Author: Tiffany Reisz

From his pocket, Kingsley pulled out the razor blade. When she tried to kick Kingsley away, he sliced through Marie-Laure’s hamstring. She howled in agony and the gun fell from her fingers.

Panting and bleeding, she lay coughing on the floor.

Kingsley brought his hand to his side.

Blood...so much blood. He’d been hit. No matter. Pas de problème. One more wound. He’d add it to his collection.

Gazing around the room he saw the carnage. One man dead on the floor.

Two men dead on the floor.

One woman on the floor...still breathing.

Kingsley knelt at Marie-Laure’s side.

“You always were one for temper tantrums,” he whispered in French as his sister lay on the ground twitching, blood pouring from her thigh. “One tantrum too many.”

He laid his hand on her forehead, wiped a drop of blood off her face. After all these years she was still beautiful, his sister.

“We should have died,” Marie-Laure whispered, “you and I. We should have died on that train when Maman and Papa died. We should have died together....”

“We did. The whole Boissonneault family died that day. I’m only the ghost of Kingsley Boissonneault. You’re only the ghost of Marie-Laure.”

“I don’t want to be a ghost anymore.”

Her back arched, her face contorted in agony. Kingsley shushed her gently and pulled her close. Her hand gripped his arm hard and she dug her nails into his skin.

“He didn’t love me...” she whispered. “My own husband.”

“But I loved you.”

She nodded and breathed in deeply. It was her last breath.

“Merci.” She whispered that final word and left Kingsley behind a second time.

36

THE KNIGHT

The moment Wesley realized where Søren had gone and where Kingsley was going, he knew he couldn’t stay in the house and wait for the world to end. He raced after Kingsley, knowing he would be putting himself in the gravest of danger. But that didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. Only saving Nora mattered.

He parked the car almost at the front door of the house and ran inside. Not knowing the layout at all, he could do nothing but run everywhere, searching every room. Finally he found the room, the library, and the bloodbath that it had become.

Kingsley knelt at a woman’s side. Blood seeped through his shirt. But he was vertical, breathing, alive.

One miracle.

“Nora!” Wes shouted. He called her name again. And a third time. Louder every time.

A large man with a gun lay on the floor, obviously dead. A few feet away lay another, smaller man—also dead.

Two miracles.

At last he saw something, someone, lurking in the corner of the room. A man dressed entirely in black.

Søren. Alive. Unharmed from what Wesley could tell.

Søren knelt facing the wall, his back to the room. As the guns had fired, as the bullets had flown, Søren had ducked and covered out of harm’s way. But he wasn’t out of harm’s way. He would kill the man himself for his cowardice, for letting Nora—

“I’m here, Wes,” came Nora’s voice, still and small and coming from seemingly nowhere and everywhere at once.

“Where are you?” he called, rushing around, looking for her. Had she been shot? Was she hiding somewhere?

Slowly Søren started to turn and Wesley rushed toward him.

“Søren, where the fuck is Nora?” Wesley demanded, more furious than he’d ever been in his life. If he’d hidden while Nora had gotten hurt, he’d kill the priest with his own bare hands.

“I said I’m here, Wes.” Now he saw her.

She lay curled in the corner of the room, tucked tight into the fetal position, entirely unexposed to the battlefield all around them. Søren had shielded her from the bullets with his own body. With her head against his chest, with her eyes closed, Nora had never looked so alive, so beautiful.

So safe.

37

THE ROOK

Grace stood at the window of the house and prayed. She hadn’t done this in years, hadn’t given her faith any thoughts at all. Two days in Søren’s presence had turned her devout as a nun. She had no thoughts anymore, no fears. Her mind had turned into nothing but one prayer that she repeated over and over again until it became like the chant of the medieval monks.

Deliver us from evil...deliver us from evil...deliver us from evil...

She started as she heard the sound of a car coming up the road. It turned into the driveway and crawled toward the house, another car behind it. Grace couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, could do nothing but clutch her hands at her heart and stare.

The first car stopped and Kingsley stepped out from the driver’s side. Kingsley...bloodied but alive. He laid his hand on the hood and breathed, clearly in agony.

Another car door opened and Søren emerged, something in his arms. Not something...someone. He carried Nora to the house. But was she alive? Grace couldn’t tell.

From the second car emerged Wesley. He looked shell-shocked, pale as a ghost, but alive. Alive was all she cared about. Alive was all that mattered.

Wesley went to Kingsley and took his arm and put it around his own shoulders. Kingsley let his weight fall onto Wesley and Wesley half walked, half carried Kingsley toward the house. Towels, bandages...she’d find them and see to Kingsley’s wounds.

Grace ran to the door and opened it. Søren came in first.

Nora’s head lay on Søren’s shoulder. Grace gasped as two bright green eyes met her own.

“Grace? What the hell are you doing here?” Nora asked, as if they’d met at a party in Manhattan and not a house in the middle of nowhere.

“It’s a long story. Are you all right?”

“Oh...I’m fine,” she said as Søren carried her up the stairs and Grace waited at the bottom. “Is Zach here?”

