Author: Tiffany Reisz

“Yeah, he pisses me the hell off, too. But what are you going to do about it?”

“You don’t like him?” Kingsley asked, finally wrenching his attention away from the staircase.

“’Course not. What’s there to like? He’s smarter than all the priests put together. The kids shit bricks the second he walks in the room. He won’t talk to any of us. I’ve gotten maybe five words out of him in four years.”

Kingsley suppressed a smile. Five words? He’d just had a full five-minute conversation with Stearns. That must be some kind of school record.

“Everyone acts like they’re scared of him,” Kingsley offered. “Maybe that’s why he doesn’t talk more.”

Christian half laughed and clapped Kingsley on the shoulder. “It’s not an act. We are scared of him.”

“Why? He seems…” Kingsley searched for the right word. Safe wasn’t right. Stearns seemed anything but safe. “Rational?”

“Kingsley…” Christian began, and took a breath. “I keep forgetting you’re new here. Something you should know about your friend Mr. Asshole Stearns.”

“Quoi?” Kingsley asked. “What?”

“Rumor has it that at his last school…he killed somebody.”

NORTH

The Present

The drive from the city to Søren’s sister’s house in New Hampshire took approximately four hours. Søren usually grabbed every opportunity to take his Ducati out on the open roads, but Kingsley managed to talk him into riding in the Rolls-Royce with him. They needed to talk, Kingsley insisted. They needed to plan. With a skeptical tilt to his smile, Søren finally agreed. Kingsley knew full well that Søren wasn’t fooled. They had nothing to talk about yet. They knew nothing yet. Kingsley simply wanted to be alone with Søren in the back of his Rolls-Royce.

“What will we tell her?” Kingsley asked as they neared Elizabeth’s house. “She’ll want to know why we’re here.”

“We will tell her the truth. You received a threatening package postmarked from Lennox. I’ll watch her eyes, her face. We’ll see what it betrays.”

Søren sat on the opposite bench seat, staring out the window. He’d made little eye contact for the entire drive. Unusual for him. Søren seemed to delight in intense eye contact. He could read someone with a single glance—know their motives, their plans, what they wanted, who they trusted... As teenagers, Kingsley had thought it a great parlor trick. It wasn’t until years later, working as a jack-of-all-trades for the French government, that he understood the root of Søren’s talent. Abused children often grew up with extraordinarily astute abilities to judge character. It wasn’t a gift. It wasn’t a parlor trick. It was life or death, a survival skill. But Søren wouldn’t look at him today. Kingsley decided to take it as a compliment.

The Rolls pulled into the long and winding drive that led to Elizabeth’s house. Although Søren wouldn’t look at Kingsley, that didn’t stop Kingsley from looking at him.

“I’m fine, Kingsley,” he said, giving him the barest of glances before turning his eyes outside the window again.

Kingsley nodded toward the house. “Your mother was raped in that house. Raped by your father.”

“This is not news to me,” Søren said, his voice even. “That is, in fact, the reason I exist.”

“You were raped in that house. By Elizabeth, with whom we are about to have a polite chat.”

“Kingsley, I said I was fine.”

“I know you’re fine. I know you aren’t simply saying you’re fine. And that’s why you alone of all the men and monsters in this world terrify me.”

“That is a lie and you know it. You and Eleanor are the only two people in the world who aren’t afraid of me.”

“Tell yourself that if it helps you sleep at night.”

Søren finally looked at him, looked him straight in the eyes.

“Boo,” Søren said, and Kingsley could only laugh.

“No ghosts, please.” Kingsley held up his hands. “There’s more than enough ghosts in that house.”

“I’m not one of them.” Søren sat back against the leather seat.

“Elizabeth is. She haunts that house still…or perhaps it haunts her.”

“I’ve asked her to move. She’ll have none of it.” Søren shrugged elegantly. He touched his neck where his Roman collar rested against his throat—a gesture that Kingsley rarely witnessed. He knew most priests seldom wore their clericals when visiting family. With his other sister, Claire, and his niece Laila, Søren always wore lay attire. But with Elizabeth he wore his clericals and his collar. Always. Simply another part of his armor.

