The Angel (The Original Sinners) (30 page)

“Right. But don’t wait up. This might take a while.”

“I’ll wait up.”

The smile lingered on Suzanne’s face long after she’d hung up.
At about ten o’clock she arrived in Wakefield and Sacred Heart. A few lights
still burned in the church and set the stained-glass windows subtly glowing. How
beautiful the church looked by night…how peaceful, how sacred. She still didn’t
really believe in God. Nothing would ever convince her that some man in the sky
was running the show down here on Earth. But for once she started to believe a
little in one of His believers.

She entered the church and found it empty. But surely Søren
would return before long to turn off the lights and lock up. Søren… She realized
all of a sudden that he’d become Søren again in her mind. But although she knew
his name, knew his secrets, she didn’t feel quite worthy to call him by the name
only his most trusted intimates knew him by.

“Father Stearns…” she whispered aloud as she stared at the
altar at the front of the church. She’d never call him Søren to his face or in
her heart and mind again. Glancing around, Suzanne saw a small staircase that
led to the choir loft. She climbed the stairs and stood at the edge of the
balcony area and surveyed the entire sanctuary.

Sanctuary. In olden times she knew that criminals and runaways
would seek real sanctuary inside the walls of churches. The church was holy
ground, sanctified, and the authorities treated it as a place of real power not
to be meddled with. For the first time since childhood, Suzanne felt safe in a
church and safe with a priest. She used to think the only cure for the ailments
of the Catholic Church was wholesale destruction. It gave her pleasure to quote
Denis Diderot’s words, “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled
with the entrails of the last priest.” She’d met both a king and priest in her
investigation and had to admit that while the world might not be better off with
them in it, it certainly was more interesting.

Below her she heard the door open and Father Stearns strode
down the center aisle toward the altar. She watched him a moment and smiled as
he crossed himself, gave a quick, elegant bow next to a pew and sat down to
pray. In his hands he held rosary beads, and she had to wonder for what special
intention he prayed. She started to call out a greeting to him, but she heard
the door below her open again.

“Søren!” A man’s angry voice echoed throughout the sanctuary.
Suzanne took a step back from the edge of the railing and hid herself in the
shadows. Father Stearns stood up and turned around.

“Griffin…how nice to see you in church.”

Suzanne’s inhaled in shock. She couldn’t see the man’s face,
but from his muscular build and the photos that she’d seen, she recognized
Griffin Fiske, the son of the chair of the New York Stock Exchange.

What the hell…

“None of that,” Griffin said, his voice flush with fury. “Don’t
pull any of the bullshit mind-fuck stuff on me. You know why I’m here.”

“I don’t actually.” Father Stearns stood in the center of the
aisle and gave Griffin a placid smile. “But tell me. We can discuss whatever you
like.”

“Let’s discuss how my love life is none of your fucking
business. Let’s discuss what an arrogant, pretentious asshole you are for
thinking you can tell me or anyone who they can or cannot be with.”

“Eleanor is very fond of you, Griffin. I’ve yet to discern
why.”

Griffin took a menacing step forward.

“Maybe because unlike you, I don’t try to control her every
move.”

“Yes, Eleanor is utterly oppressed, isn’t she?” Father
Stearns’s voice dripped with mockery. “Eleanor acts like a child because she’s
full of childlike joy. You simply are a child, Griffin. A spoiled child who has
never had a real relationship in his life. I’ve watched you use people up and
discard them over and over again. If you think for one moment I would allow you
to use up and discard someone I love—”

“Me?” Griffin laughed bitterly. “Me? I use people up and
discard them? Are you blind? Are you deaf? Your precious Eleanor uses men like
fucking tissues. One good hard blow and she tosses them out. Her editor? Her
intern? Her thousand ex-lovers? Jesus Christ, Søren, even—”

Whatever name Griffin Fiske started to name went unuttered. And
it all happened so quickly Suzanne couldn’t even reconstruct in her mind the
series of motions she’d witnessed. She knew it began with Griffin pointing his
finger at Father Stearns’s chest and ended with Griffin on the floor of the
church with his arm pinned behind his back. Father Stearns had moved with such
brutal force and efficiency Suzanne could only cover her mouth in shock.

