The Mistress (16 page)

“So he’s not Laila’s boyfriend?” Daniel whispered to Kingsley.

“Non.”

“Has anyone told Laila that?”

“Not yet.”

Kingsley followed Daniel all the way upstairs to his bedroom and supervised the packing. He knew Daniel would keep to his word and leave the house to them. But he couldn’t stomach being in the presence of the grief-stricken huddled masses down in the living room, and he could barely look Søren in the eye for the pain and fear lurking behind his steady gray gaze.

“Do you know what you’re going to do yet?” Daniel asked as soon as he’d packed the basics in his suitcase.

“Oui,”
Kingsley said simply. Luckily Daniel was one of the more intelligent men he’d ever met, and he had to say nothing more than that.

“Be careful, okay?”

“You know, with my connections, I could assassinate the governor of New York in broad daylight and not get arrested.”

“I know all about your connections. It’s not the police I’m worried about. I don’t want any more reasons to have to visit cemeteries. I’d much rather visit you in prison. In fact, I might have fantasized about it a time or two.”

“No prisons, no cemeteries,” Kingsley pledged.

“I’m holding you to that.”

“Go, Daniel. Go and fuck your wife for me.”

“Happily. After I fuck her for me. Try not to break anything while I’m gone. I kind of like my house.”

“I’ll only break the bed.”

Daniel paused on the threshold of the door.

“I know you’re terrified, King. I know you’re pretending not to be for all our sakes.”

Kingsley said nothing in reply. To deny would be a lie. To agree would be to admit weakness.

“And I know...” Daniel continued, “I know you and Eleanor have had your differences. I know you and him—”

“I love him,” Kingsley said.

“I know you do. Please, don’t let that cloud your judgment.”

“I’m not going to let her die on the off chance he and I can be together. She’s one of mine. I promised him when she started working for me that I would keep her safe. One promise I intend to keep.”

“I didn’t think you’d let her die to get him. I just...” Daniel paused and raised his hand. He started ticking off on his fingers. “She saved me.”

“I’ll save them,” Kingsley pledged, and the use of “them” was no slip of the tongue. If she died, there would be no hole they could dig wide or deep enough to bury Søren’s grief. He knew this for a fact. He knew this because he once overheard Søren saying it. That was the day they buried Maggie, Daniel’s first wife.

“I know you will.” Daniel turned again but immediately spun back around. “To answer your question from earlier, it’s Marius, age nine. Byrony, age seven. Willa, age six, Archer, age four. Oh, and Leonard.”

“Leonard?”

“The goddamn cat. The other baby in the family.”

Kingsley laughed.

“You have to blame Anya if you don’t like the names,” Daniel continued. “Her rule—she has the babies, she names the babies.”

Kingsley swallowed a sudden knot in his throat. It took all his strength to meet Daniel’s eyes and speak in an unbroken voice.

“They’re beautiful names.”

“Thank you.”

“You should be with them.”

“I’m going. You’ll call when this is over.”

“Non,”
Kingsley said. “She will call.”

“She better.”

“And knowing her, she’ll demand phone sex.”

“If she insists.”

Daniel gave Kingsley a long searching look, one Kingsley tried to ignore. He turned and left Kingsley alone in the master bedroom. As soon as he was alone, Kingsley sank down onto the bed, letting his guard down finally. He couldn’t let his fears overwhelm him, not when he had a job to do.

Closing his eyes, he tried running through what he remembered about Elizabeth’s home—the layout, the rooms, possible places to hide, the trees—but instead he heard Daniel’s voice.
Marius, Byrony, Willa, Archer...
Long ago he’d forgiven Nora for her choice not to have his child. His shock of the discovery had translated into horror to her. How many times on his bathroom floor that morning had she told him she was sorry...so fucking sorry...accident...had no intention, she swore to God. And no matter how much he tried to calm her down, she’d remained frantic, terrified, her entire life before her hanging in the balance. Every moment with Søren she had to steal. A child would steal the already too few hours he could make for her. So he let her make the choice and didn’t try to sway her, didn’t tell her the secret truth.

He’d wanted to keep it.

