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

Nora 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.