Author: Tiffany Reisz

She slapped him lightly on the cheek to tease him as she skipped ahead into the cold.

Ah, Marie-Laure… Kingsley sighed to himself. If she only knew.

Arm in arm, they wandered the grounds of the school. He showed her the dining hall and introduced her to Father Aldo. Marie-Laure and the priest conferred for several minutes about that evening’s menu. He’d planned a soufflé. She suggested quiche. Kingsley feigned falling asleep and Marie-Laure pinched him in the arm, as she always did when they were children.

Kingsley flinched at the pinch, hard enough that Marie-Laure started.

“When did you get so sensitive?” she asked as they left the dining hall. “I only pinched you.”

“It’s fine. You just pinched me where I already have a bruise. I’ll survive.”

“I’ll find a part of you that isn’t bruises, and that’s what I’ll pinch next time. Oui?”

“Oui.” He smiled, but he knew it would take a great deal of searching to find a part of him that didn’t carry a bruise or a welt. Last night, Søren had been absolutely merciless with him. The beating had seemed interminable. The sex even more so. Upon reflection, Kingsley realized the intensity of their night was because Marie-Laure’s presence would make meeting much more complicated. But they would find a way. They had to be together, Søren and Kingsley. They belonged together.

“What’s that?” Marie-Laure paused outside the chapel.

Kingsley cocked his head to the side and smiled. From within he heard the sound of a piano playing the haunting rhythms of…

“Bolero,” Kingsley said. “Ravel.”

“Ravel…” Marie-Laure sighed and looked at Kingsley with a mix of sadness and longing in her eyes. He knew she had lost herself in the same memory he had—Papa and his records. Of their father lying on the floor of their apartment in a patch of sunlight, eyes closed, and humming along with the music…

“I miss him,” Kingsley whispered as he took her hand and squeezed it.

“So do I. But I’ve missed you more. So much…so much I thought I’d die.”

Kingsley shook his head. “Don’t die. We’re together now.”

The music swelled and Marie-Laure turned her face toward the chapel.

“Can we go listen?”

Kingsley started to lead her there, but as soon as they crossed the threshold into the church, something deep within him warned that he should stop, go back... The music grew louder as they neared the source of it. Kingsley shook off his sudden strange fear. Marie-Laure followed the music, her eyes as wide and mesmerized as a child of Hamlin.

At the door to the sanctuary they stopped and looked inside toward the nave. Søren sat at the ancient and battered grand piano, his jacket off, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing his muscular forearms. He played the piece with such stunning virtuosity and passion that once more Kingsley felt the music come alive around him. Closing his eyes, he let the notes touch him, dance about him, tickle his face, brush through his hair, whisper secrets in his ear.

God, how he loved Søren. Loved him. Loved him like a father, like a brother, like a friend and a lover…and loved him like the enemy that forced him to be stronger, smarter, wiser, braver. Søren had become everything to him... Kingsley opened his eyes and saw not Søren, but God at the piano, and knew he’d chosen the right man to worship. Even now he would fall on his knees before him.

Kingsley felt Marie-Laure’s hand begin to shake in his grasp. It brought him out of his communion and back to the world. He looked at his sister and smiled. He understood everything now…Søren had brought her here for him, for Kingsley. Søren had done it out of kindness. He’d done it as a grace, as a mercy. Like all of God’s gifts, it was given out of love.

Søren loved him. Kingsley knew that now in his heart. And those mind games he played were just that—mere games. Søren punished him with silence even as he gave him his undivided attention. He insulted him before bestowing the most passionate of kisses. He said Kingsley meant nothing to him before spending half the night inside him. Søren loved him. Søren loved him. Søren loved him. The refrain in his heart matched the insistent beat of the music. No one could or would understand the love they had for each other or how they showed it. Only Søren, Kingsley and the music knew, and the music would never tell.

“Mon Dieu…” Marie-Laure breathed the words, her eyes trained on Søren with a blank, unblinking stare. Once more the fear returned to Kingsley’s heart.

No…not her, too. Anyone but his sister…

She pulled her hand from his and raised it in front of her. Kingsley’s eyes widened in fear as he saw the subtle tremor that had overtaken it.

“Mon Dieu,” she had whispered. My God.

Kingsley took her hand again and pulled it tight to his chest. He would hold her close and keep her safe from the love that he knew would enter her soul like a demon.

“Don’t be afraid.” Kingsley kissed the back of her hand and smiled at her—a false smile meant to break the spell of the music and the blond god who played it. “He does that to everyone.”

NORTH

The Present

Kingsley left the Rolls-Royce idling in front of his town house. Everyone knew of Kingsley Edge and his silver Rolls, which ferried him all over Manhattan. He needed anonymity today. So instead he returned to his house, changed into black jeans, a gray T-shirt and leather jacket, pulled on sunglasses and hid his long hair in a low ponytail. At the back of the town house was a garage that most of Manhattan assumed held only the Rolls-Royce and its twin brother. But at the back under a suede car cover sat a sleek black Jaguar with unregistered plates. Only in emergencies did Kingsley ever leave his home incognito. And this certainly qualified as an emergency.