He pushed the thought away. The house...the hallways...the trees...the line of fire... He ran through various scenarios, visualizing the target, anticipating the worst, but it wasn’t a target, was it? His sister had Nora and he’d seen her with his own eyes.

He stood at the window in Daniel’s bedroom and stared in the direction of the house as Wesley was doing on the first floor. No doubt somewhere else Søren was staring in the same direction. “Please, Marie-Laure, don’t make me do this....”

Kingsley turned around, putting his back to the window, and noticed for the first time the rocking chair sitting in the shadows. He’d been in Daniel’s bedroom before but had no memory of such a bourgeois bit of furniture in the otherwise elegantly decorated room. It must be Anya’s doing. No doubt she had rocked the children to sleep many a night in that chair before carrying them off to the nursery and returning to her husband’s bed as his own mother had with him and Marie-Laure.

Whatever Marie-Laure’s crimes, she was still his sister. She’d even named him, his mother had told him long ago when he’d asked who was to blame for giving him such a decidedly un-French name. Marie-Laure, only three years old, had a set of paper dolls—knights and squires, lords and ladies, kings and queens. One day Marie-Laure took the king doll and placed it on top of his mother’s pregnant stomach. His American mother, wanting her daughter to know French and English, had pointed at the doll on her stomach and said, “It’s a king.” For the next two months whenever curled up with her mother, Marie-Laure would pat the growing stomach and repeat, “It’s a king. It’s a king.”

And so Kingsley was born.

How did it happen...how had it come to this? His sister had been a sweet child once, his mother’s little angel...and then she’d become a teenager and her beauty had blossomed. More than blossomed, it had exploded, gone off like a bomb complete with mushroom cloud and utter devastation.
Mon Dieu,
the fallout—he’d never seen anything like it before or since. Nora had broken her fair share of hearts but she somehow always managed to leave the men better off than she found them—even Daniel, especially Daniel. But his sister... At the time he’d been too busy with his own conquests to pay much attention to her. Last thing he wanted to think about was who his sister was spreading for. Looking back, they should have seen the signs. One boyfriend had threatened suicide over her dismissal of him. When he ended up in the hospital after swallowing a bottle of pills, Marie-Laure had laughed and bragged about it to friends and said it could only have been better had he died. Perhaps that’s where she’d gotten the idea—punishing someone who didn’t love you by killing yourself. But for whatever reason she had come back and seen both him and Søren happy and in love.

Kingsley had wealth and power and the most beautiful, intelligent, understanding woman in the world in his bed. Søren had a peaceful life in his parish, and the respect and devotion of his entire congregation. And he had his Little One, whom he loved above all others and who loved him in return in her own beautiful if broken way. Marie-Laure’s first attempt at revenge had failed. This was take two.

He would make sure her second attempt would fail like her first had.

And this time, Marie-Laure would stay dead.

19

THE QUEEN

N
ora lay on the floor and stared at the door. After her late breakfast with Marie-Laure, Andrei had escorted her to a room, locked her in and made casual mention that if she tried anything, Damon would be waiting right outside the door ready to shoot her—or worse. Death waited outside that door. She barely noticed the rest of the room. The footsteps in the hallway commanded her complete attention.

The footsteps faded and Nora forced herself to breathe, to relax. Carefully she got off the floor and tried the window. That was a waste of time, of course. Elizabeth, having had the childhood from hell, had taken childproofing her home to an absurd extreme. If Nora had a lead baseball and a cannon, she still couldn’t have shattered the window glass. And someone, Damon or Andrei, had kindly nailed the wood to the frame. She was trapped. Nothing to do but wait and stare and pray the day away.

And plan.

After all, while she believed in the power of prayer, she also believed in having backup plans on the off chance God wanted her to get off her ass and do it herself. Escape plans...these were her specialty. The daughter of a man who ate his meals with the Mafia, she’d learned early on that the world was an ugly, dangerous place full of men with guns who’d pat you on the head, call you a good kid and then walk out the door and kill somebody who’d made the fatal mistake of crossing them. The lowlifes of the world had been her father’s best friends, his worst enemies and all at the same time.

So even at the tender age of eleven she’d started to figure things out. A coat hanger bent the right way could unlatch a car door in under a second. A tiny ball bearing held between two fingers and aimed at the center of a pane of glass could shatter it into a thousand pieces. This wire to that wire and the car would start, no key necessary, no permission asked.