“Griffin…” Father Stearns spoke the name with cold,
calculating, utterly terrifying calm. “You are in God’s House. And Eleanor is
His Child. And when you dare speak of her in my presence or in His, you will do
so with the utmost respect. Are we understood?”

Suzanne could only stare at the scene. It appeared that if
Father Stearns pulled on Griffin’s arm any harder, he would dislocate the
shoulder. Griffin grimaced and took a pained breath.

“Yes, sir,” he finally said.

“Good.” Father Stearns released Griffin’s arm and stood up.
Griffin quickly came to his feet. “Now shall we continue brawling like
schoolboys? Or should we discuss this somewhere like gentleman?”

Griffin nodded. “The Circle?”

Father Stearns sighed heavily.

“If you insist.”

“I do. This ends tonight. You know what I want and who I
want.”

“I do, in fact. Are you prepared to earn what you want?”

Griffin’s back straightened.

“I’ll do whatever it takes. Last thing I want is to cause that
kid any more pain. Not the bad kind of pain, anyway.”

The kid? Suzanne thought that was an odd way to refer to Nora
Sutherlin. From what little she knew of the infamous Griffin Fiske, he was
slightly younger than Nora. And what the hell did he mean by the bad kind of
pain? Was there a good kind of pain?

“Nor I. Which is why I set the conditions I do.”

“Fine. Let’s get this over with. I’m not going to waste another
night sleeping alone if I don’t have to.”

Suzanne saw Father Stearns’s eyes narrow as Griffin stormed out
of the church. However pure his feelings for Nora Sutherlin were, surely he
didn’t want to hear about her in bed with some other guy. Obviously Father
Stearns had considerable sway over her if Griffin Fiske had to come fighting her
priest to be with her. That night at the rectory when he’d dropped his guard and
talked about how he’d had to rescue Eleanor Schreiber from herself as a
teenager, how he’d practically had to raise her after her home life
imploded…maybe Father Stearns was to her exactly what he’d said he was—a
father.

Father Stearns left the church and Suzanne collapsed into a
pew, her heart still racing from the strange scene she’d witnessed. Father
Stearns had nearly gotten into a fistfight with New York’s biggest trust fund
baby over Nora Sutherlin. Bizarre… Suzanne had so many questions, but she
apparently wouldn’t get to ask them that night. Why didn’t Father Stearns want
Griffin Fiske and Nora Sutherlin together? Why did Griffin call her “the
kid”?

And what the hell was The Circle?

* * *

Nora took Michael up to his bedroom and sat him down in
the window seat. She ordered him to stay while she went to her room to retrieve
something. When she came back, she found him up and pacing.

“So you’ve just given up following any of my orders, I see,”
she teased as she sat on the bench in the window. “Hopefully Griffin will be
able to train you better than I have.”

Michael blushed and collapsed miserably onto the bench across
from Nora.

“Oh, God, I’m in love with a guy…” he groaned. “This
sucks.”

“It also blows.”

Michael groaned again and Nora could only laugh at him.

“Aah…teenagers,” she said, reaching out for Michael and
dragging him to her. He curled up in her lap with his head on her thigh.
“Everything is life-and-death when you’re seventeen. Especially love.”

“It isn’t life-and-death?”

Nora closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the
wall.

“No, it is actually. Life and death are less life-and-death
than love is. When I fell in love with your priest, I felt as though I had this
open wound. I was so raw, so tender. And it hurt. But I didn’t care. Love is the
open wound that you hope never heals.”

“Love will hurt a shit metric ton if my dad finds out about
this.”

“Your father is an asshole, Angel,” Nora reminded him. “Why do
you care what he thinks?”

Michael shook his head.

“He makes Mom miserable about me. Anything I do, he turns on
her. He dumped us, divorced her, and he still comes around and gives her shit
for every single thing he hates about me. And that’s a lot of shit.”

“Your father has terrible taste in sons.” Nora ran her hands
through Michael’s long hair and brushed it off his forehead. “I’d be thrilled if
I’d ended up with a kid like you.”