He started the car and left the town house by the back streets, cursing Nora the entire way to Connecticut. Stupid girl. Foolish girl. Why did she have to live so far away? She could afford Manhattan or anywhere in the city. Why she had to buy a Tudor cottage in a bourgeois and pedestrian suburb was something he would never understand. Only a year into her career as a Dominatrix she’d saved up enough money to afford the down payment on her home. She’d paid it in cash, and moved out of his town house the first chance she could. In five years, Kingsley had been to her home only once. He’d nearly died of boredom just from the drive there alone. Standing in her living room, full of comfortable but unremarkable furniture, and bookcases stuffed with novels, he’d turned to her and asked only one question.

“Why?”

And she’d smiled and shrugged and sighed and laughed and shook her head and done everything she could to avoid answering him in words.

But he’d stared at her until the smile died and the laugh left her eyes. Those eyes of hers…if he had to guess, he would have said she’d stolen them from the devil himself.

“I like it here, King. I feel…human here. Normal.”

Kingsley had walked across the beige carpet toward her and taken her by the chin.

“You are the most famous Dominatrix in all the world, chérie. I made you a monster and a monster is what you are. Live here if you must, but remember that inside these walls you are Eleanor Schreiber. Nora Sutherlin does not live here.”

Her only response had been to return his stare with one as hard as his own, and that’s when Kingsley had realized the terrible truth—he hadn’t created Nora Sutherlin at all…he’d only unmasked her.

An hour passed and he finally reached Westport. Another fifteen minutes took him to Nora’s neighborhood. In front of her house sat a red Porsche—Griffin was still here. Griffin and no one else. Good. The boy hadn’t been so foolish as to call the police.

Kingsley didn’t knock, merely entered through the front door, and found the house as he remembered it—tame, safe, suburban, bourgeois.

“In the bedroom, King,” he heard Griffin call to him. Kingsley found the stairs and raced up them two at a time. At the end of the hallway he found Nora’s bedroom…

Or what was left of it.

“Shit…” Kingsley breathed, too shocked even for French.

“Yeah, that’s what I said.” Griffin stood at the edge of the room, staring at the carnage before them.

“Where is Michael?” Kingsley asked, pronouncing the name in the French manner, as Michelle, a habit he tried to break for the sake of Griffin and his boy.

“I got him out of here fast. Sent him to his mom’s house to stay the night. He almost puked when he saw the place.”

“I can sympathize.”

Kingsley swallowed hard as he studied the damage.

In the center of the room were the charred remains of what had once been the most fantasized about bed in the world. On top of the blackened ashes lay what appeared to be Nora’s entire wardrobe of Dominatrix clothing—every last piece slashed and desecrated.

Across the walls was splattered blood—animal blood, Kingsley guessed. Guessed and hoped. Bloody words, bloody handprints. Blood on bloodred walls. The pale carpet below their feet also carried bloodstains, bloody footprints. And bloody words.

“What does it mean, Kingsley?” Griffin asked, staring at the writing. “It’s French, right? My French is shit these days.”

“Oui, it’s French.” Kingsley read the words and his stomach tightened as he recognized the same ones that had been written on the wall above the body of his dead Sadie.

Griffin squinted at the messages, clearly making no sense of them. “I told you...” He shook his head and sighed. “What does it say?”

Kingsley exhaled heavily, not sure he wanted to tell Griffin or anyone about the writing. But even if he told him, Griffin wouldn’t know what it meant.

“It says, ‘I will kill the bitch.’”

“I will kill the bitch? Nora? Who is he talking to?” Griffin rubbed his face and turned even paler. “King…does someone want to kill Nora?”

Kingsley saw something on the walls he hadn’t seen at first. Holes. No, not holes, stab wounds. Someone had taken a knife and repeatedly plunged the blade into the drywall, leaving one-inch slices everywhere he looked. He went to the bed and picked up one of Nora’s bloodied corsets. The slash marks had been concentrated in one spot. The stomach. Had Nora been wearing this while it was stabbed, she would have been dead in seconds.

“Oui. Someone very much wants to kill our Nora.”

“But…” Griffin turned wide and horrified eyes to Kingsley. “Why? Nora’s never hurt anybody. I mean, not without their consent.”

“I fear this person feels Nora has taken something that doesn’t belong to her.”

“Nora’s never stolen anything in her life, either. Well, other than all those cars when she was a kid. But nobody would kill over a car.”

“No. Not the cars. That is not it.”

“Then what the fuck is it? What did Nora steal? Whoever this fucked-up freak is, I’ll pay him off.”

“No amount of money could buy what they want, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Griffin said, in the tone of a man who’d been raised to believe he could buy anything or anyone he wanted—including another’s life. “What does he want?”

Kingsley reached into the pile of Nora’s clothing and found what he knew he would find. He pulled out a string of rosary beads—bloodred and worn smooth with a thousand prayers that would have made the Magdalene herself blush. He knew Nora kept the key to the box that held her collar behind the crucifix of her rosary beads. He found the beads…the crucifix…and no key.

Kingsley wrapped the beads around his hand and held them out toward Griffin by way of explanation.