“So, then I can get her help,” I say, looking across at her. “She’s been fine as Cassia—holy fucking shit, Izabel; Seraphina never actually existed. When I married her in private, when I made love to her, all of the things we did together; she was and always has been Cassia Carrington. Seraphina never existed.” The revelation nearly sends me over the edge, and what’s left of my own mind into oblivion.
“I can get her help,” I repeat, resolved to do just that.
“Fredrik,” Izabel speaks up carefully, “I don’t think there’s anyone or anything that can help her.”
“Why would you say that?” I feel my eyebrows hardening in my forehead.
She glances at the paper in front of me.
“You should read the rest of it.”
I shake my head.
“I’m not going to read anymore. Seraphina is sick. She needs help. And I’m going to get her help.” My voice begins to rise. “What, you think shrinks and doctors just put people like her away because they’re sick? No. They put them through therapy and give them medication—”
“Yes, they do,” Izabel adds with caution and sympathy, “but not the ones who murder innocent people. I’ve read the entire file Fredrik. Her parents may not have been innocent. She killed them and they deserved it. But that boy, Phillip Johnson, he wasn’t the first innocent person who Seraphina killed. There were several others after him. All male.”
And then the innocent blonde women six years ago—there’s no telling how many people Seraphina killed that I never knew about.
“Which side of her did, or do you, love more?”
I look up. “I never said I still loved her.”
“You didn’t have to say it.”
I look back down.
“I loved Seraphina because she was like me,” I begin, seeing only Seraphina’s face and short black hair and dark makeup in my mind. “I was a different kind of monster when we first met. She was the answer to everything. She helped me control my urges and showed me a way to still be myself without risking getting caught. We were perfect together, Izabel. I never prayed and I never dreamed of anything, but she was both the answer to my prayers and a dream come true. She was everything to me.”
“And what about Cassia?”
I picture only Cassia now with her long, beautiful blonde hair and natural beauty because she never wore makeup—only now I know why: she couldn’t look into a mirror in order to apply it.
“Cassia gave me something that I never got from Seraphina. She gave me peace. She made me see a light in the darkness that is my life and she made me feel as normal as anyone else.” I lock eyes with Izabel. “She is my light.”
Izabel looks at me for a moment—pain and regret lay in her features.
“You need a whole person, Fredrik,” she says thoughtful and determined. “I have to believe that one day you’ll find her, a love who is both light and darkness, who understands you and fulfills you the way that Seraphina did, but who can also give you peace.” She interlocks her fingers on the table and leans forward. “But you can’t do this with her, and you know it. She’s not a whole person. And she’s gone too far—in every way—to ever become one. She could snap and turn at any moment, and you know that, too.”
I look away. I don’t want to hear any of this. Because I know it’s true.
“You’ll find her—”
“No,” I cut in; my eyes boring into hers. “If it can’t be Seraphina—Cassia—then it’ll be no one.” I grind my jaw. “I’m not desperate for the love of a woman, Izabel—you’re entirely mistaken if that’s what you think. I never wanted Seraphina when I first met her. I wanted to be alone and the last thing I needed was her, or any other woman, shadowing my every move. But because she understood me and because I had been emotionally alone all my life, I fell in love with her. That couldn’t be helped. Love betrayed me, just like life did the day I was born in a convenience store restroom to a mother who didn’t want me.” I lean over, pushing myself farther into view so Izabel can see the resolution buried on the surface of my face. “There will be no one after her. There will be nothing after her except the shell of a man I was before we met.”
“What does that mean?” She appears worried—for me, no doubt.
I begin stuffing the paper back into the envelope and then shove it down inside my coat pocket.
I stand from the table.
“It means that I might not fit into yours or Victor’s world anymore.”
Izabel stares up at me from the chair; her long auburn hair blanketing the shoulders of her white coat, gathering atop the fuzzy white faux fur around the border of the hood laying against her back.
She rises to her feet, tall in height wearing a pair of tall-heeled bronze-colored boots. Her cheeks are still faintly reddened from the cold outside.
“She helped you kill, didn’t she?”
My heart stops. I glance across the empty room at the barista behind the counter, and then down at the floor.
“No,” I answer. “She helped me find the right people.” I look at her again and continue to speak lowly. “People who were tied to her hits. Those whose death could be covered and accounted for under her Order. They were all people who deserved it and who I knew one hundred percent deserved it.” My eyes fall away from her so maybe she won’t see the shame and guilt hidden within them.
“Who did you”—she looks at the barista once and whispers even lower—“how did you do it before Seraphina?”
My shoulders rise and fall. I sit back down.
“People off the streets,” I say. “Drug dealers. Pimps. Gang members. People few would notice missing. But—.” I stop myself.
“But what?”
Glancing down at my shoes I go on: “A few times—and I mean a few—I’d take an innocent person by mistake. I tortured a man last year. It was around the time you fled Mexico and were on the run with Victor. I…well, like I said, I tortured him. Found out before I killed him that he wasn’t the man I was looking for.” I look straight into her eyes, regret at rest in mine. “I tortured an innocent man, Izabel. A father of two daughters. Didn’t even have a parking ticket.”
“But you didn’t kill him. Right?” She looks hopeful.
I shake my head. “No. I didn’t kill him. If it hadn’t been for those instincts of mine—though they kicked in a little late that night because my head was so clouded by need—I never would’ve stopped. I never would’ve listened to him tell me he wasn’t who I thought he was. I let him go and”—I laugh suddenly—“and as if it would make it all better, like slapping a goddamn Band-Aid on a gunshot wound, I gave him half a million dollars—would’ve given him more if I’d had it, but I hadn’t been paid by The Order in three months.”
“But you didn’t kill him,” Izabel says with a small smile of urgency.
I’m not smiling.
“No, you’re right,” I say. “I didn’t kill him.”
Her face falls just as quickly.
“There was one,” I say with reluctance, picturing the victim’s face. “A woman. Not long ago in San Francisco. She was the sister of one of Dorian’s hits.” Her eyes get bigger now that she knows I was the one who killed the woman because no one knew what had happened to her until now. “Long story short, she claimed she was in on the murder that her brother had been involved in. She confessed while I held her captive in the opposite room while Dorian took care of the brother—she wasn’t supposed to be there. I’m sure you remember the report.” She nods. “But I was in desperate need of bloodshed. It had been a month since my last interrogation. She confessed and I obliged.”