Nora gazed out at the manicured lawn and the empty driveway.
Griffin probably wouldn’t be home until morning. God only knew what Søren would
put him through tonight. Nothing truly terrible, of course. Nothing he hadn’t
done to Nora a time or two. Just some mind-fucking and probably a hefty dose of
pain. It would do Griffin good, actually. There was something to be said for
fighting for the one you loved. Especially if the one you loved was a
seventeen-year-old boy who didn’t think he deserved that love.

“What happened to the kid?” Michael whispered and Nora pulled
her eyes away from the evening sky.

“What kid?”

Michael raised his head off her lap and simply stared at her.
Nora sighed heavily.

“Oh, that kid.”

“I don’t talk much, but I do listen.”

“Too damn well apparently,” Nora said, laughing without joy or
mirth. God, this was about the last thing she ever wanted to talk about. “You
really want to know?”

Michael nodded.

“Maybe it’ll distract me from worrying about Griffin.” Michael
sat up and pulled his knees tight into his chest.

Poor thing…love shouldn’t have to hurt
this much,
Nora thought before realizing what blasphemy such a
sentiment was in their world. Would she ever know what love without pain felt
like? Did such a thing even exist?

“I was twenty-seven,” she began, turning her eyes back to the
setting sun. “And so in love with your priest I couldn’t see straight. But for a
long time, I’d felt…incomplete, I guess is the best word for it. I hung out at
Kingsley’s a lot in my twenties—it was the only place your priest and I could
really be ourselves together. You remember that hot French guy who came on to
you in the Rolls Royce?”

Michael grinned. “Won’t ever forget that guy.”

“That guy owns New York. At least the Underground parts of it.
He’s got the hottest submissives, doms and dominatrixes in the world on his
payroll. They’re in and out of his town house all the time. And I would watch
the dominatrixes and just stare at them. They were so beautiful, so powerful.
Even the male dominants gave them a wide berth. You expect men to be tough and
strong and in charge. But when you meet a woman like that? It’s mind-blowing. I
ached for what they had. Don’t get me wrong, I love submitting to your priest.
It fulfilled me like nothing else. But it never fulfilled me completely.”

“I can’t imagine,” Michael said with a shrug. “I guess I don’t
have a dominant bone in my body.”

“You don’t. I’m sure of it. And that’s fine. I envy you. Being
a switch is no party. The doms don’t quite trust you. The subs don’t quite get
you. Just being one thing or the other would be so simple… It’s like being
bisexual. Best of both worlds. Worst of both worlds.”

“Tell me about it.”

Nora squeezed Michael’s knee.

“You know your priest has not one but two PhDs.”

Michael blinked. “Really? In what?”

“Got his first one in his twenties in theology, of course. But
when I was twenty-six, twenty-seven, he was working on PhD number two in Canon
Law. Søren is, to say the least, a nerd.”

Michael’s eyes went wide just before he burst into laughter.
What a wonderful sound, hearing Michael laugh like that—so loud, so boisterous,
so open. At the very least, the summer at Griffin’s had made him learn to speak
up a little.

“So your sexy nerd priest went to Rome to finish his
dissertation at the Gregorianum. He never left me alone when he went away for
his trips. He’d always leave me with another dominant to keep an eye on me. I
didn’t really understand that then. First time he did I was only twenty-three
years old and he drops me off as this mansion in butt-fucking nowhere New
England with this brutally hot widowed librarian.”

“Seriously?”

Nora rolled her eyes. “Seriously. Søren told me he knew I’d be
good for this guy, Daniel. And I was. And he was good for me too. Being with him
that week made me realize how much I truly loved your priest and that being with
him was worth the sacrifices. And that was the plan. Every time Søren left me,
it was a test. Would I still be there when he came back?”

“So what happened when you were twenty-seven?”

“He left me with Kingsley for three months.” Nora closed her
eyes and let her mind wander back to that time. She remembered the hot tears on
her face as Søren had kissed her goodbye and warned her to be a good girl and do
whatever Kingsley said. He promised her a hundred presents from Rome, a letter
every week… She couldn’t bear being apart from him for so long. Her stomach
ached at the very thought of it and continued to ache for weeks. Well, she
thought it was his absence that caused the pain in her lower stomach. “I was
sick,” she said, opening her eyes. “Kidney infection. Two-week course of very
strong antibiotics. Didn’t think anything of it. Sort of forgot that birth
control pills and antibiotics don’t mix.”