They hadn’t tied her up before tossing her into the room. No reason to bother if she couldn’t get away through door, window or ceiling. Trapped...she was trapped in this house that had been a house of horrors to Søren growing up. He’d almost died in this house the day his father had caught him with his sister in the library. He’d almost died and now she might, too.

No. She wouldn’t give in to such apocalyptic thinking. She was a Dominatrix, after all, not some damsel in distress waiting for a prince on a white charger to ride in and save her. Søren had taught her to be strong. Any woman sharing the bed of a sadist had to be strong.

The thought stirred Nora and slowly she rolled up off the floor.

The bed of a sadist...

No bed sat in the room they’d thrown her into, but clearly once there had been a bed. She saw the piles of ash on the floor, the blackened walls and ceiling, smelled the scent of burned wood and fabric. And that’s when she realized she’d been in this bedroom before. Standing up, Nora walked to the door. She didn’t even bother touching the knob. One jiggle and Damon would probably start firing. No, she wasn’t going to try to get out...she only needed to remember.

The night she first visited this room, she’d been seventeen. Two years she’d lusted after her priest, loved him, obeyed his every last command he’d given her under the auspices of supervising the community service Judge Harkness had imposed upon her. And all that time she’d known...something. She had no idea what she knew but she knew she knew it and she knew Søren knew it, too. It had been maddening, like living with a word on the tip of her tongue for years. Her gut had told her she belonged to Søren in some deep cosmic way she couldn’t begin to comprehend. Even if he never laid a hand on her, never kissed her, never made love to her at all, that changed nothing. She was his. She knew it.

He knew it, too. But it wasn’t until his father had died that he finally felt safe enough to tell her the truth. He’d told her...in this very room.

Nora stood by the door, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again she could see the chair by the window...and she saw Søren even younger than she was now, praying in his childhood bedroom, his blond hair like a halo in the moonlight. Walking across the floor, Nora inhaled the memories of that night—kneeling at Søren’s feet, crawling into his lap, surrendering to his arms. He’d held her before—when her father had been sentenced to prison, when her mother had turned her back on her for the final time—but all those times before the embrace had been that of her priest, a caring friend comforting a troubled girl, and nothing more. That night he held her like a lover. He’d asked her if she wanted to know the truth about him, about them, and he’d given her the sternest of warnings that her life would never be the same again if she let him tell her the truth.

To that warning she’d simply answered,
Tell me.

“Tell me...” she said to the empty room. But no, not entirely empty. The bed was gone. It appeared someone had set it on fire and let it burn down to the hardwood, leaving waste, burn marks and ashes behind. Yes, even the residue of the ashes snaked up the wall and onto the ceiling, and around the outline of words someone—Elizabeth most likely—had tried and failed to wipe clean.

Love thy sister.

“You sick bitch.” Nora raised her hand and traced the outline of the words on the wall. How dare Marie-Laure mock Søren and Elizabeth for the sins of their childhood, sins no God in heaven or on earth would ever hold them accountable for?

The night of Søren’s father’s funeral, he’d confessed his darkest secrets to her, and she’d listened in silence and in horror—never horror at him for what he’d done, horror only at what this man she’d loved so completely had suffered. She would never forget him turning his face from her and meeting the gaze of the moon. The words he said...she wanted to take them into her hands and set them alight and watch them burn until they ceased echoing inside her ears.

I am like him, like my father. I take the greatest of pleasures in inflicting pain. Eleanor, you cannot even imagine what I did to my sister...what she did to me. I never want you to imagine... Please,
Søren had begged of her,
please never imagine.
And for his sake and Elizabeth’s sake she never tried to imagine.

But today she knew she needed to imagine.

“Søren,” she whispered to his childhood bedroom. “Please...don’t fail me. If I know you half as well as you know me...”

