The Swan and the Jackal (10 page)

But it’s the only way.

Cassia
is the
only
way.

Opening my eyes, I see that I’m white-knuckling the counter, all of my fingers clamped down hard against it.

I raise my eyes to the small oval mirror in front of me.

Tiny flecks of blood are sprinkled about my unshaven face. Disgusted, I fill my hands with water and splash myself, two, three, four times before I’m satisfied. I reach out and pull the hand towel from the rod hanging on the wall and dry off. There’s blood on my shirt, I notice, and I strip it off quickly.

How could I have been so careless?

When I finally shut the faucets off, I can hear Cassia crying again without the water to drown it out. And it sears through me.

Goddammit, I was never cut out for this. Not
this
. Feeling pain and sorrow for someone,
anyone,
and letting it control me. With Seraphina, I never had to
feel
it. Not like this. So goddamn unpleasant. We were alike, she and I, like two damaged souls cut from the same sadistic cloth. We
thrived
on pain. We got off on it. Whether it was our own pain, or the pain of someone willing to let us enjoy theirs.

“What do I do?” I ask myself aloud, looking into the mirror. “Fight it like I have been the past year? Or, do I give in to it?”

I shake my head no.
No. No.
And pull my fist back and slam it into the mirror. Shards crack and fall into the sink, breaking into even smaller pieces, but leaving my skin unbroken. And when I look back into the mirror, all I see are pieces of myself that are missing. Not the glass, but of myself.

I’ve never been whole, not since the day I was born to a mother who left me wrapped in a shirt beside a public toilet.

I step out of the restroom and look first at the television screen mounted behind the Plexi-glass. Dante is still struggling in the chair. He seems more alert now that I’m not in there with him. He’s scanning the dark, dank room—the only part of this old house I never restored—for a way out, or something to use in which he can free himself. He has no idea that I’m watching. But he’s not going anywhere. Houdini couldn’t get out of those restraints.

“Please, Fredrik, please turn it off,” Cassia says with a whimper.

I don’t hesitate, despite something in the back of my mind—the dark, malevolent part—telling me to leave it alone. That she needs to see it, to hear it, to smell his pungent blood through the cracks in the wooden door that separates the rooms.

I walk over to the television and take the remote down from a shelf on the wall next to it, pressing my finger on the Power button. Cassia winds her frail fingers through the top of her hair, her face buried behind her knees.

“I’m sorry,” I say standing over her. “I—.”

“Lemme out’o ‘ere! Omeone ‘elp!” Dante cries out in garbled, choppy words.

Glancing back down at Cassia, her fingers begin to tighten in her hair as if she’s trying to pull it out, inflicting pain on herself to block out Dante’s cries.

“Fuck!” I march back across the room toward the wooden door and swing it open, slamming it against the wall.

The whites of Dante’s eyes grow stark underneath the floodlight. Blood, more black than red, covers his face, pouring down his chin and soaking into his T-shirt. His face is swelling; his lips red and purple and puffy.

“Be quiet,” I snap.

“M’beggin’ oou! On’t hurz me ‘ny’ore!”

One of three syringes ready and waiting on the tall silver tray behind the chair is within my fingers in seconds. Holding it up to the light, I gently push on the silver plunger, releasing some of the heroin from the tip of the needle.

“W-What are ‘ou ‘oing?” His head struggles to see me behind him; fear of the unknown saturating every syllable.

“I. Said. Be.
Quiet
.” I push the words through my teeth.

After quickly checking the placement and tension of the thin blue tourniquet wrapped around his upper arm, I jab the needle into his vein and pump the contents into him.

Scrubbing my hands all over again in Cassia’s restroom, I find myself drifting off in deep thought as I stare at the broken mirror. Dante is no longer screaming, but Cassia is still crying, albeit not as loudly as before. But her cries, no matter how hard or soft, make me ache just the same.

“Let me see your face,” I say to Cassia gently, crouching beside her on the floor.

I reach out and fit my fingers underneath her chin, carefully raising her face from the confines of her legs.

