“I am sorry for what our father did,” I say to him.

Niklas lowers his eyes briefly.

“I will do anything to protect you because you are my brother,” he says. “Just as you did for me.”

We share a quiet moment of understanding, nod and part ways.

“He hates me, as I’ve said before,” Sarai speaks up from behind. “But he is loyal to you.”

I had been staring out the large window from across the room, lost in thought listening to the waves crash against the rocks.

“Yes,” I say. “He is.”

She steps up to me and places her hand on my wrist.

“You couldn’t have known,” she says. “That it wasn’t him. But that doesn’t matter now. I think you cleared the air with your brother in more ways than one.”

“Perhaps,” I say and walk away. “But I can’t concern myself with that right now.” She follows me back into my room. “We should discuss you.”

I enter the bathroom and she stands at the door, the towel still pressed against her hip.

“Get over here,” I say.

She does without question.

I put my hands on her waist and turn her around to face the mirror. Instinctively, she props her hands upon the edge of the counter, letting the bloody towel fall to the floor. Tucking my fingers behind the elastic of her panties, I slip them down over her hips, letting them rest halfway at the center of her bottom.

“Where would you like to go?” I ask as I open the closet to my right. “I will set you up wherever you’d like, but we need to do this soon. I expect to have my new orders before the end of the day tomorrow and I won’t have much time to spare between taking you where you need to go and when I must leave.”

I come back over with my medical kit and set it on the counter.

Sarai doesn’t answer at first, perhaps she’s deciding on a place, but my gut tells me that’s not the case at all.

I can see her reflection in the mirror, but she doesn’t raise her head to look back at me.

“But I want to stay with you,” she says cautiously. “I’ve already told you, I have nowhere to go, no identity—”

“And I have told you,” I remind her, “that all of that can be remedied. You pick the place and I will take care of the rest. For now, you have the driver’s license I gave you.”

I clean the knife wound with peroxide and cover the area all around it with iodine. She barely winces from the stinging pain.

“I don’t need your help settling me into a life I no longer want,” she says.

I push the needle in and start to stitch her up. Not even this pain, although faintly obvious on her face, can deter her from the things she wants to say. I had hoped that it would, but her determination is unshakable right now.

“I used to dream about it,” she says, her eyes raised to the mirror now but all she sees is the reverie. “Though I could hardly remember what Arizona even looked like, I used to picture me living in that god-awful trailer with a boyfriend and friends next door. Real inspiring dream, I know,” she mocks herself. “But that place, after a while, was all I could remember. I would’ve given anything to be able to go back there and continue with the life that was stripped from me. But after the third year or so with Javier, I stopped dreaming about it. I gave up wishing that I could find a way to escape. Slowly over time I learned to accept my life the way it was. I hated it at first, of course. I hated Javier. I hated that even though he never raped me, at least not like you expect rape to happen; he knew at first I was unwilling, that I only gave in to him because I was afraid and yet he still had sex with me and I say that’s rape. But I hated him and I hated that I gave myself to a man that I did not want.”

I glimpse her throat move in the mirror as she swallows down the painful memory and she pauses before she goes on, trying to recollect her thoughts.

“At some point,” she says, “I even stopped hating him. I-I know that sounds crazy, and-and-and I never loved him,” she stutters over her words and I sense she’s conflicted about the things she saying. “But I stopped hating him….”

She catches my eyes in the mirror.

“Does that make me sick? I mean…,” she licks the dryness from her lips. I thread the last stitch and clean the area again with alcohol, only glancing away from her long enough to make sure of my technique. “I mean, because I stopped hating him, does that mean there’s something wrong with me?”

She desperately wants me to tell her no.

I slip her panties back over her stitches and go to wash my hands.

“It means that you’re human,” I say.

Trying to avoid her desire to remain with me, I leave her standing in the bathroom and offer no more of my own thoughts on the matter.

But she’s relentless and follows me out.

I continue about my business, intent on getting some much-needed sleep. I remove my shirt and step out of my pants, flipping the light switch off as I walk past, leaving the room bathed in a dark blue hue.

“Victor,” she says softly from behind. “Please take me with you. I’ve told you before, I can help. You can teach me, train me to be whatever you think I’d be good at.”

“You don’t really want that, do you?” I ask, knowing her better than she knows herself. I pull back my comforter and sheets and slip into my bed. “You just don’t want me to leave you. Alone in the world. Free to be what and who you want, to make your own decisions. To have sex with men of your choosing. To have a normal life. Because it’s foreign to you.” I pause. “If I told you to kill someone for the sake of a job, you wouldn’t be able to do it. You couldn’t bring yourself to kill any human being in cold blood, knowing nothing of their crimes or their families or even why they are being killed. You could never become like me. No amount of training could make you a murderer, Sarai.” I lie down fully upon my pillow, bringing the sheet up to my waist. “Now get some sleep. We’ll be leaving at six a.m. and I expect you to have chosen a place you’d like to go by then.”

She looks defeated. Beautiful and soft and damaged standing there before me partially clothed in the light of the moon beaming through the tall window. Beautiful, but defeated. That look in her eyes, it somehow latches onto my soul and all I want is for her to turn and walk away. Because I know that if she doesn’t, if she presses me further with those soft lips and sad, vulnerable eyes that I’ll succumb to the moment and either fuck her or kill her.

She turns and walks toward the door.

I stop her.

“Sarai,” I say, but she doesn’t turn around. “You never accepted your life with Javier, or you wouldn’t…be here with me now.” I had started to say: Or you wouldn’t have killed him, but decided against that.

She says nothing and closes the door on her way out.

I lie here staring at the thick clouds covering the sky and I think about the things I told her, the lies I told her.

She could kill in cold blood. Every part of me tells me that she can and that she would. In a way, it pains me to believe it, to know that her innocence was taken from her so long ago and that although she still has a decent shot at living a normal life, the fact that she chooses to want my life, is difficult to swallow.

It’s difficult mostly because I almost want to give it to her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Sarai

I listen to the thunder and the rain for an hour, unable to fall asleep. Despite the weather it’s so quiet in this house, so spacious and empty. Empty in nearly every sense of the word. I lie against the cool sheets in the spare bedroom, watching the dark clouds churn in the sky through that enormous window. I hear the waves crashing below and see the endless ocean in an eerie flash as lightning streaks across the turbulent sky.