The Black Wolf

  I was still a failure, with a disappointed mentor that knew I’d never be sent out into the field.

  A wave of jealousy swept over me, but I’d hoped I’d hidden it well. No matter what I did, or how hard I tried, I only seemed to fall further behind him, and I knew I’d never live up to him.

  But he was my brother, and not even a jealous heart would ever make me betray him.

  I believed him when he told me that night that he’d never do anything to cause me harm. I believed him with my whole life and my whole heart and my whole goddamned soul.

  I believed him…

  Niklas

  Present Day

  The whore with big brown eyes and perfect tits, raises her blond head from my chest.

  “Did you hear anything I just said?” she asks, her eyes slanted.

  Fuck no I didn’t.

  “Yeah,” I answer, “you were telling me about your sister, or some shit.”

  She huffs and sits up the rest of the way on the bed, her breasts bouncing, her ass jiggling—I haven’t fucked her yet, but I’m getting around to it. She had just given me a massage minutes earlier.

  I reach over to the nightstand and take a cigarette from the pack, placing it between my lips.

  The whore snarls at me.

  What the hell is she waiting for? An apology for not giving a shit?

  “What?” I argue as I drag my thumb over the lighter and a flame appears.

  She shakes her head and leans her naked body over me, reaching for another cigarette from my pack and then lighting it on the end of mine.

  “Nothing,” she says with offense. “You just said that you wanted to talk first, so that’s what I was doing—pouring out my heart about my rich bitch sister. And you weren’t even listening.”

  I puff on the filter slowly, taking a long drag.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing,” she repeats bitterly, dropping it.

  But I’ve never known a woman who said “Nothing” and really wanted to drop it. Bitches and their mind games—if it wasn’t for the pussy I’d stay the hell away from them all.

  “Maybe I should start charging you for my time,” she says with smoke streaming from her plump lips. She scoots toward the headboard and sits slumped against it, one long naked leg bent, the other lying flat against the mattress.

  I laugh lightly.

  “I’ve never paid for sex in my life,” I say, flicking my ashes in the ashtray on the nightstand. “And I never will.”

  “I said for my time,” she corrects me. “This talking bullshit, for example.” Her blond head falls to one side and she looks over at me with a spreading grin. “I’d never charge you for the sex, Niklas.”

  I smile faintly.

  After I’ve smoked the cigarette down, I crush the filter in the ashtray. The room I’ve been staying in since I left our Order is a shithole, but I’ve always preferred shitholes to luxury; old boots to shiny dress shoes; worn jeans to posh suits; rot-gut whiskey to expensive wine. Only thing I can think of clean and pure and not stained by moral perversion that I like, are women. Not necessarily this particular woman—I like her not because she’s a whore, but because she’s proud to be a whore—but women…like Claire. The only woman I ever loved more than my mother.

  The woman that my brother killed.

  “What’s up with you, anyway?” the whore asks. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but you’ve been all brooding and shit the past couple of weeks.”

  I sit with both legs stretched out before me, crossed at the ankles, the bed sheet draped over my midsection, my arms crossed over my chest. On the other side of the small, dingy room with green wallpaper, a round table sits in front of the only window covered by thick navy curtains that have been pulled together, shutting out what’s left of the daylight. Another hour and it’ll be dark. The flatscreen television—like the telephone and the broken hair dryer and stained mini coffee pot—has been mounted to the room to deter theft; it hangs from a moveable arm bracket affixed high on the wall. Old ‘Seinfeld’ reruns play on the screen with the volume low. The muffled sound of music from the bar on the ground floor beneath me funnels through the thin walls and floor.

  The bed moves as the whore—OK, her name is Jackie—shifts around next to me.

  I look over just as she’s standing up with her back to me, her naked ass shaped like a cherry. I like that.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, mildly interested.

  She steps into her skimpy black panties and walks around to my side of the bed, crushing her cigarette out next to mine; a thin sliver of leftover smoke rises from the ashes.

