Author: Tiffany Reisz

“Is that why you loved her and not me?”

“She has that core, too. And it’s why of all the people in the world, it’s only you and her I’ve ever loved.”

Kingsley’s heart rose. Hope buoyed it. That Søren would even put him in the same sentence as his Little One meant more than the touch of his hands against Kingsley’s lips.

“I have nothing in me that you cannot break. I would let you destroy me, and then I would resurrect myself from my own ashes for the honor of being destroyed by you again.”

“Your sister died because of what you and I were to each other. I can’t risk losing Eleanor the way we lost Marie-Laure.”

“Marie-Laure loved me madly. I was her brother. And she loved you even more madly. You were her husband. We are neither to your Eleanor. And she has left us both. Close your eyes, monsieur. Do you see her now? She’s in his bed right now, opening her legs for him. She’s beneath him. He’s inside her. She walked away from us. No…she didn’t walk. She ran.”

Søren dropped his hand from Kingsley’s lips. Leaning back into the seat, he closed his eyes.

“You might be the devil, Kingsley.”

With a rueful laugh, Kingsley kissed Søren’s knee before sliding back up to his seat. He became the notorious French Dominant again, his feet on the leather seat, one ankle crossed over the other.

“The devil is the Prince of Lies, remember?” He returned to his English. “And you and I both know I speak only the truth.”

The brutal truth hung between them the rest of the journey back to New York. Kingsley pushed no further. If it would happen, it would happen at the time of Søren’s choosing, not his. That was always the way. Their underground world had taken the wildness of relationships like theirs and tamed them, domesticated them. They used labels like Dominant and submissive, and bandied about slogans like Safe, Sane and Consensual. They all had safe words. Even the most violent and perverse among them played by the rules lest they be ejected from their underworld Eden. But Kingsley knew it was all artifice, window dressing, self-deception. He and Søren, they were more than a Dominant and submissive, and the rules didn’t apply to them. This was no game. When Kingsley said “I am yours” he meant it. If Søren had desired to burn him, maim him, sell him, break him—he could, and Kingsley knew he would not and could not stop him. His love for Søren had sold him into slavery, and all the riches of all the kingdoms left in the world couldn’t buy him out of it.

By midnight they finally returned to Kingsley’s town house. Although Søren hadn’t touched him with anything other than a finger to his lips, Kingsley felt he’d been flogged. Seeing the rock on which his sister had died…sitting in the hermitage where Søren had nearly killed him so many times…being back at the school that had been the home to his greatest heartbreaks…

Kingsley trudged up the stairs. He knew only one thing could help him right now. But it was the one thing denied to him. So he planned on drinking himself into a stupor instead.

Kingsley and Søren walked to his grand bedroom at the end of the hallway on the second floor.

“I’m thinking Amontillado tonight,” Kingsley said as he opened the door to his bedroom. “I have a vintage as old as Poe. It would make him proud to see us drink it.”

Søren stood at the end of Kingsley’s bed, his shoulder against the bedpost, his arms crossed. “Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin when he was twenty-seven. Should we really endeavor to make him proud?”

Kingsley peeled out of his jacket and tossed it on the floor. He couldn’t wait to get back into his normal clothes—his dark gray suit and embroidered vest. His riding boots. His cravat. This Armani nonsense felt like a costume to him. In it he could blend into a crowd of well-heeled businessmen and disappear. Anonymity did not suit him.

“I don’t think either of us has the right to judge Poe. Or anyone. Your Eleanor was only fifteen, remember? And me…we both know my crimes.”

Søren said nothing, merely looked away as Kingsley started to strip off his clothes. He did that always. Even as teenagers. Even when Søren had been inside Kingsley’s body only moments earlier, out of something—discretion, respect, denial, perhaps—Søren always turned away when Kingsley dressed and undressed in his presence. Kingsley had to wonder if he did the same with Eleanor or if he watched her, devouring every second of her naked curves. Kingsley knew he held a privileged position in Søren’s life. Technically, they were related, or had been, by marriage. Søren and Kingsley could spend all the time alone together they desired and no one from outside their world could judge them.

Kingsley pulled his riding boots on, but left his shirt off for a few minutes longer. A childish trick to pull on Søren, but he couldn’t help himself sometimes. Not when the priest stood with his jaw tight and his eyes looking anywhere but at Kingsley.

“Are you staying?” Kingsley asked as he moved to stand directly in front of Søren, trousers and riding boots on and nothing else. Usually he appreciated when the many men and women who visited his bedroom didn’t stare at his chest. His body was riddled with old scars and bullet wounds from his days working for the French government under the auspices of a captainship in the French Foreign Legion. Lovers always stared at his chest right before beginning the interrogation process.

How did you get the bullet wounds?

I was shot.

Who shot you?

All the husbands. Yours isn’t armed, is he?