“He’s in Australia.” Grace laughed the words. How absurd it was for her to be here—she wanted to be nowhere else in the entire world.

“Can you tell him something for me?”

“Anything,” Grace promised.

“Tell him my edits are going to be a little late. I have a good excuse, I promise.”

38

THE PAWN

Laila awoke to silence. Silence, yes, but not stillness. The air buzzed around her as if something great and terrible had happened and the whole world still shuddered from the aftershock.

She threw off the blankets and raced into the hallway. She saw her uncle and her aunt disappear into a bedroom at the end of the hall. At the bottom of the stairs Grace stood with Kingsley, helping him take off his bloody shirt. And Wes, he stood in the middle of the foyer, leaning against the wall, taking short, shallow breaths like he was trying to stop himself from throwing up.

“She’s alive...” Laila looked at Wesley and started to head to her uncle’s door. He grabbed her hand and pulled her back to him.

“We should give them some time.”

Laila nodded and tried to calm herself, although everything in her wanted to run to her aunt, embrace her, cling to her, weep in her arms for unparalleled joy. But something told her Wes was right, she should stay here. She should stay with him. He’d taken her hand and hadn’t let it go.

She looked down at their hands and then back up at Wes. He stared down the hall, stared at the closed door behind which her aunt and uncle had their reunion. On Wes’s face she saw grief and relief wrestling with each other. The relief she understood. The grief...

It came to her then. Wes wasn’t merely a close friend of her aunt’s. His feelings went far deeper than a crush. He loved her. He was in love with her. And in her moment of greatest crisis, her aunt had clung to her uncle and not him.

It seemed such a travesty...such a waste. Here stood this beautiful young man who had everything to give and no one to give it to.

“I shouldn’t say this,” Laila said, summoning all her courage. When all her own courage wasn’t enough, she summoned some of her aunt’s and then some of her uncle’s. Finally it was enough. “But I will.”

“Say anything you want, Laila.” Wes still held her hand. She took that as a sign to say the words her heart demanded of her.

“If I were her...” she began before leaning forward and giving him the quickest of kisses on the cheek, “I would have picked you.”

39

THE QUEEN

Nora clung to Søren as he carried her up the stairs. They didn’t speak. What was there to say? Everything they needed to say to each other they’d said in that room where they knelt facing each other with death at their backs. They needed no words, needed nothing but each other, and since they had each other, they wanted for nothing.

Søren sat her gently on the edge of the bed while he went into the bathroom and turned on the bathtub faucet. She was covered in blood, in dirt, in two days of sweat and fear. She couldn’t wait to get clean again, to get out of these clothes she’d been wearing for what felt like a year now. A long hot bath sounded like heaven and she knew it would be heaven because Søren was there.

As the water filled the bathtub, Søren came back to her and helped her undress. He didn’t wrinkle his nose at how badly she smelled. He didn’t comment on her wounds, even the huge blackening bruise on her side from where she’d been brutally kicked. To talk about it would make it matter and now nothing mattered except the beautiful truth that she was alive and safe, he was alive and safe and they were together.

He led her to the bathtub and she sank into the water slowly, gingerly, and winced as the heat seeped into her wounded skin.

Søren knelt at the side of the bathtub and pulled her hair loose and helped her lay back into the water. When she rose up again she saw water on his face.

“Sorry, sir,” she said, picking up a towel. “I didn’t mean to splash you.”

He rested his forehead against hers.

“You didn’t.”

Part Six

PROMOTION

40

THE QUEEN

The day Søren and Kingsley saved her was the best day of her life. And like all her best days, Nora spent it entirely in bed. The day after she woke up to an empty bed and a note from Søren on his pillow that simply read “Running.”

She smiled at the note. Running. Of course he was. Grace brought her breakfast and they spent a good hour catching up. She’d liked Grace from the moment she’d met her all those months ago at her house—liked her so much that it made it impossible for Nora to put up any kind of fight for Zach. Of course he belonged with Grace. She knew it the second she saw that beautiful scared, brave Welsh redhead standing on her porch. Nora offered to help Grace with the breakfast dishes but Grace told her to stay in bed—Søren’s orders.

A few hours later Søren returned from his long run and brought her lunch. He spent a good hour after lunch massaging the unbruised parts of her body. Two days cuffed and tied up in weird positions had left her more sore than she’d ever been in her life. And for a woman like her, who’d lived the life she’d lived, that was saying something.

At dinnertime, Grace showed up again with more food.

“I’m loving this room service,” Nora said as Grace handed her a mug of tea. “But I feel like I’m being quarantined. I don’t think ‘kidnap victim’ is an illness that’s catching.”

“Your priest has ordered all of us to leave you alone.” Grace blushed a little and Nora narrowed her eyes at her. “I don’t think any of us are brave enough to countermand his orders.”

“Countermand away. He went for another run.”

Grace sat on the bed next to Nora’s hip.

“Another one? Didn’t he go running this morning?”

Nora nodded. “Yeah. He’s feeling a bit pent-up.”