  “I’ve gotta be somewhere in an hour,” she says indifferently.

  I reach out and clamp my hand around her wrist, stopping her. Jackie never really has to ‘be somewhere’—I’ve known her for two months—and all of a sudden I feel like an asshole. Well, I admit I am a fucking asshole twenty-four-seven, but I don’t like it when I actually feel like one.

  She looks down at me irritably, waiting for me to get on with it, blinking her light brown eyes.

  “I’m a dick,” I say and let go of her wrist. “Sorry. Please, just sit back down.”

  Unconvinced, Jackie manipulates the inside of her mouth with her teeth, staring at me indecisively, and then reaches for her bra anyway lying on the stained carpet. Not wanting her to go—because I actually enjoy her company even when we’re not fucking—I swallow my admittedly ridiculous ego and say, “Tell me more about what happened with that rich bitch sister of yours. Did she ever apologize for shutting you out like that, for keeping you from spending time with your niece—Katie? That’s your niece’s name, right?” I really had heard everything Jackie was going on about before, when I was lost in thought thinking about my own issues with my own flesh and blood. I’ve just never been the type to talk about my shit, or to listen to anyone else’s. When I’d told her before that I wanted to ‘talk first’, I meant something more along the lines of everyday mundane bullshit: about the hair I found in my goddamn omelet this morning; the cab I rode in for three miles stuffed in the backseat with two steroid-addicted assholes whose arms were so big they couldn’t reach their armpits to apply deodorant—I’ve been taking a cab lately so Victor and Izabel won’t know I’m still in town, though if I know my brother, he knows where I’m at by now. But somehow, while talking about why I was taking a cab, Jackie started talking about her sister. Oh yeah, I guess it was because I mentioned that I had been avoiding my brother.

  I still don’t care much about her sister—from what I’ve heard, they could be the stars of their very own reality TV show—but to make her stay a little longer, I’ll listen if that’s what she wants.

  Jackie’s fed-up expression finally turns forgiving, and she drops her bra back onto the carpet and sits down on the bed beside me, her feet on the floor.

  And for the next thirty minutes I listen to her tell me everything.

  “So what do you think I should do?” she asks, and I realize she really does want my advice.

  What the fuck do I look like, a shrink?

  “You want my honest opinion?” I ask, at least warning her beforehand because I never sugarcoat anything.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I want honesty.”

  I shrug and then bring my arms up, locking my hands behind my head.

  “She may be your sister,” I say, “but that doesn’t make her off-limits. You do what you gotta do; beat the shit out of her if that’s what’ll make you feel better”—my eyes meet hers with warning and purpose—“but that shit you were saying about calling Child Protective Services just to get back at her—that’s fucked up. Do what you gotta do, but only bitches betray their families like that.”

  Jackie nods several times in deep contemplation of my ‘advice’, and then she smiles, letting out a breath, her petite shoulders rising and falling underneath her disheveled blond hair.

  “You should take out an advice column in the newspaper,”
she says with a grin.

  I laugh.

  “Yeah, I can see it now”—I swipe a hand in front of me in demonstration—“I’ll call it: Dear Niklas, Should I Kill Myself? Sure, If You Feel Like You Should.”

  Jackie chuckles, shaking her head and gently rolling her eyes. Then she crawls over my body and takes her place next to me on the other side of the bed again. She lays against the pillow on her side, facing me. The tip of her index finger, her fingernail painted with some weird glittery shit, begins to trace the outline of my chest muscles.

  “What about this stuff with avoiding your brother?” she asks. “Wanna talk about it?”

  Absently, and with bitterness, I chew on the inside of my cheek.

  “No,” I answer after a moment, staring at the lime green door out ahead. “I’d rather not.”

  “Oh come on,” Jackie says lightheartedly, patting my chest with the palm of her hand, “it can’t be that bad—mine was pretty messed up; can’t be much worse than mine. What did he do?”