She started to look around the room where Søren had lost his virginity to Elizabeth, his own half sister, the room where he’d first begun to explore the strange dark desires he’d been born with. She knew herself. She knew her past. As a young teenager she’d often scald herself with candle wax, carve shallow patterns into her skin with needles—games, they were. Challenges. Dares. A game of chicken played with herself. All their kind started young. The sadists’ first victims were their own bodies. The masochists’ first sadists were themselves. Simone, one of Søren’s favorite submissives, had once confessed that she’d play cowboys and Indians with her brothers only because they always tied her up during their role-play. The sexual thrill she’d experienced as her older brother lashed her to the foot of their parents’ bed embarrassed her even to this day. When the game ended, she’d disappear into the privacy of her own bedroom, and tie herself up, leaving only one hand free to masturbate.

The innocent games children play...

Nora got on her hands and knees and swept along the edge of the baseboards looking for a loose board. Nothing. Over the top of the window frame she found only dust. Little furniture in the room but for the remnants of the bed and the bookcase.

The bookcase.

Kneeling in front of the shelves Nora ran her eyes over the books. They looked untouched, unread. Søren had spent almost his entire childhood from age five to ten away in England at boarding school. The books had been mere decoration in this house where every smile was nothing but show. Søren had come back to this house at age eleven after he’d killed the boy who’d attacked him in his bed.

As Nora studied the titles of the books, a memory stirred of a long-ago conversation between two people who’d not yet become lovers.

You’ll need a safe word, Eleanor.

I trust you.

That’s all well and good but I don’t entirely trust myself with you. Choose a word and I’ll carve it onto my heart and when you say it, I’ll know I have to stop. Otherwise, there is a very good chance I won’t, not even if you struggle, especially if you struggle.

She’d remembered the first poem she ever memorized as a child. The words had been all nonsense and yet they tripped easily off her tongue. “Twas brillig and the slithy toves...”

Jabberwocky,
Nora, age eighteen, had answered on the day Søren started training her.
I always loved that monster.

He was always my favorite monster,
Søren had said.

And Nora, then still just Eleanor, remembered smiling at him, kissing him...

You’re my favorite monster,
she said against his lips.

Ignoring all the other books on the shelves, Nora carefully removed a gilt-edged hardbound copy of
Through the Looking-Glass
from the shelf and held it in her lap.

I’ll carve it into my heart...

Nora closed her eyes and let the book fall open.

As she looked down into the book, a tear fell from her eyes and landed onto the paper monster.

“Oh, Søren,” she whispered, love and anguish warring for possession of her heart. Love for the man and anguish for the boy. “You poor little boy, thank you.”

The book had fallen open right to the Jabberwocky. And that reason was the razor blade a child had secreted between the pages thirty-six years ago. Nora took the blade from the book and held it into the light. The acid-free paper had kept it perfectly preserved—no rust, no decay. It was as sharp now as the day Søren had hidden it inside the book, hidden it away after using it on his sister...or perhaps, even worse, on himself.

She put the book back where she found it. Had she possessed a brick of solid gold it would feel less precious than this sliver of steel that could possibly cut her free from the ropes that would bind her to Marie-Laure’s bed tonight, or perhaps even save her from an attack on her own body. Aimed just right she could slice the jugular artery wide open with it, the femoral vein in the thigh. If Fat Man or Little Boy got any ideas, she could slice their balls off and shove them in their mouths. That vision gave her a dark smile. No more defeatist thinking. She would survive this to see her kidnappers pay for their crimes. She would live to watch them die.

A new and precious hope had burrowed a hole into her heart. She tucked it in, let it get comfortable. Thirty-six years ago, a troubled little boy had hidden a razor blade inside this book and thirty-six years later the woman who’d grow up to love him would find it the moment she needed it most. The razor blade in her hand felt like a miracle, like a sign, like salvation. She tucked the blade into her back pocket where she could reach it even with her hands tied.

“Thank you, God,” she prayed with the deepest, most profound gratitude she’d ever experienced in her life. Even the night her father had been killed and she’d realized she was free of him and his kind forever, she hadn’t felt this unfathomably infinite gratefulness. “Thank you for making him like this...thank you.”

How could she not thank God right now? Søren had confessed there were times as a child and teenager that he wondered why God had made him this way, made him so that he took the deepest of pleasures in causing the most brutal pain. Now she knew the reason why and she couldn’t wait to see him again, couldn’t wait to tell him.

God made Søren what he was so that he would leave this precious gift for her three years before she’d even been born.