Wesley slowly nodded. “She told me.”

“Eleanor, she plays dangerous games sometimes. She gets that from Kingsley. A few years ago she spent the night with him and they engaged in some breath-play. Erotic choking.”

“I know what it is. I lived with Nora.” Wesley felt his jaw tighten. The thought of Kingsley with his hands around Nora’s neck...

“Kingsley’s very good at this game. So is Eleanor. It’s not one I play often. A bit too dangerous even for me, especially for me. The temptation to go too far is ever-present. Not surprisingly that act can cause some light-headedness. She stood up too quickly after and fainted. She landed on her side on the hardwood floor. Only minor injuries resulted, thank God. A black eye, a bleeding lip, a bruised rib. Kingsley was deeply apologetic, although I wasn’t angry at him. It’s simply the risk we take.”

Wesley swallowed hard and kept his mouth shut, his lips a thin tight line. He didn’t trust himself to speak yet.

“That was the night she learned if she fell the right way she could give herself minor but visible injuries. The night she came back to me...”

“She hurt herself,” Wesley finally said.

“She did.”

“And you knew it wasn’t an accident?”

Søren nodded. “Eleanor is one of the most naturally graceful women on earth. I’ve known clumsier cats. It takes alcohol or exhaustion to make any sort of dent in that grace. We were doing nothing that night but the usual pain-play we both find enjoyable. I stepped away and she fell. And I knew the moment I looked at her exactly why she’d done it. She wanted to scare you away from her for your own good.”

“I wish she hadn’t done that.” Wesley rubbed at his face.

“You and I are in agreement. Let us pause and enjoy this rare moment of concord between us, Wesley.”

Wesley’s head throbbed, his eyes burned. He’d never felt so raw and wounded in his life.

“Do you have any idea,” Søren began, picking up the empty wineglass once more, “how hard it is to overcome one’s own sense of self-preservation? Try it. Try falling face-first into hardwood and see if you don’t catch yourself. You think you can do it, but I promise you, at the last second you’ll put your hands out and catch yourself every single time. She didn’t that night. Her love for you outweighed her love for herself. The least I could do is let her have her way. She wanted you to think I was a brutal monster? Fine. It’s not far from the truth. I’ve certainly been brutal in the past. Even to her.”

“But not like that.”

“No. Not like that. The one time Eleanor ended up in the hospital because of me was...” Søren stopped and ran a hand through his hair. It was such a human gesture of nervous energy that Wesley almost didn’t believe his eyes at first. Søren was human—who would ever have guessed? “I’m sorry. I’m sure you don’t want to hear this.”

“I think after all I’ve been through I can take it.”

“The one time she had to go to the hospital because of me—I had her tied to the bed, only her wrists to the bedposts by leather cuffs, and I was inflicting one of the worst forms of torture you can inflict on Eleanor...tickling. She has the most raucous laugh when she’s being tickled. Infectious. God can hear it in heaven when she laughs like that. She flinched wildly and twisted too hard in the restraints. She sprained her wrist. She screamed in pain and then, because she’s Eleanor, she kept laughing.”

Wesley stood up and turned his back to Søren. He couldn’t even look at the man anymore.

“She does have an amazing laugh.”

“That she does. It’s my favorite music.”

“I’m going to miss hating you,” Wesley said, staring into the shadows between the trees that surrounded the house.

“You’re most welcome to keep despising me if you need to. I’m no saint. When Kingsley and I were at school together...” Søren’s voice trailed off and Wesley said a silent prayer of gratitude that the priest chose to go into no further detail. “That he enjoyed it is no excuse for my savagery. When I put him in the infirmary it was no laughing matter. I’ve hurt Eleanor, too, very badly. Not necessarily physically, although she has been the primary target of my sadism for the past fifteen years. I have bruised her, beaten her, cut her, burned her...all for pleasure. I know that turns your stomach, and I certainly won’t attempt to defend myself. But I also know I don’t have to remind you that Eleanor was an adult who chose to submit to me and to pain of her own free will and that all she ever had to do was utter a single word to stop me, and I would have stopped.”

“You’re trying to make me feel better about hating you.” Wesley turned back around. “You are the weirdest man on the planet.”

Søren paused, glanced at the ceiling and seemed to mull the words over.

“You only say that because you haven’t gotten to know Griffin yet.”

“I know she consents to what you do to her. That’s the only reason I never called the cops on you, and you better believe I seriously considered it a time or two. I even told her I was going to one night, that night of your...anniversary. She said it would be as stupid as calling the cops on two boxers fighting it out in the ring. Kink is a blood sport, she said.”

“A not entirely inaccurate description.”

“I hate blood sports. Hunting, cockfighting, dogfighting, all that horrible stuff people do to animals. Our horses, they run to run. They don’t run because they’re after a tiny fox that’s about to get torn apart by a pack of dogs.”

“Eleanor is no fox being chased by dogs. She’s as much hunter as hunted. And if she runs it’s because she wants to be chased. When she’s caught it’s because she wants to be caught. And when she’s tired of being chased, she mounts her horse and she finds a fox of her own.”

Wesley shook his head.

“You say you regret some of the stuff you did to Kingsley. Do you regret anything you did to Nora? I manned up and apologized to you for thinking you beat her into the E.R. At least you can admit you’re sorry about something you did to her.”