Kingsley always deflected the questions with his wit, and his lovers loved him even more for it. Only Søren knew the truth of his wounds. Kingsley never converted to Catholicism at Saint Ignatius as Søren had. But he did tell the priest all his secrets. How did he get the bullet wounds? The people he was paid to shoot sometimes shot back. How did he get the pale scars on his back? He’d been held hostage for one month by a foreign terror cell and tortured. How did he get the poorly healed cuts on his wrists? He’d nearly ripped his own hands off trying to get free from the manacles that they’d shackled him with.

Of course, those scars meant nothing to him. He had them; they’d healed. His scars gave him an air of mystery and danger in the Underground. The wounds that mattered to him were the ones Søren had left. Kingsley’s one regret about his year as Søren’s lover was that no matter how brutally Søren beat him and tortured him, he had no scars at all from their time together.

At least none anyone could see.

“I should go,” Søren said. “It’s late. I’m hearing confession tomorrow morning. And I want to pray about your theory, Father Christian’s theory.”

“Pray all you want. I’m certain there’s something to it. To even know about that photograph of us…you know it must have been a student there. Or one of the priests.”

“So you say, and you may be right. Sleep well.” Søren met his eyes for only a moment. “Lock the doors.”

“I never lock the doors,” Kingsley reminded him as Søren started to leave.

“I know, and that’s why Eleanor’s file is missing from your office.”

“I never lock my doors for a reason. If it appears that I’m afraid of this city, then I will have to start being afraid of this city. Everyone knows I don’t lock my doors, and that scares them more than any security force in the world could.”

Søren leveled a stern stare at him. “This isn’t about your image, Kingsley. It’s about your safety. Do as I say.”

Kingsley strode toward Søren. “I don’t answer to you anymore. I’d sell what’s left of my soul for one more night with you. But until you decide to take off that damn collar of yours and take ownership of me and what you’ve done to me again…” Kingsley paused and drew a breath, hoping to tamp down some of his anger. Only Søren ever dared to tell him what to do. Not even his Juliette took such a liberty. “I will not obey your orders until you’ve earned the right to give them to me again. Now you should go. And I’ll be certain to leave the doors unlocked behind you.”

“How you’ve lived this long without getting murdered is beyond my powers of imagination.”

“Your powers of imagination disappeared when your writer disappeared. Perhaps you should go fetch her from her new rich young lover.”

“I have an excellent imagination.” Søren stood face-to-face with Kingsley, who knew he did so simply to emphasize the four-inch difference in their heights. The man was an ass—an utterly, insufferably arrogant ass. “I’m currently imagining a few creative ways of causing you extraordinary amounts of pain.”

Kingsley raised his chin. Mere inches separated their faces.

“Stop flirting. You know we don’t have time for that.”

“I wasn’t flirting. The pain I’d inflict on your right now…only one of us would enjoy it.”

“Only one of us ever did.”

“Don’t make me laugh. You begged for it. Night after night, you begged for it.”

“Of course I did. Pain is the only way you know how to show love.”

“It’s not the only way I know how to show love. It’s the only way I chose to with you. You showed up at Saint Ignatius and decided to become king of the school. Someone had to turn you into the little prince you actually were.”

“Not so little. I think we’re rather well-matched in one certain area.”

“Your arrogance, Kingsley, was beyond and is beyond anything I’d ever seen in my life.”

“Anything you’ve ever seen outside your own reflection, you mean.”

“You’re trying to pick a fight with me. It won’t work.”

“It already has. You’ve already threatened to cause me bodily harm. I’m already hard. I think it’s safe to call this one of our typical arguments.”

“I’m leaving now.”

“Good night, sir.”

Søren opened the door to Kingsley’s bedroom and stood on the threshold. Kingsley watched and waited. His hands trembled for reasons he didn’t understand, so he shoved them in the back pockets of his trousers, raised his chin and stared at Søren.

“Forgetting something?”

With his hand on the doorknob, Søren turned to him. “Did you mean it…back then…that God wanted nothing to do with us?”

Kingsley laughed softly. “A foolish offhand remark. Had I known it would hurt you so much…I would still have said it.”

Now Søren laughed and shook his head. “I needed to believe then that God brought us together.”

Kingsley exhaled heavily. “He did, perhaps. It did have the scent of destiny on it—you and I. God did bring us together. Only when we were together…like that, I think He tried not to watch.”

Søren nodded.

“I can’t blame Him for that.”

Smiling, Kingsley took his hands out of his back pockets and walked to Søren. He took Søren by the wrist and opened his hand. In his palm he laid a tiny cross on a broken silver chain.

Søren stared at the cross in his hand, the cross Kingsley had torn from his neck the night they’d first made love. Time stopped. The world ended. No one noticed except Kingsley.

Reaching up to his neck, Søren pulled off his Roman collar. He stepped back into Kingsley’s bedroom and locked the door behind him.

God closed His eyes.

SOUTH

Wesley took one deep breath and in that one deep breath let himself freak out that the moment he’d been waiting for and praying for and lusting for and dreaming of was happening.

Right now.