Unable to watch him dawdle anymore, she ran, meaning to rescue her mother herself.But her father had reached out and snagged her jacket as she raced past, jerking her backward, and shoving her to the ground.Then he leaned in and snarled in her face.“I told you to stay there.So you bloody well stay.”He’d pushed her so hard that her head had banged on the ice.She’d lain on the ice stunned, tears running freely down her face, unable to fathom what was going on.Why her father was acting so strangely.She’d sat and watched as her father finally made it to where her mother had fallen through.He stood staring down for many, many moments, before he dropped to his knees, then began to commando crawl across the ice—just as she had done when she rescued Jiro.Aurora knew it was too late before he’d even reached down into the water and pulled up her mother’s lifeless body.
Later on he said he’d been trying to protect her from the sight of her dead mother in the freezing water, but Aurora knew that wasn’t the case.Something else had been going on, but she had never figured out exactly what.Had they had an argument?Whatever it was, she had a strong feeling that Karl had hesitated long enough so that her mother never got the help she needed.She also had a strong feeling that her mother may not have fought to live either.There had been no splashing, no yelling, no attempt to rescue herself that Aurora could see.The ice had broken beneath her feet, and she’d just let herself sink to the bottom.Of course, Aurora could never truly know what was going on in the heads of either of her parents, but she’d never recovered from that day.And had left soon afterwards, taking a job in Gothenburg at a non-profit charity for homeless kids, just to get away from her father.She’d never spoken of it to anyone except Astrid.And Astrid hadn’t wanted to hear Aurora’s theories; she was perhaps too young to really understand.Mårten knew the bare details—that her mother had drowned in a frozen lake—but she’d never let on her true suspicions to him.Never told him she thought her father had let her mother die.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Jiro insisted.“You did everything right.You were amazing.”
His words of praise lifted her heart.Even if she didn’t fully believe him, it was nice to know he had faith in her.Nice to know that he at least thought she had got it right.Another silence descended over them, but this time it wasn’t awkward, as Jiro pulled her in even tighter, and she relaxed into him.
“What’s going to happen to the man in the lake?”Jiro’s question broke the silence, and she was strangely grateful for it, as it took her mind off the tumult of memories that were now cascading through her mind.As well as the tumult of sensations that was filling her senses because of Jiro’s intimate closeness.They were so entwined it was almost as if they were in the afterglow of a lovemaking session.That thought had Aurora squirming with mortification, and so she concentrated on his question.
“We’ll have to retrieve his body.We have specialized divers for that job,” she replied.The image of the man floating face down in the frozen water would probably haunt her till the end of her days.It was her bullets that had killed him; she knew that much.But she had reached down and turned him over just to make sure he was dead.Pulling him out onto the ice would’ve cost her more energy than she had left.He would just have to stay there until she could call out a unit to retrieve him.The image of the dead man floating in the water was nothing compared to the primal fear she had felt as she watched Jiro fall through the ice, however.At least Jiro’s story had a happy ending.
She knew she’d have to make the call to HQ soon, but she’d checked her own phone for reception before she’d taken off her clothes, and there had been no signal.She might be able to find another network she could connect to that would allow her to dial emergency services if she walked farther up the hill to the north, but that would have to wait until she was warm enough to make the journey.
“Do you think we’re safe now?Was there only that one man after us?”Jiro asked the question that had been playing on her own mind.
“I can’t be sure,” she replied truthfully.“Especially because you won’t tell me what’s going on, apart from the fact it has something to do with the Yakuza, and frankly that scares the shit out of me.”She wasn’t proud of herself for that jibe.It’d just come out, but it was probably warranted.“But I’m gonna take a gamble and say that whoever was behind the phone call thought one sniper would be enough to take us out.”The sniper could also possibly be the second person involved in the abduction of Kenichi, but that was just conjecture for now.
“Okay, that’s good,” Jiro replied, but she could hear thoughtfulness in his voice.Another silence settled between them, and she realized she was indeed getting warmer.The fire would be helping to take the chill off the air, but their bodies entwined was doing the job.Her eyelids felt suddenly heavy.Now that she was heating up, and the adrenaline had left her body, she was surprisingly fatigued, but she fought the growing lethargy.She was surprised when Jiro spoke again.“You’re right; you deserve to know more.I’ve been a dickhead, keeping a promise to Taro because I thought I was helping him.But clearly, I’m not, because we haven’t found him yet.”
That surprised her.Was he about to tell her everything?Well, she wasn’t going to argue because information was power, and right now they needed to scrabble back all the control they could get.
