“You have a lover, yes, and all the Underground knows she and I would destroy anyone who tried to destroy you. And yes, you fell in love with her when she was fifteen, but you didn’t take her until she was twenty, a feat of Herculean proportions, considering how she spent those years attempting to seduce you. Even if your congregation caught you with your hand around her throat and eight inches inside her on the altar of the very church where they worship, they love you too much to tell a soul about you. You might very well be the safest man on earth.”

“So what is this, then?”

“It may be more than ruination they are after, mon père. This, pardon my French, is a mindfuck. Which, as everyone in the underground knows, is your specialty. Someone is doing unto you what you do unto others.”

“And you believe it’s someone we went to school with?”

“It would have to be. Who else would know about us? About that photograph of us Christian took?”

“Eleanor has a copy.”

“Do you think Eleanor is behind all this?”

“Of course not.”

“Then who?”

Søren exhaled through his nose, shook his head in obvious frustration and turned his head to stare out the window. Although he knew he was in as much danger as Søren from whatever the thief had in mind for them, Kingsley couldn’t help but take perverse pleasure in Søren’s impotence in this situation. No matter what happened in their world, Søren always had it under control. In any situation that arose, he always had the knowledge, the answers and the fortitude to deal with it. When a sadist at The 8th Circle got out of hand, Søren put him in his place. When a young submissive stopped being able to tell the reality of the outside world from the fantasy of the scene, Søren talked sense into her. No matter what drama befell their world, Søren handled it. He handled the drama, he handled the Underground and he even handled Nora Sutherlin, the one woman Kingsley or any other man on earth couldn’t handle.

But Søren seemingly couldn’t handle this.

“Kingsley…” he began, and met his eyes. “Who do you think it is?”

Kingsley could only shrug. “Je ne sais pas. I can’t imagine. But I think Christian has a point. We were so wrapped up in each other at the time, we barely noticed that we were the only two at school who weren’t in love with my sister.”

“She was a beautiful girl.”

“And the only girl within fifty miles of the place. They never allowed women on naval ships or pirate ships for just that reason. A lone woman among men means disaster.”

“Disaster would be an understatement.” Søren raised a hand to his forehead and rested his elbow on the window ledge. “It was a catastrophe. All of it.”

Kingsley bristled at the implication.

“All of it? I think that’s something of an exaggeration. What you and I had before it was ruined…”

“What you and I had was something God wanted nothing to do with.”

Søren’s words came at Kingsley like bullets.

“I refuse to believe you mean that.” Kingsley leveled a stare at him.

“Those, Kingsley, were your words after our second night together. That is what you said as we stood on the cliff over the hermitage. You were the one who said, and I quote, ‘Surely God wants nothing to do with us, anyway.’ You, not I.”

Kingsley heard the edge of old anger in Søren’s voice, the tinge of bitterness, the hurt. The hurt?

Thirty years ago he’d made an offhand remark after being beaten and fucked halfway to unconsciousness…and three decades later Søren remembered it word for word. Remembered the words and remembered the pain.

“Mon Dieu…I never thought the day would come. Finally and for once, I have hurt you.”

Kingsley did laugh then—loudly and decadently. And Søren only glared at him until he, too, laughed.

“God, Kingsley, we were children then. Foolish children playing dangerous games after dark.”

“Games? Is that what it was to you? My blood on your body, that was a game?”

Søren sighed heavily. He clasped his hands almost as if in prayer and gazed at Kingsley over the steeple of his fingers.

“No. Not a game. Not at all. In a way, what you and I had…it was my salvation. I thought of it as such back then. Prayed that’s what it was, prayed that God had sent you to me. When you said God wanted nothing to do with us…yes, it hurt.”

Kingsley kept his face composed and tried to pretend Søren’s words didn’t fill up his heart like water poured into a cupped hand.

“I saved your soul by shedding my blood for you. How Christian of me.”

Søren gave him a wry smile. “God saved my soul. You, however, saved my sanity. Before you, I thought…”

Søren’s voice trailed off and Kingsley found himself leaning far forward in his seat. He wanted to touch Søren—his knee, his hands, his face—but dared not lest the moment shatter. Søren did confess to him on rare occasions. Late at night at the town house, at the rectory, when they’d both had too much wine and too little sleep…Søren would sometimes bare his heart a little to Kingsley, just enough for him to remember that Søren did have one.

“What did you think?”

“Horrible thoughts, mon ami.” Søren smiled. “After what happened that summer with Elizabeth. I thought I had to stay apart from everyone, far away from them lest they be contaminated with whatever it was that had turned me into this. Even before Elizabeth I knew there was something different about me. With her I discovered what it was.”

“You inherited your father’s sadism like I inherited my father’s eyes. But I am no more my father than you are yours. You have a conscience. He didn’t.”

“I know that now. As a child…I didn’t understand, couldn’t understand. I thought I’d been born broken.”

“Broken?” Kingsley could hardly believe his ears. “When I saw you the first time, I felt…healed. If you are broken, then I only pray someday I break, too.”

