The Shadow Circle

Chapter-11

If there's one thing I regret, it's that Elizaveta didn't stab me with the knife and put me out of my misery then and there. No, the sadistic Satan worshipper continued to torture me in the most inhumane, brutal way possible.

She decided to talk to me.

Trust me, holding one minute of conversation with her can also be an extremely convincing argument against human intelligence.

"So what did your sister do to piss off the Circle," she demanded for the seventh time. She refused to believe that I was utterly clueless, maybe because she, herself, was utterly clueless.

"Kai, kill me. If I piss you off enough will you do me the mercy of killing me?" I asked him.

"If you piss me off enough, I'll leave you alone with your new best friend," he said.

"She's not my best friend, I hate her," Elizaveta said.

"He's being sarcastic, Eliza," Julian said.

"Kai, are you being sarcastic?" Eliza asked Kai.

"No, of course not. Never. Why would you think that? What reason have you given me to believe you two are not going to get along?" Kai drawled.

"I'll give you a reason!" Elizaveta said.

"He's being sarcastic," Julian said again.

"Oh," she said. "You didn't say it sarcastically enough."

"Well, I guess the good thing is that you're travelling light," I said, pointing to my head.

She stared at me.

"Did you just call me stupid?!"

"Five seconds, not bad. New record?"

"Hey Kes? Remember what I said about not interfering the next time she tried to kill you?" Kai asked.

"That still holds?"

"Yep," Kai said as we walked towards my car. Elizaveta and Julian had to leave to pack up because we were going to have even more people trying to kill us. It's funny, I was never a people's person and yet I'm drawing them in like magnets. Of course, I somehow doubted their intentions were friendly.

We'd left the waitress a three hundred dollar tip as an apology for scaring off her customers.

"So what's wrong with your girlfriend?" I asked.

"She's not my girlfriend," he said.

"That's the only thing right with her," I muttered.

"She hates your guts. That gives her another point for good sense," he said.

"Why'd she try to kill you?" I asked.

"You haven't figured that out yet?" Kai asked.

"Didn't really care enough to, really. Except for for the fact that she hates the Circle, which I found out just to intimidate her," I said honestly.

"She is Dragomirov's daughter," Kai said. "She thought I killed her mother," he said.

"Did you?" I asked slowly.

"No, Dragomirov did," he said.

"Right, who's this guy now?"

"One of the board members," Kai said. I got into the car and he sat in the passenger seat. "This time can you follow the speed limit and not break any signals?"

"I did follow the speed limits last time. I was going at fifty-ish," I said.

"Don't get us killed," he said.