Søren laughed a little. “Very well. If you insist.”

Søren stood up and took his empty wineglass over to the fireplace hearth. He uncorked another bottle of wine and poured a new glass. Wesley never imagined Søren would be this open, this talkative. Was it the fear over Nora’s fate? Or the wine? Whatever, it didn’t matter. Maybe he’d finally get some of the answers he needed.

“This house,” Søren said, raising his glass to indicate the room, “belongs to a man named Daniel Caldwell. You met him briefly.”

“Yeah, seems like a nice guy.”

“He’s more than that. He’s an intelligent and honorable man. I’ve always respected him. He had a wife named Maggie. Older than him by over a decade when they met and married. She and Kingsley had been lovers once. They stayed friends after she married Daniel. Daniel is of the Dominant variety. We were friends, all of us—Daniel and Maggie, Kingsley and I.”

“I saw the pictures in the house—him and his wife and kids. She looks a lot younger than him.”

“That is Anya, his second wife. Maggie died of cancer a few years after they married. Daniel was even younger than Eleanor is now and already a widower.”

“Shit. That’s horrible.”

“It was. He was bereft. It’s difficult for those of our kind to find someone we’re compatible with, to find someone who understands our desires and even shares them. He was not only a man without a wife, he was a Dominant without a submissive, a master without his slave. And he was lost. He’d gone into such deep mourning after the funeral he stepped into this house and didn’t leave the property again for years.”

“Years?”

“Years. Maggie died and he decided he wanted to die, too. He buried himself alive in this house. The thought of someone so young and vital giving up offended me to my core. Catholics abhor suicide not for the death but for the despair. I couldn’t allow it to go on any longer. I believed Daniel simply needed reminding that there was something out there in the world worth living for. And if he had a reminder of what he was missing by staying in this beautiful coffin, he might come back to life again. So I lent him Eleanor.”

“You what?”

Søren took a deep drink of the wine. Wesley was about ready to start chugging the stuff himself.

“I allowed Daniel to keep Eleanor with him in this house for one week. He was allowed any liberty with her he desired—sex, dominance, the infliction of pain and punishments to a certain degree. I told him Eleanor’s limits and preferences, and as long as he didn’t violate them, she was his for seven days while I went to my conference in Rome.”

“And Nora was okay with this...why?” Wesley raised his hands in utter bafflement.

“I ordered her to submit to me by submitting to him. She did as she was ordered. She was not happy about it at first, to say the least.”

“Can’t imagine why.”

“Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not apologizing for lending her to Daniel for a week. She was my property and she knew she need only say her safe word, and I would have taken her back home again. I knew she would like it here. I knew she would be good for him. As you can tell from all the photographs of Daniel with his wife and children, it’s safe to say I was right.”

“So if giving Nora to some guy to screw for a week isn’t what you regret, what do you regret?”

“I had an ulterior motive for lending Eleanor to Daniel. You may not know this, but when Eleanor was nineteen years old, there was someone else in her life.”

“Someone else?” Wesley asked. Nora had never told him about another guy before.

“Yes. You weren’t her first brush with a vanilla sort of romance. I was away at the time, working on my dissertation when she and this young man struck up a friendship. It quickly became something more. They were the same age, had much in common, and he adored her as well he should have. Still, she chose me. Hardly a fair fight—I was 32 years old, he nineteen. But Daniel—now he could give me a fair fight. And I assure you he did. I never quite trusted Eleanor’s love for me only because it seemed far too good to be true. I could give her so little compared to what other men could. Our time together was and is limited by my calling. She and I could never be seen in public together. The simplest things you take for granted—going for a walk down the street holding hands, stealing a kiss under a streetlamp, being able to marry and have children—I could give none of that to her unless I left my life in the church. She claimed she didn’t want that, didn’t miss it, didn’t want me giving up who I was for her. I feared that she said that only to be kind. If given the chance to take it, I thought she would. I feared she would. But because I loved her and prized her happiness more than my own, I gave her a chance to be with someone who could give her all that I couldn’t. I loaned Eleanor to Daniel. I gave Daniel to Eleanor.”

“That sounds...nice is not the word. Hard,” Wesley said, finally finding the word he needed. “That sounds hard.”

“It was very hard letting her come here to be with him. It’s hard coming anywhere near that house I grew up in. I didn’t want to come here. She certainly didn’t. She was angry, petulant. I was cruel to her in response. Cruel on purpose. I wanted to give her ample reason to leave me. When I left her in this house, I didn’t even kiss her goodbye.”

“You were stacking the deck,” Wesley said, understanding immediately.

“Stacking it against myself. And, of course, Eleanor surprised me. Daniel asked her to stay. What man wouldn’t? Although tempted to stay with him, she came back to me. And when I told her that I was surprised she’d come back, she looked at me with so much hurt in her eyes...” Søren paused, lifted the wineglass but couldn’t seem to bring himself to drink from it. “She said, ‘I love you, you stupid man. Don’t ever fucking forget that.’ And that’s what I regret, putting her through a vain and cruel test of her love for no reason. There were other ways to help Daniel. I didn’t have to use her like I did. That I doubted her love...I regret that. I regret it enough that I went to confession over it. When I told Eleanor, she absolved me, too.”