Free Reviving Izabel by J. A. Redmerski

hold it against him. I gave him my word, Sarai.” He walks toward the glass door, folds his hands down in front of him and gazes out at the luminescent blue pool glowing under the night sky. “It is Niklas’ time to shine now and I won’t take that from him.”
    “ Bull shit!” I shoot up from the couch, my fists clenched down at my sides. “He’s after you, isn’t he?” I grit my teeth and step around the coffee table. “That’s fucking it, isn’t it, Victor? To prove his worth to Vonnegut, he’s been commissioned to kill you. Your piece of shit brother betrayed you. He thinks he’s taking your place in the Order. I can’t fucking believe—”
    “It is what it is, Sarai,” Victor stops me, turning around to face me fully. “But right now, Niklas is the least of my worries.”
    Crossing my arms, I start to pace, gazing down at the dark and light swirling patterns in the wood beneath my bare feet. My toenails are still painted blood red from two weeks ago.
    “Why did you leave the Order?”
    “I had to. I had no other choice.”
    “I don’t believe you.”
    Victor sighs.
    “Vonnegut found out about us,” he says and has my undivided attention. “It was Samantha…the night she died. Before I left the Order, I met with Vonnegut in Berlin, the first face-to-face meeting I’d had with him in months. I was in an interrogation room. Four walls. One door. A table. Two chairs. Just me and Vonnegut sitting across from each other with a light blazing in the ceiling above us.” He looks back out the glass door behind him and then goes on:
    “At first I thought for sure he brought me there to kill me. I was prepared—”
    “To die?” If he says yes, I’ll slap him for it.
    “No,” he answers and I feel like I can breathe a little more. “I went prepared . I kidnapped Vonnegut’s wife before I met with him. Fredrik held her in a room, prepared to do…his thing, if it came down to that.”
    Immediately I want to ask what Fredrik’s ‘thing’ is, but I skip that for now and say instead, “If Vonnegut intended to kill you, you had his wife as leverage.”
    With his back to me, he nods.
    “Samantha was being watched by the Order. Probably for a long time.”
    “They suspected her of betrayal? Why didn’t they just kill her then, like they did Niklas’ mother, or like they wanted to do to Niklas?”
    Victor turns around to face me again. “They didn’t suspect her of betrayal, Sarai, she was…,” he takes a deep breath and presses his lips together.
    “She was what ?” I walk over to stand closer to him. I don’t like where this seems to be heading.
    “She was more loyal to the Order than I ever could have imagined,” he says and it hurts my heart. “As I sat in that room with Vonnegut and the more he spoke, the more I began to understand that Samantha was as much a traitor to me as Niklas has become. Vonnegut told me things that he couldn’t have possibly known. He knew I helped you. Sometime before she died that night, she was able to relay information to Vonnegut about us being there.”
    “I don’t believe that.” I slash a hand in the air in front of me. “Samantha died trying to protect me. We’ve already been through this. I don’t believe you, Victor. She was a good woman.”
    “She was a good manipulator , Sarai, nothing more.”
    I shake my head, still not believing it. “Niklas is the one who told Vonnegut about you helping me. He had to have been. Niklas even knew that you had taken me to Samantha’s house.”
    “Yes, but Niklas didn’t know that I made Samantha taste-test our food before we ate that night. I knew the second that Vonnegut brought up how distrusting I still was of her after all the years I had known her, that she had betrayed me.”
    “But that doesn’t make any sense.” I start to pace the floor again, arms crossed, one arm bent upright, my fingers touching the side of my face. “Why would she protect me from Javier?”
    “Because she wasn’t