The Swan and the Jackal (11 page)

Olaf had always had a soft spot for me. He showed that by taking me away from the violent men and from the brutal beatings they inflicted on me. And he continued to show it by having me sleep in his quarters on some nights, sometimes on a cot on the floor next to his bed, while other times he insisted I sleep with him
in
his bed. I did not want to, but it would’ve been foolish to protest.

I stood from the cot and kept my eyes on the floor, my small, boyish hands folded together down in front of me. I smelled of urine and I was embarrassed. I had been wetting myself in my sleep the whole six months I had been imprisoned in this room. They did terrible things to the boys here. Unspeakable things.

Following Olaf past the tall iron door, my eyes finally began to adjust to the light in the hallway. The humid air stank of mold and garbage. I heard the pattering and squeaking of overfed rats scuttling down the hall in front and behind me. In this section of Olaf’s estate, the rats were fed better than the boys were.

Olaf was wearing cologne and this frightened me. He was also dressed in a suit, although his pants were an inch too short and he wasn’t wearing anything as distinguished as a tie. But the suit was a stark difference from the navy pants and wool sweaters he often wore. Olaf only wore suits and cologne for special occasions. And his special occasions almost always entailed teaching me the greatest of lessons, which I was always the most afraid to learn.

I dared not speak unless spoken to as he guided me down the long, dusty hallway and outside the building. I walked alongside him obediently toward the old, yet more immaculate building I had lived in with Olaf before I attempted escape. The sun was shining brightly overhead as my bare feet went over the prickly grass. The warmth on my skin was a godsend. The clean air filling my lungs. The sweet smell of the white flowers with bell-shaped petals that grew alongside the building.

But it was gone all too quickly, as well as the sunlight, when we stepped through another door and I was bathed in a harsh orange light in the foyer and the acrid smell of incense and cigars.

Willa, in her average height and average frame, greeted us wearing a long gray dress that fell just above her ankles, and a pair of flat black shoes over thin white ankle socks. Her arms were covered by the sleeves of a white button-up top that she wore underneath the dress, the collar fixed neatly around her neck with a little four-leaf clover broach pinned to the left side. I liked Willa. She was the only person other than the boys who were imprisoned here like I was, who I didn’t want to see die a painful and horrific death.

Willa was young, but older than me by at least five years. A kind and beautiful girl of about fifteen or sixteen. She was taken by Eskill at a young age, the same as I was. But she would never be sold and was treated kindly by the other men for the most part. I never knew why.

But Willa, also like me, put on a very different face in front of the men.

And as always when I saw her, I went along with it.

“Vhy geev me the runt?” Willa snapped in a heavily broken accent, her pretty natural pink-colored lips curling with censure as she looked down at me through harsh, but beautiful green eyes. “Vhy must you always geev me ze hopeless ones?”

“Because you are the only one here, my dear Willa, who can make the hopeless ones at least
appear
worthy.” Olaf smiled. I wouldn’t dare look at his face, but I could tell there was a smile on it without having to see.

My body jerked forward and I nearly lost my footing as Willa’s hand yanked on my elbow. And then I saw stars when she slapped me hard across the face with her free hand, and finally my wobbly legs came out from underneath me. My bare knees scraped against the wood floor, but I kept myself from falling further, bracing my free hand against it to hold up my frail weight.

“Geet up!” Willa pulled me to my feet.

“Willa,” I heard Olaf say in a forewarning tone, “I’ve told you, not in the face. Now go. Get him cleaned up.”

“Yes, sir,” Willa said, curtsied and then turned on her heels with my elbow still clutched in her hand.

She walked me up the winding staircase to the second floor. Passing other servants in matching gray dresses, Willa grabbed me by the back of my dark, filthy hair and wound her fingers aggressively through it, pushing me along in front of her cruelly.

“I said valk straight, boy!” she growled behind me.

When the door to her quarters was opened, she gave me a hard shove and I fell through the doorway onto my hands and knees.

The lock on the door clicked behind me and then Willa was sitting on the floor next to me, pulling me into her lap and rocking me against her chest.

“I’m so sorry, Freedrik!” she cried into my hair. “You vill forgive me?”

Tears soaked my cheeks, streaking through a layer of dirt I could feel on my face. But I wasn’t crying because of the way she treated me. I was just glad to see her again.

“I’ll always forgive you, Willa.”

I felt her lips on the top of my head and it sent a rush of warmth through my body.

“Ve must get you ready quickly,” she said, helping me to my feet again. “I don’t want Olaf to have any reason to put you back in confinement.”

“I’m afraid, Willa.”

“I know, Freedrik. I know.”

She kissed me lightly on the cheek and wasted no time getting me into the bath. She was always so careful with me, just as she was with all of the boys who were placed in her care. And she never violated me. She cleaned every part of my body with a caring touch. I never wanted to leave her room whenever I was there, but I would always be whisked away soon after, to avoid suspicion and to make certain that Willa maintained her place as head servant.

After I was bathed and dressed in a clean white T-shirt and a pair of khaki pants, Willa hugged me goodbye as the kind and loving young girl, before taking me back out into the hall as the girl with the iron fist.

Minutes later, she was gone and I was back in the company of Olaf, who seemed to be waiting eagerly for me in his too-small suit and headache-inducing cologne.

“Before I take you to your new quarters,” Olaf said walking beside me with his hands resting folded on his backside, “there is something you need to see.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. Already my legs felt shaky, my stomach queasy and tied up in knots. I inhaled a deep breath and remained silent with my eyes facing forward.

“Do you remember when I punished you long ago for forgetting to brush your teeth?” he asked.

I nod. “Yes, sir.”

