I try to lift my head but I’m so weak that my cheek stays pressed against the scruffy carpet.

“Niklas is all that you have, the only family you have left,” I say. “I would do anything to have someone who cares for me as much as he cares for you. Anything.”

The room gets very quiet. I can see Victor’s eyes, clouding over with…I’m not sure. Is he even really looking at me at all? I feel like I can hear Niklas speaking but it sounds muffled and distant in my ears. I see the ceiling now. Just the ceiling. Thousands of minuscule holes open up to me from within the material and I feel like I can see every single one of them as they push down on me from high above. That warmth. What is that warmth I feel all around me like a blanket?

“Sarai?” I hear a voice say, but whose voice it is I can’t tell.

All I see is blackness. I try to lift my eyelids, but they’re too heavy.

I hear the voice again and a shot of pain radiates through my body when I feel like I’m being lifted into the air. I try to cry out, but I don’t think anyone can actually hear my voice.

I try to cry out….

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

I feel like I’ve been dreaming for days. The same constant series of images and voices all around me always sound calming yet persistent. The images, they’re what tells me that it’s not real because everyone I see are already dead. Javier. Izel. Lydia. Samantha. My mother. They walk by me in a sort of quiet, contemplative state as if I’m not even here. I can almost touch my mother’s hair when she passes.

I must be dreaming.

But the dreams are slowly fading and the strange, unfamiliar voices I hear are becoming more distinct. I feel like I’m trapped inside my own mind and it has forgotten that it controls my body. Because I can’t move anything. Not my eyes or my lips or my hands. I can’t even tell if I’m breathing on my own. But mostly what I think about are the voices, how clearer they’re becoming. I find myself concentrating as hard as I can so that I can focus on their words, but I never get further than the sound.

At least not until I hear Victor’s voice in the distance.

“I won’t be here long today,” I hear him say to someone.

I try to wake up, but I think the effort has the opposite effect because in an instant I’m consumed by blackness and all of the voices disappear.

More time passes. More dreams. More voices.

And then just like that as if a switched had been flipped in my brain, my eyelids break apart and I see that I’m lying in a hospital bed.

Victor is sitting next to me in a chair.

“You’re awake,” he says and smiles down at me.

“How long have I not been?” I’m still trying to put my mind back together.

“Three days,” he says. “But you’re going to be fine. They kept you sedated most of the time you’ve been here.”

I try to raise my back from the pillow, but the pain in my stomach is too much. I wince and my hands come up to put pressure on the area, but Victor takes my hands and guides me back down. “You can’t be moving around yet,” he says and stands up. He takes the extra pillow from a nearby chair and positions it underneath the back of my head. Then he pushes a button on the side of the bed to raise it to allow me to sit upright. An IV snakes along the top of my hand, plastered to my skin with white tape. It itches like mad.

“The bullet missed every organ,” Victor says as he sits back down in the chair. “You were lucky.”

Niklas’ face flashes in my mind.

“Or your brother is just a bad shot.”

I look down at my arms resting on the bed at my sides. I want to know what happened to Niklas and I feel like I should hope that he’s dead, but I can’t.

“Is he—?”

“No,” Victor says. “Half of me wanted to kill him, but the other half couldn’t do it. I just wonder which half would’ve won if you hadn’t been alive in that moment.”

I reach across the bed a few inches with my hand in search of his. He interlocks his fingers with mine.

“I’m glad you didn’t,” I say, pushing a faint smile through to the surface of my face. “I couldn’t live with myself if I had been the reason you killed your brother. I-I never should’ve come between you. I didn’t know what I was doing, Victor. I am so sorry.”

He squeezes my hand.

“You did something that no one else could,” he says and I eagerly wait for him to tell me what that could possibly be. “You made me remember that I have a brother, Sarai. He and I have practically sat side by side at a table as strangers for the past twenty-four years. And I see now that despite his faults, he has never once betrayed me.”

He pauses and his gaze veers off.

Then he looks back at me.

“In a sense he did betray me when he went there to kill you,” he goes on. “He betrayed me when he misled me so that he could get to you. Yes, that is a betrayal. But it’s a very different kind of betrayal.”

“I know,” I say. “Look at me.” He does. “You did the right thing. Regardless of what he did to me, you did the right thing and I don’t ever want you think I’ll feel differently.”

He doesn’t speak, but I know that look on his face, it’s the conflict that’s always there. I wonder if he’ll ever be rid of it.

Then he says, “But you did something else that no one else ever could.” His features soften and my heart is slowly melting. “You made me feel real emotions. You unlocked me.”

I reach out and touch his lips with my fingers, my hand cradling his chin.

The subject changes all too fast.

“Niklas will never hurt you again,” he says. “He gave me his word. And besides, he knows that if he ever tries that I won’t hesitate to kill him the next time.”

Then suddenly he adds, “You’re just as important to me as he is.”

I’m quietly stunned.

Victor stands up and walks to the window, crossing his arms looking out at the brightly-lit day. I can see that there are so many things he wants to say, so many loose ends he wants to tie up with me. But things have changed since Niklas shot me. I can feel it. And I won’t fight him anymore because I know that it has to be the way it is, that it has to end the way it’s going to end.

“I don’t expect to ever see you again, Victor, and I understand.” I swallow hard. I don’t want to say these words. “It’s better this way, I know.”

“Yes, unfortunately it is,” he says distantly with his back to me. “I can’t keep you safe with the life that I live. I wanted to, but in the end, I couldn’t. I knew better, but I…”

I wait quietly.

“…but I was wrong,” he says, though I feel like he wanted to say something else. “I’m sorry, but there’s no other way.”

My heart is breaking….

“Promise me one thing,” I say and he turns only his head to look at me. “Don’t go to Germany. Don’t go to that man, your employer or whatever the hell he is. Niklas told me about what will happen if you go there. Please don’t go there….”

I hear him sigh softly and he looks back out the window.

“I can’t promise that,” he says and my heart crumbles. “But I can promise that I won’t just stand there and let someone kill me.”

That doesn’t make me feel any better, but I know it’s all he’ll give me.

He leaves the window and produces a package from a briefcase lying on the nearby table. He walks back over beside me and places it in my hand. It’s an elongated black box stuffed inside a tattered paper package that had been covered in tape at some time. I pull the box from the package and open the lid. A single stack of cash is inside along with an envelope that has been folded over length-wise to fit and a few other random pieces of paper.

“What’s all this?”

“Your real birth certificate, social security card, shot records, which you are behind on a few that you should get taken care of soon.” He points to the folded envelope as I’m opening it to see the contents.