The Swan and the Jackal Read Free Page A

love you…and because I love you,”—I feel my body moving across the floor—,”you have to let me go.”
    Smoke. It’s scratching my throat and my lungs, seeping into my pores and suffocating my blood vessels. I feel like I’m being cooked from the inside out. The heat is becoming unbearable, the flames engulfing the wooden beams holding the basement ceiling up. I can’t see them through my heavy lids, but I can hear them, licking the walls like a thousand demons that sprang from Hell to torment me.
    “Seraphina…,” I call out, my voice hoarse with pain, every kind of pain, “…Sera…”
     
     
    ~~~
     
     
    I wake up the next morning lying in a cold field with the sun on my face. The thin layer of white snow around my body is stained black by soot from my clothes. I look up at the sky, so clear and so blue, and I see a sliver of gray smoke rising into the air in my peripheral vision.
    With difficulty, I try to get up, but can only go as far as rolling over onto my side. Dead grass pricks my cheek. Snow melts in a little indention near my face as my hot breath expels from my lips and nostrils against it. I’m freezing, yet I’m warm and it doesn’t make sense.
    The thin layer of smoke rising over the tops of the trees in the short distance is coming from what was left of my house.
    She didn’t leave me there to burn.
    Why did she drag me out?
    Upon realizing, finally I feel the pain in the back of my head and I reach up weakly to massage the area with my fingertips. She had to have dragged my body up the concrete steps.
    I’m aching all over. But I’m alive. And I wouldn’t be if Seraphina didn’t want me to be.
    I will find her.
    I’ll never stop looking for her.
    It’s a dangerous game that she and I play, that we’ve always played. Only this time, she has upped the ante.
    And I’m all in.
     
     
     

Chapter One
     
     
    Fredrik
     
     
    Present Day…
     
     
     
    Five men, two on each side of me and another seated at the head of the dinner table my opposite, watch me with guarded eyes.
    My gun was taken at the door.
    “It is a peaceful dinner, monsieur,” the door man had said. “No weapons allowed.”
    “Very well,” I had said and removed my gun from the back of my pants, placing it on the table.
    I knew not to wear more than one as I’d surely be patted down before they allowed me inside. And I was correct.
    But I need no gun.
    Unarmed, I walked past a dozen guards carrying a bottle of wine and stepped into the belly of the beast surrounded by four of François Moreau’s most experienced men.
    I knew in advance also that the wine I brought would be whisked away by one of the waiters and placed in the center of the table. François thanked me for the gift. It was an expensive French wine, after all, and it would have been quite rude of him not to thank me, even knowing that I came here to kill him.
    “Is it true?” François asks casually, looking over the length of the table at me seated on the other end. “Vonnegut has a bounty on three of his former men? Including you?”
    I nod. “I suppose the rumors are true for once.”
    A slim, confident smile pulls the edges of François’ hard, weathered mouth. He has short graying hair, cut smoothly at the back of his neck and combed over to one side in the front, plastered to his small head by thick amounts of hair gel.
    “And I suppose tis’ good that I have no interest in filling bounties for a man like Vonnegut.” His smile becomes more arrogant, as if I have him to thank for being alive in this moment.
    I nod again and bring my lips to my wine glass, which isn’t the wine from the bottle that I brought.
    The dark-haired man sitting to my left with a scar above his left eyebrow removes his white cloth napkin from the table in front of him. He unrolls it from its neat little arrangement and places it within his lap. The other three men sitting on the outsides of the table follow suit when they notice the waiters entering from a