She felt small and breakable, utterly helpless as she coughed and sobbed in my embrace, and for some reason, I remembered holding my son that way, comforting him when he cried. Only Sara is not a child, and my body reacted to her slim curves with startling hunger, with a desire as primitive as it was irrational.
I wanted the woman I’d come to interrogate, the one whose husband I intended to kill.
I tried to ignore my inconvenient reaction, to continue as before, but when I had her on the counter again, I found myself unable to turn on the water. I was too aware of her; she’d become a person to me, a living, breathing woman instead of a tool to be used.
That left the drug as the only option. I hadn’t planned to use it on her, both because of the time it required to work properly and because it was our final batch. The chemist who made it was recently killed, and Anton warned me it would take time to find another supplier. I’d been saving that batch in case of emergencies, but I had no choice.
I, who had tortured and killed hundreds, couldn’t bring myself to hurt this woman more.
“He was a kind and generous man, a talented journalist. His death is a loss beyond measure, both for his family and his profession…”
I tear my eyes away from Sara to focus on the speaker. It’s a middle-aged woman, her thin face streaked with tears. I recognize her as one of Cobakis’s colleagues from the newspaper. I investigated all of them to determine their complicity, but luckily for them, Cobakis was the only one involved.
She continues going through all of Cobakis’s outstanding qualities, but I tune her out again, my gaze drawn to the slender figure under the giant umbrella. All I can see of Sara is her back, but I can easily picture her pale, heart-shaped face. Its features are imprinted on my mind, everything from her wide-set hazel eyes and small straight nose to her soft, plush lips. There’s something about Sara Cobakis that makes me think of Audrey Hepburn, a kind of old-fashioned prettiness reminiscent of the movie stars of the forties and fifties. It adds to the sense that she doesn’t belong here, that she’s somehow different from the people surrounding her.
That she’s somehow above them.
I wonder if she’s crying, if she’s grieving for the man she admitted she hadn’t really known. When Sara first told me she and her husband were separated, I didn’t believe her, but some of the things she said under the drug’s influence made me rethink that conclusion. Something had gone very wrong in her supposedly perfect marriage, something that left an indelible trace on her.
She’s known pain; she’s lived with it. I could see it in her eyes, in the soft, trembling curve of her mouth. It intrigued me, that glimpse into her mind, made me want to delve deeper into her secrets, and when she closed her lips around my fingers and started sucking on them, the hunger I’d been trying to suppress returned, my cock hardening uncontrollably.
I could’ve taken her then, and she would’ve let me. Fuck, she would’ve welcomed me with open arms. The drug had lowered her inhibitions, stripped away all her defenses. She’d been open and vulnerable, needy in a way that called to the deepest parts of me.
Don’t leave me. Please, don’t leave.
Even now, I can hear her pleas, so much like Pasha’s the last time I saw him. She didn’t know what she was asking, didn’t know who I was or what I was about to do, but her words shook me to the core, making me long for something utterly impossible. It had taken all my willpower to walk away and leave her tied in that chair for the FBI to find.
It had taken everything I had to leave and continue with my mission.
My attention returns to the present when Cobakis’s colleague stops speaking, and Sara approaches the podium. Her slim, dark-clothed figure moves with unconscious grace, and anticipation coils in my gut as she turns and faces the crowd.
A black scarf is wrapped around her neck, shielding her from the chilly October wind and hiding the bandage that must be there. Above the scarf, her heart-shaped face is ghost pale, but her eyes are dry—at least as far as I can tell from this distance. I’d love to stand closer, but that’s too risky. I’m already taking a chance by being here. There are at least two FBI agents among the attendees, and a couple more are sitting unobtrusively in government-issue cars on the street. They’re not expecting me to be here—security would be much tighter if they were—but that doesn’t mean I can let my guard down. As it is, Anton and the others think I’m crazy for showing up here.
We normally leave town within hours of a successful hit.
“As you all know, George and I met in college,” Sara says into the microphone, and my spine tingles at the sound of her soft, melodious voice. I’ve been watching her long enough to know that she can sing. She often sings along to popular music when she’s alone in her car or while doing chores around the house.