  After a pause, I say without looking at her, “My brother murdered my fiancé,” and in half a second Jackie’s almost-fully-naked body becomes a rock next to mine.

  “Oh…”

  “Why don’t you take those panties back off?” I suggest.

  It takes her moment to hear my question, and then, still with quite a shock on her face, her eyebrows drawn inward, she slips her panties off and tosses them on the floor.

  Tearing open a condom wrapper, I put the condom on and then gesture with one hand toward my lap.

  “Get on,” I say, and she does.

  And in under thirty seconds, neither one of us are thinking anymore about our fucked up families.

  Izabel

  New York City

  I’ve begun to master it, the art of moving without making a sound, how to blend in with the shadows, to control what I hear and see and taste and feel and smell.

  As my flat-heeled boots move silently over the asphalt rooftop in the dead of night, I see everything. My vision is sharp, taking in the way the moonlight lays across the building in a cloak of gray. I see a tiny glint of silver illuminated by that light on the doorknob just up ahead. I feel the mild air on my face, the calm thrumming of my heartbeat. Cool and collected yet eager to get this done. I should hear the movement of light traffic on the streets of the city below, the lapping of the waves against the shore, the wind moving through the tops of the trees, but I’ve blocked it all out so I can stay focused, so that I can hear what matters: the enemy’s footsteps, the cocking of a gun, a whisper intended to be unknown to me. Nora taught me these things. “Stay focused,” she had said a hundred times before she caught me off-guard and hit me in the face. “See and hear and know your enemy’s movements before they act on them.” And then she’d hit me again, and again, until the last time when I caught her off-guard and nearly broke her nose. Fucking bitch.

  She smiled proudly and wiped the blood away with the back of her hand. Nothing fazes that woman. Nothing.

  Nora turns her blond head done up in a tight bun, to look back at me on the rooftop. Her brown eyes appear black in the dark. Piercing. Beautiful. Malicious—strange how the night can reveal a person’s inner-workings. She smiles so slimly that it barely touches her lips, but I see it there, in those dark pools looking back at me with excitement and a sort of sweet murderous rage—she couldn’t have joined up with a more fitting group of people.

  We slip our face masks on and she gestures at me with her gloved index and middle fingers.

  I nod and prepare to follow.

  We’ve been hiding on this rooftop since seven p.m. when Randolf Pinceri’s men locked the building up for the day. It was the easiest way inside: walk in among the employees and guests by day and then slip back in through a rooftop door by night, rather than trying to break in from any of the bottom floor entrances, which are heavily guarded in the overnight hours.

  Like two stealthy black cats stalking prey, Nora and I move alongside the building, remaining hidden in the cover of its shadow. Our black bodysuits conceal every inch of our skin. Our heads are covered by masks, pulled down tight over our faces, leaving only our eyes untouched. Black boots cover our feet. Black gloves fit tight over our hands and wrists.

  A camera moves in a slow horizontal motion, drinking in the quiet undisturbed scene of the rooftop. We stop at just the right moment, pressing our backs against the wall and remaining perfectly still until the camera passes. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. We move quickly toward the rooftop door, having only fifteen more seconds to get that door open and slip inside undetected before the camera makes another round.

  With my lock-pick already wedged between my leather-clad fingers, I get to work on the door while Nora stands off to the side with her gun in-hand.

  “Ten seconds,” I hear her whisper.

  I say nothing and continue to work vigorously, crouched in front of the door. My heart begins to pound more erratically, pushing adrenaline hotly through my veins.

  “Five seconds.”

  Sweat begins to bead in my hairline underneath the tight fabric. I bite down hard on the inside of my mouth, trying not to fumble the lock-pick.

  “Three.”

  I can feel the camera making its way back, slowly and methodically, like a pair of eyes on me in the darkness that I can’t see but I know are there, and it sends a shiver up the back of my neck.

