“I know it wasn’t you,” Victor finally says.

I’m stunned. And confused. And a little stung by Victor’s immediate trust.

“How the hell do you know that?” I ask sharply.

“Because if Fredrik was going to give you up, it wouldn’t make sense that he tell them where Dina Gregory once was. Weeks ago.”

I snarl and cross my arms.

“You used me to test Fredrik,” I snap. “You left me alone with him to see if he’d betray you by telling Stephens where to find me.” I glare at him accusingly, unforgivingly.  This isn’t the time or place to confront him about this, but I can’t hold it back any longer.

Victor steps up closer and reaches out both hands, intent on placing them on my arms. I start to step away and refuse him, but the recliner blocks my path. His warm hands fall upon my skin, his long fingers curling around my biceps. He peers down into my eyes and I see sincerity and determination in them.

“That is not what I did,” he insists. “You have to trust me on this. And you have to trust Fredrik. He’s not the enemy.”

“So easy to judge and trust,” I say with an edge in my tone. “Then why did you leave me alone with him like that? What did you mean by the things you said about trusting my instincts before you left?”

Victor’s hands fall away from mine.

“We have to get out of here,” he says.

He turns to Fredrik now and I’m left feeling both livid by his lack of explanation and apprehensive about the current situation because of the urgency in his voice.

“Fredrik,” Victor goes on, “it’s your decision. Take her to a safe-house or leave her here to her fate.”

Amelia’s swollen, reddened eyes widen with alert and dread. She jumps up from the sofa, her blue bath robe coming undone around her waist, revealing a white nightgown underneath.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks fearfully, fumbling the tie around her waist to tighten the robe closed again. She looks right at Fredrik. “What does he mean, Fredrik?”

Victor

Sarai blames herself for a lot of things, and in some cases, she is right to do so. It was foolish to speak of her training with Spencer—although vaguely—with Dina and Amelia. But she was careful with the information that she chose to divulge. She was careful, but not careful enough. Sarai is young. Inexperienced. Yet, she is learning, and learning the hard way, when it comes down to it, is really the only way.

“You can’t learn to swim by reading it in a book,” I tell her on the drive back to Albuquerque. I thought it best we take a car back this time rather than risking the airports again so soon. “It is the best way, Sarai. To learn from your mistakes is to make them. Authentically. No amount of training, no rehearsed scenario is going to teach you better than the real thing.”

Sarai sits quietly on the passenger’s side staring out the side window. She won’t look at me. She has hardly spoken since we pulled away from my liaison’s location near Phoenix thirty minutes ago. The moon hangs low in the early morning sky, appearing enormous across the dark expanse of the desert landscape.

“It’s no excuse,” she finally speaks up, although distantly.

“It is an excuse,” I correct her. “This isn’t Hollywood, Sarai. You’re not going to learn the things you want to learn in the time you wish you could. You’ve made mistakes. You’ll make plenty more—”

She snaps around to face me.

“I said it’s no excuse,” she pushes the words through her teeth, her eyes are wide and unforgiving. Unforgiving of herself rather than me. “I’m the one that got myself into this,” she says. “I chose this life. I told you it’s what I wanted. I begged you to help me.” She points her index finger harshly at herself, pauses and grits her teeth. “I chose this life. I’m not a child, Victor. You can’t sit me down and tell me that what I did was OK, that I have a right to make mistakes. Because in this life mistakes get you killed.”

I admire her more now than I did moments ago. Because she understands it. She refuses to take the easy way out by accepting the get-out-of-jail-free card that I offered her. She refuses to be allowed mistakes and though I know she will still make them because she is human, she will learn faster from them than someone who chooses to accept the excuses. Sarai is a defiant girl. She is hard and reckless and fearless to a fault. But she is determined and she is strong. Despite her problem with discipline, and how she still hasn’t fully tapped into that criminal, killer mindset in which is key in helping to keep her alive, I know that she can succeed in this life.

“Do you regret it?” I ask. “Do you regret the life you chose?”

“No,” she says flatly, honestly, her eyes trained out ahead watching as the black asphalt on the highway is swallowed up by the hood of the sedan. “I don’t regret it. And I don’t want out.”

She raises her back from the seat and faces me again.

“I want to kill Hamburg and Stephens,” she says with determination, “and then after that…,” she pauses, but never moves her hardened eyes from mine. I only glance away long enough to check the road. “I have to tell you. It’s something that I told Fredrik. After Hamburg and Stephens are dead, I don’t want them to be the last.”

I felt all along, from the moment she told me she wanted to kill them herself, that they would only be the first in a long line of future assassinations. I could see it in her eyes, the lust for revenge, the hunger for bloodshed. The death of Javier Ruiz by her hands is what sealed Sarai’s fate. The first kill is always the trigger, the instant in one’s life when everything changes, when a person’s character takes on a new, darker form. I know she thought about killing Hamburg every single day from the night she met him. I know because I remember the face of my second kill, the way I hunted him for a week like a serial killer might hunt his next victim. All I saw was his face. All I wanted was to end his miserable life the way I ended the life of my first mark. Because it was what I was bred and trained to do. I longed to feel the praise that Vonnegut bestowed upon me after my first successful mission at the age of thirteen. To see him smile proudly as I had always wanted to see my father do. I longed to taste the admiration that the other boys in the Order had for me. So, from my first kill onward, I devoted my life to my job, giving up my resentment for being forced away from my mother. I killed to please Vonnegut for the majority of my life, until I began to see that Vonnegut took more from me than he ever gave.

Now, I kill because it’s all that I know.

Sarai and I kill for different reasons, we are driven by very different needs, but in the end we are both killers and I know that will never change. We can’t come back from that, and most who kill more than once, don’t want to.

I look back out at the road.

“Does that bother you?” she asks about the truth she just revealed. “That I don’t want them to be my last?”

“No,” I say softly. “It doesn’t bother me.”

I sense her look away and silence fills the car, only the sound of the tires moving briskly over the highway filtering through the confined space.

“What’s going to happen to Amelia?” she asks.

“Fredrik will either take her to a safe-house, or he’ll kill her.”

I expected her head to snap around again upon hearing that, but she doesn’t even flinch. She nods, accepting it as casually as I would.

Already she is becoming harder. Already she is adamant about not letting her mistakes define her, betraying the only things she has left, to make certain that she doesn’t make them again.

Her humanity.

Her conscience.

It’s late afternoon when we make it home. I thought Sarai might sleep most of the way, but she didn’t sleep at all. She’s been awake for more than twenty-four hours and yet she is entirely conscious and shows no signs of lethargy. It’s the adrenaline. I’m all too familiar with its effects on the mind. But right now, I’m so exhausted by the drive that if I don’t get some sleep soon, I’ll be useless.