How could I forget? He brushed them for me in such a violent manner that the toothbrush had been shoved into the back of my throat numerous times, and he scrubbed my gums so hard that they bled for three days afterwards.

We turned left at the end of the hall and came upon a door.

I heard screaming inside and my legs began to shake more noticeably.

Olaf placed his weathered hand on the lever-style handle and said, “This is what will happen to you if your teeth become damaged, or diseased, or grow in crookedly after the old ones have fallen out. You’ve been lucky so far to be blessed with good teeth. Let’s hope it stays that way. You will become a young man soon, in your prime, and how your body begins to take shape now will be with you forever. If any part of it isn’t satisfactory, you’ll face extensive cosmetic corrections, or, depending on how well you are fancied by myself or another Master, you could be disposed of.”

My heart sank and my knees began to buckle, but I straightened up quickly.

He pushed open the door and the screams escaped the room in a whirlwind as if they had been waiting on the other side of that door to be set free. I wanted to cover my ears with my hands, but I knew better than to try. I knew to remain standing with my back straight, my eyes lowered and my arms either down at my sides or placed on my backside like Olaf was standing. I opted for folding my hands together behind me so that I could at least dig my fingers into one another as a way to cope and distract from the screams. They echoed vociferously through the moderately-sized room with high vaulted ceilings. I could smell blood. Bitter and stout, as clearly as if my face had been shoved in a pool of it. I had always had an unfortunate strong sense of smell that I often thought of as a curse. Especially in times like these.

Olaf guided me into another room adjacent to the main room where a boy, older than me and probably Willa’s age, was strapped to a strange-looking chair that allowed his legs to stretch out in front of him elevated evenly with the rest of his body. His blond head was strapped against a headrest by a thick piece of leather, like his torso and his ankles and his arms, which were laying out straight against the chair arms and bound at the wrists.

The boy thrashed about in the chair, though he could hardly move. Blood spilled out over his chin, crimson and sticky. His hair was drenched in sweat. His eyes were wide and frightened.

I wanted to throw up. I wanted to run out of that room as fast as I could, to hide in Willa’s room and hope to never be found but by her so that she could hold me against her breasts and comfort me.

But I could do nothing.

A man with curly gray hair, wearing a white lab coat stood over the boy with a pair of pliers in his hand, covered in blood. He didn’t even wear gloves. I got a dark feeling from that man, even worse than the one I got from Olaf. This man liked blood. The smell of it. The mesmerizing crimson color of it. The thickness of it. The taste of it. But most of all, I could sense that he loved drawing it, in any way possible. This man frightened me more than Olaf ever could.

“Is this the little jackal?” the man asked.

“Yes, this is Fredrik.”

“Good, good,” the man said and caught my eyes with a spine-chilling smile.

I didn’t want to look at him, and I wasn’t supposed to, but I couldn’t help it. Thankfully he didn’t feel any need to have me reprimanded for the mistake. No, this man was beyond beatings and punishment. His mind danced in Death’s realm too much to be bothered with such petty things.

He turned back to the frightened teenaged boy strapped in the chair and inserted the pliers into his mouth. The boy grunted and tried to scream while attempting to bite down on the pliers at the same time. But the man grabbed his lower jaw with the other hand and forced his mouth open.

My hands were shaking on my backside. Bile churned violently in my stomach. I started to look away until I remembered promptly that if Olaf noticed, he’d punish me.

The pliers wrenched back and forth, side to side, and a bloodcurdling sound of bone crunching almost made me faint. My knees began to buckle again, but this time I wasn’t able to control them and I felt Olaf’s hand around my elbow, catching me before I hit the floor.

I gathered my composure quickly and stood up straight, my breathing heavy and rapid, my hands trembling now down at my sides.

The man jerked the tooth from the boy’s bleeding mouth and dropped it on the floor.

And then he went to work on another one.

By the fifth tooth, I could no longer stand up on my own.

I can’t look at Cassia. My chest is heavy with the memory, a weight so oppressive and unforgiving that I’m still surprised every day of my life that it hasn’t killed me yet. I still have the nightmares. I still wake up in a feverish sweat, so tormented by the faces—those evil, those incapacitated—that I believe I’m living it all over again. And in my reality, it makes my need that much greater. It makes my addiction that much more dangerous. All-consuming.

I will never stop. I can never stop.

The past has shaped me, molded me into a monster. A monster with a persecuted heart and a dead soul.

Chapter Nine

Cassia

I can’t speak, not because I don’t know what to say, but because I don’t know what to start with.

My heart is breaking into a million pieces.

Fredrik pushes my hands away carefully when I try to cup his face within my palms.

“No pity,” he says. “Is that understood?”

“How can you
say
that?” I gaze deeply into his eyes filled with absolutely nothing, mine filled with heartbreak. “Fredrik—”

“No,” he says resolutely and rises to his feet, leaving me on the floor. “You have to understand, Cassia, it doesn’t hurt me to talk about it. I don’t cry myself to sleep at night thinking about my childhood. It does something
else
to me. It puts me in a much darker place.” His beautiful blue eyes peer down into mine with a chilling darkness. “I neither deserve nor
want
pity.”

I stand from the floor, the chain around my ankle shuffling as I approach him.

“Did that man ever put you in that chair?” I ask quietly from behind now that his back is to me. “Did he pull out your teeth?”

Fredrik’s shoulders rise and fall with a heavy, silent breath.

He turns around to face me, his tall height and gorgeous features as always make my heart flutter and my stomach harden when he looks at me like that, like he’s hungry for something. It’s the darkness within him, the part of him that takes over and compels him to control me, to ravage me in ways that, although I can’t remember, I know that no other man ever has.