I manage to pick myself up from the floor.

“You have a choice,” Victor says. “Go along with my plan to tell Vonnegut that she’s dead, or tell him the truth, tell him everything that went on here to secure your place in the Order. I won’t hold it against you. I’ll take her away with me, set her up somewhere so that she can go on with her life. And then I’ll go on with mine. It’s your choice, Niklas. But I won’t kill her, and if Vonnegut finds out that she’s alive he will, rightfully so, question my loyalties. And you know first-hand what happens when any of our loyalties is questioned.”

“Eliminated as a precaution,” I say out loud, though mostly to myself, remembering what Victor said moments ago about why they ordered Niklas dead.

Niklas is in shock. He shakes his head repeatedly as if trying to shake Victor’s treacherous words out of his mind.

“You of all operatives,” Niklas manages to say, “…I don’t understand why you’re doing this, why you would throw away everything and go into hiding—.” He shakes his head again, unable to finish the sentence.

“It wouldn’t be the first time I risked my position and my life to follow my conscience rather than my orders.”

Niklas takes in a deep breath and averts his gaze toward the ceiling. Then he looks at me and we share a moment suspended within this intricate web of lies and contempt and resentment, a moment where, despite all of that, we realize we have something in common: Victor saved us both equally, and for that we are one in the same.

Simultaneously, we look back at Victor.

Niklas finally breaks the thick silence.

“As I have always said, brother, I will never betray you.”

Victor nods and I see the relief hidden within his blue-green eyes. I wonder if he would’ve killed Niklas where he stands if Niklas had chosen to take the alternate route.

“I’m with you,” Niklas says and glances at me once. “Whatever you want to do. But before we do anything we need to figure out who told Javier where you took her.”

When Niklas’ eyes fall on me again they stay there, and I suddenly feel like he’s blaming me.

My eyebrows wrinkle in my forehead. I cross my arms tight over my chest. “Well, I sure as hell didn’t tell him,” I spat. “Don’t look at me like that.”

Victor walks between us and takes me by the wrist, leading me to the nearest chair where I sit willingly. My stomach swims nervously. I look up at both of them, my hands gripping the ends of the chair arms.

“It wasn’t me!”

“I know it wasn’t you,” Victor says. “But I need you to think right now, Sarai. Have you at any time spoken to anyone since you left the compound? Anyone at all. Have you seen anything that maybe didn’t seem right, something seemingly insignificant?”

I shake my head, my index fingers making a nervous circular motion against the cherry wood grain grooves in the design of the chair. “I-I don’t know,” I say breathily, desperately trying to come up with something, anything that he could be looking for.

But I can’t.

“Victor, I-I don’t think so.”

He paces once and then looks over at Niklas. Then as if he was just slapped in the face by a theory, he turns his body swiftly back to me.

“Take off your clothes,” Victor demands.

My heart stops.

“What?”

“Sarai, take off your clothes.” He pulls me up from the chair by my hand. I try to wrench it away from him, but he applies more pressure.

“I’m not taking my clothes off! Why would you ask me to—?” I slap him with my free hand, right across the left side of his face.

He grabs my wrist. “I need you to trust me. I’ve brought you this far now do as I say and take off your fucking clothes.”

His uncharacteristic use of that vulgarity shocks me into compliance. My eyes dart back and forth between them again, my jaw tightening, my breath heavy and short expelling from my nostrils.

“Fine,” I say, jerking my hand from his. “But not in front of him.”

Victor takes me by the wrist and walks with me past Niklas and toward the entrance to his room.

“You have nothing I want to see,” I hear Niklas say just before Victor shuts the door.

I already feel naked standing in the wide open of Victor’s spacious ocean-view room and I haven’t even taken my clothes off yet. I want to linger as long as possible, drag it out so that maybe he’ll change his mind or at least tell me what this is all about, but he wastes no more time. And he doesn’t let me waste any more of it, either.

“Take them off. Now.”

I start with my shirt, pulling it over my head and exposing my bare breasts. I drop the shirt on the floor beside my feet. He watches me, not with lust in his eyes, but with determination. I lean over and slip out of my pants and all that is left are my panties.

He steps right up to me.

I hesitate. The space between us is about two feet but it feels like two inches. I don’t want to take off my panties, not because I’m afraid of him, but because…I’m embarrassed for him to see me that way.

When he steps up closer and doesn’t demand I take the panties off, I breathe a silent sigh of relief.

“Lay down on the bed,” he says and that breath is sucked right back into my lungs again before it can expel completely.

When I don’t act fast enough, he wraps his hands around my upper-arms and gently pushes me down against his expensive designer comforter.

I swallow a lump in my throat.

As I start to raise my arms to my breasts to cover them, I feel Victor’s warm hands on me. I freeze, my eyes wide and unblinking. He raises my arms above my head and begins to feel every inch of my skin, pressing his fingers along the underside of my arms first and then down toward my ribs before making his way to my breasts.

His eyes catch mine briefly.

Maybe he wanted to ease my fear of him with that glance, but all it did was make me want him to touch me more.

The guilt of that thought sears through me. But the touch of his hands on my breasts, kneading only a small portion of them with his fingers, does something entirely different.

I picture his mouth on my nipple…

I force that ridiculous thought away and I watch him, his intent eyes and how deftly, yet at the same time, aggressively, his hands move across every inch of my body. Furtively I inhale the scent of his skin, his natural scent that somehow makes me want him to kiss me. He leans up and away from me, but he isn’t done. He goes for my thighs next, starting with the left and kneading his fingers around the flesh using both hands. And then the other thigh.

When his fingers touch the sensitive skin of my inner thighs, right at my panty line, I gasp.

He stops. He looks up at me, across the naked landscape of my body. I can only wonder what he’s thinking, but this time I get the feeling his gaze isn’t to ease my fear of him, but instead to study my reaction to his hands being on me, so close to the most intimate part of me. I wonder why he would study my face at all, why he wouldn’t take my obvious reaction and reject it by moving his hands away as I expected him to do. But instead, he leaves them there, the pad of one of his fingers I feel grazing the flesh at the bend of my leg just on the edge of my panties, conflicted about what he should do. What he might want to do.

He pulls away and abruptly flips me over onto my stomach.

“What are you doing exactly?” I ask, adapting to the quick change of the moment.

He pulls my panties down halfway over my butt cheeks, moves his hands here and there in the same manner and then back up to my hips.

“I’m looking for something.”

“What?” I ask.

Then suddenly he stops, his thumb moving in a circular motion on one particular spot just above my right butt cheek, on the back part of my hipbone. The same general area where I removed his bullet.

“A tracking device,” he says. “You have one.”