Page 33 of The Seller

“What’s that?” She looks back at me over her shoulder, making eye contact through the tobacco haze.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? For what?”

“Just,” I make a gesture with the cigarette. “I guess, for everything. Everything that came before you. Everything that led to this moment, the one where you walk out of my life.”

She shakes her head. “You know this isn’t about you, Stavros.”

“I know. It’s about you. Whoever you are.”

A smile lights her face, and she is so fucking beautiful my heart hurts more than my ribs do. I’m not going to lose her, because I never had her, not really. I had the shell of what she was, the facade she showed to the world.

She played me perfectly, turned my strength into weakness. Before Siri, I thought I was better than women. Not in a sexist way, I mean, not an intentionally sexist way. I just thought it was a fact. I thought I was stronger, smarter, meaner, and that those things made me better.

But she’s far smarter and stronger than I am, and I suspect, she might even be meaner. I can see it in the way she holds herself now, her shoulders square and resolute. She’s a very young woman with a wild and likely dangerous future ahead of her, but I think she’ll survive it.

“I’m going to miss you too,” she says, her voice light.

“I didn’t say I was going to miss you.”

“Sure you did,” she winks. “I’d lay low for a while if I were you. Maybe try finding something else to sell. Something non-human. I hear there’s a growing market for leggings.”

I snort and pull her half-drunk drink to my lips.

The second it goes down, I realize that it’s not just alcohol. There’s something else in there. I know what it is because I’ve used it before. It’s what Siri would have tasted the night the delivery man took her.

“Siri…” my voice is heavy with disappointment.

“I know you don’t want me to go. And I know, even in your state, that you’re likely to try to stop me,” she says as the world goes hazy. “But I wanted to say a proper goodbye. Go lay down. When you wake up, I’ll be gone.”

“Siri…”

I say her name, but it’s a slow slur of syllables, and then it’s all over. I feel my muscles relaxing, my body sliding out of the chair and onto the ground in a sinuous motion, like I just became a very floppy snake.

The last thing I see is her standing over me, a sad expression on her stunning face. She’s so fucking beautiful. She’s everything. She’s mine. And she’s gone.

Chapter 8

Three months later…

Siri

For the first time in my life, I’m free.

Thanks to Stavros’ network of contacts, a series of men who are insulated from one another by code names, secrecy, and the threat of death, I was transported to Norway with no trace at all. Each and every one of them were paid off to ensure they wouldn’t pass my location on, and a death threat or two may not have gone astray either. I refuse to be found again. I have disappeared completely into a new world, become a new woman, and life is good.

I wake up each day in a small fishing village at the bottom of a glacier. I watch the fishermen head out to sea, and I smile to myself because this is as far away from the worlds I have known as it is possible to get, and I love every moment of it.

There’s one little piece of melancholy which stirs inside me whenever I let myself think for too long. I have come to the land of vikings. There are tall, striking, nordic men everywhere, any one of them more than handsome and nice enough to settle down and raise a little fisher family with, but every time I even consider anything remotely romantic, my mind and heart are filled with the eyes of the tall, dark, evil fuck of a man I left behind.

Just because I managed to fall for Stavros, it doesn’t mean he is a good person. I shouldn’t be pining for him. I used him, and I saved him, which is more than he deserved. I owe him nothing, so why do I crave him now?

At first, I told myself it was Stockholm syndrome, that I was just desperate at the time and I needed someone, so I fell for him. I told myself the feelings would pass, and that I deserved better. The second part is still true, but the first is not happening.

I miss that deviant asshole. He knew how to touch me. How to look at me. He knew how to set me aflame. Now I am cold, inside and out.

“Ma’am?” A rough, accented voice brings me out of my maudlin thoughts.

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