  “Two.”

  There’s a click and the door comes open when I grip the knob and turn.

  We slip inside and shut the door with not a second to spare.

  I stop to catch my breath.

  The timing had to be perfect. Not necessarily the dodging of the camera, but everything from here on out. At precisely ten-thirty p.m. the alarm system on the building will automatically activate. But between the hours of seven p.m. and ten p.m. we had to wait for all three of our targets to arrive before we could act. Getting in was the easy part. Getting out will be a different story—we have to fulfill this mission without drawing attention, without setting off alarms, without one of Pinceri’s men alerting the dozens of others of our intrusion. We have to move through this building undetected, make it to the eighth floor, get information from one target, kill him and two others quietly, and then make it out of the building before the alarm is set. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it.

  Pulling back my glove, I glance down at my watch.

  “We have less than fifteen minutes to pull this off,” I whisper to Nora while she adjusts the tiny speaker fixed inside her ear.

  I hear Victor’s voice inside mine as well:

  “One man is stationed just outside the tenth floor door,” he says. “But there are three at the far end of the hall.”

  Nora and I nod to each other, knowing what we have to do.

  After tucking my lock-pick back behind the tight fabric at my wrist, I pull my gun from the holster on my thigh and follow behind Nora as she descends the concrete steps of the stairwell. The air is warm and moist in here where the air conditioning doesn’t reach, making my bodysuit adhere to my skin uncomfortably. The sound of our boots moving down the steps is faint, practically unnoticeable, but slightly enhanced by the echo of the small space. Dull fluorescent lights lay out a path for us as we make our way to the bottom and reach the tall metal door that leads out onto the tenth floor.

  “Left or right?” Nora asks Victor.

  “Right side of the door,” Victor responds, his deep but soothing voice always a comfort to me on these missions. “He is armed, but his gun is holstered.”

  We spent two weeks scoping this building out: sent others in before us, blending in with the day visitors, who planted hidden cameras of our own, feeding real-time images to Victor and James Woodard back at our Boston headquarters.

  “There is only one surveillance camera in the hall,” Victor says. “It’s stationary. Wait for my word.”

  Keeping eyes on the one man sitting in the surveillance room of this building,
without Victor as our eyes on the outside, we’d be completely blind to everything around us.

  A full minute passes, then another, and all I can think about is how many minutes Nora and I have left to get this done.

  “Now,” Victor says urgently into our ears—he was waiting for the man in the surveillance room to leave the multiple screens in front of him to take his nightly piss and make a coffee pot run, practically right on schedule.

  Nora carefully swings open the door into the tenth floor hallway so as not to let it hit the wall, and she grabs the man standing guard on the other side, snapping his neck before he can reach for his gun. His heavy body slumps over into her arms and together we carry him into the stairwell and let the door close quietly, hiding him from view of the camera.

  Wasting no time, Nora and I move quickly down the hall where just around the corner at the end, three more men stand guard at the elevator.

  With our silenced guns drawn, we round the corner to see them staring back at us with wild rounded eyes and quick hands.

  “STOP!” one man shouts just before Nora’s bullet zips through the air and drops him like a slab of meat.

  Squeezing my trigger without even thinking about it, I put a bullet in another man’s head and he drops onto the white tiled floor in a heap of dead weight and black fabric. The third man raises his gun, but Nora takes him out before he can get a shot off. His gun hits the floor and slides several inches as he falls.

  “Are we still clear?” I ask Victor as Nora and I drag two bodies by their ankles across the floor toward another door, the sound of their suits moving over the tile like a snake slithering through a bed of leaves.

  “Yes,” Victor says, “you’re still clear, but move with haste; he won’t stay away from his post long.”

  Pushing open the door with my back, I drag the body inside; the long, heavy legs hit the carpeted floor of what looks like an office, with a thump-thump. Nora comes in right after me, dropping the second body.