The Swan & the Jackal (In the Company of Killers 3)

I fall against the back of my chair and throw my head back, laughing gently. “Unbelievable.” I cross my arms over my chest. “I fell in love with probably the most mentally f**ked up woman on the planet.”

Izabel isn’t laughing, nor is she even smiling at my poor attempt at humor. I guess she was right when she said we can’t hide pain from each other.

“OK,” I say, motioning my hands, “so she’s sick. I knew that already. As a matter of fact, this whole multiple personality thing, in the back of my mind, I knew that’s what it was. But I didn’t want to believe it. I mean it is rare, after all. Why did it have to be her? This is ridiculous. I can’t even—.” I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore.

I drop my hands in my lap and stare at the creased paper in front of me. Izabel remains silent, listening, watching, wanting to say something to make this all better but she knows as much as I do that there’s nothing that can.

“So, then I can get her help,” I say, looking across at her. “She’s been fine as Cassia—holy f**king 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.