“I won’t hurt you,” I say. “You know that. You should know that by now.”

She shakes her blonde head as her soft brown eyes look up into my blue ones. “You’ve hurt me before,” she says, tears straining her voice. “You put me in that chair when you first brought me here. Who’s to say you won’t do it again?”

“
I’m
to say I won’t do it again.”

I sit down fully on the floor in front of her, my knees bent, my arms resting atop them at the wrists.

“I will never hurt you,” I say, though I’ve told her this many times since that night. “Things were different then. I thought you…,” I stop myself. I have to be careful the way I talk to her and with the things I say. “Cassia, I thought you knew more than you were telling me. But I know the truth now.”

My heart utterly melts when she scoots across the short distance and moves to sit between my legs. My body instinctively allows her in, conforming to hers as my bare arms wrap around her small form. Her long, delicate fingers curl about my bicep and she presses her head in the warm hollow where my shoulder and chest muscles meet. My eyes shut softly and a small breath emits from my parted lips as I feel her body against mine. I cup her head in my large hand and savor the softness of her hair pushing between my fingers and brushing my chest like a blanket of silk. My heart thrums inside of me, the first sign of an inevitable betrayal, the one where I become a man that I despise. A man who is weak and defenseless at the mercy of emotions that I learned long ago to reject.

I wish Seraphina would’ve let me fucking burn in that fire six years ago.

“You were singing,” I whisper onto her hair. “Connie Francis. Why were you singing, Cassia?”

She shakes her head.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

My arms tighten gently around her.

“It’s OK,” I say in a quiet voice.

After a pause, I ask carefully, “Do you remember anything?”

Cassia raises her head from my arm and turns at an angle to look into my eyes.

“Fredrik,” she says as softly as I had spoken. “Can I speak freely? Can I tell you whatever I’m feeling?”

Confused, and even troubled by her question, I’m not sure at first that I want to let her.

“Yes,” I say, against my better judgment.

Cassia turns around fully between my legs so that we’re sitting face-to-face, her white gown pulled down over her bent knees, her hands resting on the tops of her delicate feet. I don’t know how my hands found their way at each side of her neck, with my fingers splayed carefully to touch the edges of her jaw, but there they are, like two traitors setting out on their own, independent and defiant of the rest of me. I don’t argue with them.

Her eyes soften and so does my dark heart.

I feel like I want to kiss her. But I don’t. I can’t. That’ll only make me want to do other things to her and I’ve been down that road with Cassia before.

It’s a very dangerous road.

“What is it?” I urge her, brushing my fingers against her jawline.

She reaches up and carefully hooks her hands about my wrists, peering into my eyes.

“The things that you do to those men,” she says with words kind and understanding. “I want to know why, because my heart tells me that your darkness was born from darkness. It’s not just a job like you’ve told me before. It’s more than that, Fredrik.”

My hands drop from her neck and fall atop my bent knees again, dangling at the wrists. I shake my head. In the eleven months and nineteen days that I’ve kept her here, she’s never asked this question, never pried into my life before Seraphina. Her curiosities have always been—understandably so—only about Seraphina, the very reason that Cassia is here. I guess I never thought that after spending so long with someone that they eventually begin to see through all of the things you think you’re hiding from them so well.

Cassia pushes herself closer when I thought she couldn’t
get
any closer and urges me to look at her. Her right hand moves toward my face to console me, but I stop it, holding it at the wrist and pushing it back down.

“The only one of us who should be talking about our past, is you,” I tell her.

Her doe-like eyes fall under a shroud of disappointment.

But she’s not going to give up so easily.

“You’ve asked so much of me, Fredrik,” she says with such kindness, “but when I ask anything of you, you turn me away. I only want to know this
one
thing. I don’t care anymore about Seraphina, or the history you have with her. I don’t even care what
I
have to do with it.” Her soft hand ends up touching the side of my face anyway, and I’m not sure how she slipped it past my barrier. “All I care about anymore is you, Fredrik.” She peers deeply into my eyes and ensnares my gaze, her face full of heartbreak and longing. “What are your demons trying so hard to kill?”