“No, we haven’t,” she answered carefully.“And I’m beginning to think we were never intended to.This whole thing was a distraction to keep us occupied and isolated and then eliminated.We were a problem they needed to get rid of.”
“I can see that now,” Jiro replied.As he spoke, his fingers began to trace circles on her lower back.It was clearly an unconscious move, but Aurora stilled beneath his touch.“I was hoping that Taro was somehow handling things behind the scenes, and I didn’t want to jeopardize that.But I guess it’s too late now.”
“Yes,” she agreed.“It was only sheer luck we both weren’t killed.I’m sure he probably had some plan to put a bullet in both of us and then drop us in the frozen lake.Our bodies wouldn’t be found for months, not at least until the spring thaw next year.”It was a sobering thought, one that she hadn’t allowed to fully take shape in her mind yet.If Jiro hadn’t fallen through the ice, who knew how things might have ended.Perhaps in a way, it’d been a fortunate mistake.Because if they’d both been pinned down in the middle of the lake, the sniper would’ve been able to wait them out, and probably pick them off at his leisure.But when they’d separated so suddenly, and he’d lost track of them, it’d forced him to move location, which had given Aurora the few minutes she needed to reposition herself.
“Yep, it could have ended badly, and I’m so sorry for that, Aurora.You have been nothing but supportive to me, and all I’ve done is keep secrets and put you in terrible danger.”His hand on her back stopped circling for a second, and she could hear him grinding his teeth together.“I’m going to make you a promise that from here on in, I will not keep anything from you.I will be an open book.”This was interesting and somewhat unexpected, but she would take it.He was right, she had helped him even against her better judgement, breaking her own personal rules, for reasons she still couldn’t really fathom.It was about time he paid some of that faith back.
“I’ll tell you what I know so far.You can ask as many questions as you need, and I’ll try to answer them as best I can.Okay?”
“Okay.”He started up the circles again, and she almost wanted to purr like a cat at the wonderful sensations.Instead, she tried to focus on what he was saying.
“Like I said, Taro was involved with a gang that is part of the Yakuza.”She nodded against his chest, but didn’t speak.“But I didn’t tell you what his relationship was to them.He was smuggling weapons from the US into Japan for them, so they could wage their stupid gangland wars.”
Okay, that was a little unexpected, but then she hadn’t really had time to think about Jiro’s revelation earlier that there was indeed a connection with the Yakuza.Sweden had no problems with these particular gangland mobs, especially not this far north, and so they were never really on her radar.Of course they had an Interpol division based down in Stockholm, which might well have had dealings with this type of thing, but in her limited experience, she had never come across anything like this before.She waited for him to continue.
“Taro told me it all started off rather tame, but then he got dragged in deeper and deeper, until he couldn’t tell what was morally right or wrong anymore.”Jiro was trying to defend his brother, but she didn’t really need to hear that bit.If Taro was involved in gun smuggling, then he was a criminal, end of story.In her experience, most criminals had some sort of sad past or history they would use as a reason why they’d embarked on their criminal activities in the first place.But none of the sob stories mattered in the end.Mårten kept telling her not everything was black-and-white, there were shades of gray in every situation.And maybe later on in her career, she might soften her stance, but right now all she knew was that people who did bad things deserved to end up in jail.
“Things finally came to a head when they asked him to smuggle something big, something really big that scared him.”
“What do you mean?”She lifted her head slightly, wanting to look him in the eye, but their silver cocoon wrappings kept her locked in place, so she rested her cheek back on his chest again.“Do you know what they wanted him to move?”
“Taro thinks it might have been nuclear material.”
“Holy shit.”That was big stuff; even a small-town constable like her knew that much.
“When Taro suspected that was what they wanted, he decided enough was enough.He was working on a way to get himself free of his commitments.”
Commitments.Aurora nearly scoffed out loud.The guy had made his own bed, so how did he ever think it was going to be easy to stop once he’d started?
“But he had to make sure his family was safe before he did so.Which he did.He sent them to stay with an uncle.”
Oh.Aurora had never considered the older brother might have a family.That added an extra dynamic to the situation.Why did the criminals never think about their families, think about the consequences of their actions when they first started down the path?Aurora had never been able to answer that question, but she decided that greed had a lot to do with it.Greed and power.And she would never say this to Jiro, but his brother was very firmly in the same boat.
“I think when the gang couldn’t easily get their hands on Taro’s wife and children, they decided to target my father instead.”
“Let me guess, they didn’t kill him because they just wanted to send Taro a message,” Aurora interjected.
