these types of situations.”

“It was just one guy,” she argues. “You know as well as I do that I could take him down. I did take him down. He barely weighs more than me.”

I shake my head. “No, Sarai, you don’t get it. You wouldn’t believe how many people, mainly tourists, women, teenagers, that Andre Costa has had a hand in abducting in South America.”

“But we’re not in South America,” she says.

“You don’t have to be. People are abducted every single day in the United States and transported overseas, made as slaves, murdered. The list is endless. You of all people should know how easy it is to be forced into a life of slavery and how difficult it is to be set free from it. Most never are.”

“But I knew you could hear me on the mic,” she says and I sense that she’s beginning to lose her confidence in herself. “I was smart enough to tell you every street that I was on.”

“I know,” I say softly, rubbing my palm across her thigh. “But what if I didn’t hear the hints you were dropping? What if Costa had led you to a car or a building—much like this one—and the men who were with him in the bar were there waiting to restrain you?”

“We can’t live by the what if’s, Victor.”

“We absolutely live by the what if’s,” I come back. “We don’t live a life in fear of them, but yes, we must always take them into account.”

Her chin drops and her eyes stray from mine.

“You wanted me to help you, to train you,” I say, raising her chin again with the edge of my finger. “You said you’d do anything. I’m asking you to trust my lifelong experience and do not defy me anymore.”

She nods. “OK, but I don’t want you to get pissed at me if I fall off the wagon.”

A smile warms my eyes.

I know that I’ll never be able to change her, but that’s what I like about her. I don’t want her to change. I just want her to realize that I’m the one that knows what I’m doing. I won’t say it to her, but I would never send her on any kind of mission that I knew she couldn’t handle. Luring Costa to the car was a simple task. I knew she could pull it off. I knew she could handle Costa if they were alone, or else I never would’ve sent her there in the first place. Allowing her to do this wasn’t my way of seeing if she could pull it off, or letting her ‘practice on the easy people’, it was my way of seeing how well she could follow orders.

But Sarai has a mind of her own. And as much as it infuriates me that she doesn’t listen as much as I’d like her to, at the same time it makes me mad for her.

I feel her lips touch mine. The smell of her skin sends me into a brief high. I suck a breath deep into my lungs and reach up, cupping her face firmly in my hands as she turns around on my lap, straddling me. “You’re going to be the death of me,” I whisper onto her lips before slipping my tongue into her mouth.

Costa’s blood-curdling scream echoes through the warehouse.

Sarai pulls her lips from mine and her body shoots upright on my lap.

“What the hell is he doing to him?”

I fit my hands on the sides of her waist. “You don’t want to know.”

She nods steadily and climbs off my lap. “Yeah, actually I do.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Sarai


“Motherfucker! I don’t know anything! AHHH!”

Andre’s screams fill the space around me when I open the office door. His hands are clenched into fists, restrained against the arms of the chair by two leather straps pulled so tight against his skin that they’re turning colors as he struggles against them. Dark blood glistens on his lips, pouring down over his chin and down his throat.

Fredrik holds a pair of bloody pliers in his hand which is covered by a white latex glove.

“You fucking whore,” Andre growls at me as I step into the dull gray light. His enraged eyes dart back and forth between the three of us. Victor stands behind me now. “My brother will find you before you leave this city. And he’ll fucking kill you!”

Fredrik drops something from the end of the pliers into a silver tray on top of the table next to him. It clinks into the bottom. He is so calm, so refined, and I find it eerie as he stands over a bleeding man who is precisely the opposite, how their stark differences can exist in the same room without one canceling the other out.

“Who is your brother?” Fredrik asks in a relaxed manner.

“Go fuck yourself!” Andre spits out the words and a spray of blood spatters from his lips.

Fredrik very calmly grabs a hold of Andre from underneath his chin, his fingers fitted firmly against his cheeks, the white latex quickly becoming red. Andre struggles in his grasp, trying to thrash from side to side but can barely move his head two inches with the leather strap bound tightly around his forehead.

“I won’t tell you shit!” Andre screams and gurgles as the blood drains into the back of his throat. “Go ahead! Pull them all out! Nothing an implant can’t fix!” he taunts Fredrik, but his struggling body and the way his fingers dig aggressively into his palms tells a much different story.

Fredrik brings the pliers into view and clamps them around one of Andre’s front teeth. Andre gurgles and spits some more, which I realize is him trying to speak, but actual words are indecipherable now. He screams through moans and grunts, his eyes open and shut from pain and mental exhaustion.

“Where is Edgar Velazco?” Fredrik asks, holding the pliers still around Andre’s tooth.

Andre gurgles something inaudible, but what sounds very much like, “Fuck you!” and the bones in Fredrik’s hand harden as he begins to pull. Andre cries out in pain, his fists shaking against his restraints, his whole body stiffening and jerking against the chair. The tooth comes out after a few stomach-turning shifts of the pliers back and forth, the grinding of the bone makes me want to cover my ears until it’s over.