I push her hand away more forcibly this time.

“Do you remember anything?” I ask, disregarding her question altogether.

“Stop,” she says with more intensity than I expected. “You’re going to give me this. Before you leave me alone down here another night, you’re
going
to tell me.”

The desperation in her eyes bores into me. I look away, only to look right back at her.

“
Please
…,” she says.

A lump moves down my throat and settles somewhere in my chest. All ten of my fingers spear through the top of my dark, messy hair and I let out a miserable sigh of defeat.

I never talk about my past to anyone. Ever. I try not to think about it, but on some days that is as futile as trying not to breathe. It wasn’t until I met Seraphina eight years ago that I learned to control it, that I became a much different man from the one who hunted shit stains like Dante Furlong, tortured and murdered them every other night, never feeling the satisfaction that I longed to feel with every kill. I was like a drug addict, always looking for a fix but never really satisfied enough to stop. Never satisfied at all, because I only wanted to do it more and more.

Seraphina helped me control the perpetual urges. She showed me how to release the darkness within me with quieter, cleaner methods so that I didn’t leave a trail of bodies and evidence behind. But the biggest impact that Seraphina had on my life was making me feel like I
had
one. Because before her, I was just a speck of dust floating around in oblivion. I didn’t know the meaning of happiness, or understand the thrill of pleasure or the hunger for excitement. I was just a shell of a man who knew only darkness and death, who only felt the emotions of anger, and hatred, and rage and vengeance.

But Seraphina, she was my dark angel, who came into my life and showed me that there was so much more to living than I ever understood. Ever since she left me in that field the night she set my house ablaze, I’ve been slowly but surely succumbing to my old life again, and I need to find her before I fall too far.

If I haven’t already.

Seraphina is the only person I’ve ever talked to about my past. If I do this with Cassia, I fear I might open doors that need to stay shut, for both our sakes.

But…I can’t deny her.

I feel like I owe her after all I’ve put her through. And since it isn’t anything about Seraphina, which I can’t tell Cassia no matter how hard she pries, I resolve with myself to tell her what she wants to know.

Gazing into Cassia’s eyes, I search them for a moment, rapt by her strange feelings for me, and briefly wonder why she even cares. And then my gaze falls on the wall behind her, in the corner where she’s always sitting when I come down here.

Finally, a fragment of a memory spills reluctantly from my lips.

Twenty-three years ago…

Dust swirled up before me when the heavy door to the chamber room groaned opened. A dull gray light filtered inside the room from the hallway onto the stone floor. It hurt my eyes. My filthy hands came up mechanically to rub them only to push dirt behind my eyelids. I winced and shut them tight as tears—brought on only by the aggravation—drained warmly from the corners.

Boots tapped against the stones. Olaf’s boots. I knew the sound of his just as I knew those of all the men who ran this place. It became mandatory to know, like that of every other part of my surroundings at all times. The smell of the guard’s body odor who watched this chamber room from dawn to noon. The squeaking noise the guard’s cigarette lighter made who guarded the chamber from noon to dinner. The swishing of guard number three’s long trench coat that always sounded like the rustling of a plastic garbage bag. These things were vital that I know because I was
going
to escape this place no matter what, and I needed to memorize every aspect of my environment.

I looked up from the edge of my elevated cot made of old wire and worn springs to see Olaf standing over me. My eyes still burned from the dirt I smeared in them. The other boys in the room were also sitting on their cots just as I was. Quiet. Scared. Each of them fearing that Olaf was here for them for punishment, and not for advancement like I was being treated to on this day.

“Come now,” he said with the subtle backward tilt of his head, “I’ll show you to your new quarters.”

It had been a day to look forward to, when Olaf, after six months of confinement, believed I had learned my lesson and would never try to escape again. I was caught just outside the tall brick wall that surrounded the massive property. My only friend, Eduard, who spoke only French, was with me. He was shot in the head next to me, his sentence for fleeing. I was left alive and Eduard’s death had been my final warning.