Søren lowered his clasped hands and held them between his knees. Once that had been Kingsley’s home. He loved sitting at Søren’s feet between his knees. At the hermitage, after they’d spent their lust and brutality on each other, they would turn from beasts back into students. Søren would read and grade papers while Kingsley rested his back against Søren’s shins and work on his own studies. Such civility after such violence…neither one of them ever noted the strange irony of it. It felt right to them in the moment. It would feel even more right…right now.

Kingsley slid out of his seat and knelt on the floorboard at Søren’s feet. He slid his jacket off and tossed it aside. He kicked off his shoes, his socks, took off the tie and unbuttoned his collar. It had been so long since he’d done this, let his submissive side take over, that he’d almost forgotten how to sit. But as he sank into the floor it came back to him. Respectfully, he lowered his eyes to the floor. He didn’t speak. He relaxed his ramrod straight posture and surrendered to his fate.

“Kingsley…” Søren sighed his name, and Kingsley rested his forehead against Søren’s knee.

“I know you need this, sir,” Kingsley whispered. “It’s dangerous for you to deny yourself. We both know that.”

“I’m fine.” Søren’s voice had a hard edge to it, but Kingsley heard the crack in his resolve. “She’s only been gone a few days.”

“Even when she is here…you hold back with her. I’ve seen it. You worry about breaking her. You know I can take ten times the pain your Little One can. You remember, don’t you? How much I can take?”

Kingsley stopped talking and let the silence speak for him. Pain…so much pain. The things Søren had done to him when they were teenagers—it was a miracle Kingsley lived to be eighteen. Even on the hottest days, when the other boys stripped out of their uniforms to play baseball on the lawn, Kingsley kept his clothes on to hide the bruises, the welts, the cuts, sometimes even the burns. He drank pain in those days, drank it like water, got drunk on it like wine. For years now, his tongue had been dry with the thirst to drink it again. Eleanor Schreiber…Kingsley had taken Søren’s submissive and turned her into Nora Sutherlin, the most celebrated Dominatrix in the world. But he hadn’t created her for the world. He’d made her for himself. And after he’d trained her, he became her first client. He paid through the nose for sessions with her, and she earned every penny. But no matter how vicious and brutal she was with him, it never compared to the pain Søren caused him. Nora could hurt his body in beautiful ways. But only Søren could tear open his soul.

“This can’t happen again...” Søren laid his hand on top of Kingsley’s head as if to bless him.

“Pourquoi pas?” Why not?

“Theresa of Avila…she wrote once that she didn’t love God and didn’t want to love God, but she wanted to want to love God. I understand that.”

Kingsley hid his smile. “You don’t want to want me,” he said, turning his eyes up to Søren. “But you do.”

Søren’s slid his hand from the top of Kingsley’s head to the side of his face.

“Yes.”

Kingsley waited. It would come. Søren would raise his hand and bring it down onto his face with a slap, a slap that would hurt worse than the many punches he’d taken in his day. And then Søren would grip him by the throat and force him onto his stomach or his back. With Kingsley’s own belt, Søren would beat him, perhaps even choke him. There was no end to the possibilities. Some sadists took years learning to master the art of inflicting pain without causing harm. But Søren was a natural. He was fluent in nineteen modern languages, five ancient languages and the one true universal language—pain.

“I am yours.” Kingsley slipped into French, the language they always spoke to each other during their most private moments. French was Kingsley’s first language, and he fell into it when tired, when weak, when at his most vulnerable. With others he used it as a weapon to disarm or a shield to deflect. With Søren, he spoke French in his moments of surrender. French was what he had spoken as a small child. With Søren, he became that defenseless yet again.

Je suis le vôtre. J’étais toujours le vôtre, monsieur.

I am yours. I have always been yours, sir.

“Oui. Tu es le mien.”

Yes, you are mine.

Kingsley froze, not able, not willing to move. For the first time in thirty years, Søren had called Kingsley his. He’d waited decades for this moment.

Slowly, Søren traced Kingsley’s lips with the tip of his finger. Kingsley remembered that first night on the forest floor…Søren pushing Kingsley’s broken body onto his back, and those perfect pianist’s fingers on his mouth. The fingers then replaced by lips. The kiss had seemed less personal than the touch. He’d kissed his mother, his sister, his father, his friends. All the French kissed all the time. A kiss was nothing. But to touch fingertips to another’s lips…so erotic, so possessive, so intimate. By now, Kingsley had easily kissed a thousand women, half a thousand men. But he could count only three people who he’d ever allowed the liberty of touching his face with their hands—Nora, Juliette and Søren.

“I still love you as I did that night you broke me.” Kingsley spoke the confession aloud, his lips moving against the back of Søren’s hand. “You can break me again.”

“I can’t break you.” Søren shook his head. “I never could. Your body, yes. But there is a core inside you that I could never touch, never reach, never break. It’s the part of you that was never afraid of me.”