“Masochist, you think?” Kingsley asked, smiling. “Fitting, since her brother’s a sadist.”

“Possibly. Or perhaps she has something to prove to herself. That our father didn’t win.”

Kingsley raised an eyebrow, stretched out his legs and rested them, ankles crossed, on the seat next to Søren’s knees.

“Or…”

Søren glared at him. “Or what?”

One deep winter’s night thirty years ago, after Søren had bared his body to Kingsley, he’d allowed himself to bare a sliver of his soul. He’d told Kingsley of his sister Elizabeth, what she’d done to him that night when he was a boy of eleven and she only twelve. And then, after a long pause, Søren had told Kingsley what they’d done together the next night and every night after until their father had caught them in the act.

“Perhaps it’s nostalgia.”

Søren didn’t deign to answer that with anything other than an even colder glare.

“You can’t deny jealousy would make sense as a motive for this,” Kingsley continued, taking his legs off the seat and sitting forward to return Søren’s glare.

“Jealousy? Really?”

“Don’t act so skeptical. I sent that reporter to Elizabeth to ask her questions about you. A strange woman she’d never seen before investigating her brother and what did Elizabeth do? Told her every last thing about you two.”

“Elizabeth was trying to protect me.”

“Or she was bragging.”

“I pray for you, Kingsley.”

Kingsley grinned. “Pray harder.”

“It’s not Elizabeth. She hates what happened between us as children even more than I do.”

“Hate? Really? You know you enjoyed yourself. What did you call it, that summer you two played together? Like Adam and Eve?”

Søren fell silent for a terrible moment before answering. “I said we were like Adam and Eve…in hell.”

The chauffeur opened the door and Søren got out without another word. In silence, they walked to the front door.

Before Kingsley could knock or ring the bell, the door flew open, to reveal Elizabeth standing in the vaulted foyer. Last time Kingsley had seen her, she’d looked ten years younger than her actual age. Auburn hair, violet eyes…a true New England beauty. But today she looked panicked, frantic and aged by fear.

“Thank God,” she breathed. Rushing forward, she threw her arms around Søren’s neck. Kingsley tensed, but Søren embraced her with the affection of a brother and nothing else. “Andrew called you?”

Søren pulled back. “No. No one called us. What is it?”

She ran a hand through her curly hair. “I even thought about calling the police,” she said and Kingsley’s eyes widened in surprise. Elizabeth had as good a relationship with the police as he did with reporters. Although he did recently fuck a reporter into near unconsciousness in the back of his Rolls. But that was business, not pleasure. Well…business and pleasure.

Elizabeth glanced back and forth between Søren and Kingsley.

“Tell me what happened.” Søren spoke the words in his comforting pastor’s voice, although Kingsley could detect the faintest trace of fear under that calm.

Fear? Søren? Kingsley never thought he’d live to see this day.

“I’ll show you. Come with me.” Elizabeth finally noticed Kingsley. “You, too, Kingsley. I don’t know why you’re here, but I’ll take all the help I can get.”

“Always happy to be of service. We are family, after all…in a way.” He glanced at Søren, who said nothing to that. Elizabeth knew of her brother’s brief, tragic marriage to Marie-Laure, Kingsley’s sister. What she thought of it, he neither knew nor cared, but the marriage, ill-fated as it was, at least gave Søren a safe excuse to consort with the likes of him.

“I don’t know if this is a family you’d want to lay claim to,” Elizabeth said as she led them deep into the house toward the center staircase. At the top of the steps she turned left and guided them toward the east wing, the nursery wing.

Surreptitiously, Kingsley watched Søren’s face. Every room in this house held memories of the horrors of his childhood. His mother had given birth to him in her tiny room at the end of the east wing. Out of sheer willpower, she’d labored completely in silence, not willing to let Søren’s sadist of a father have the satisfaction of hearing her scream. In the library, Søren had nearly lost his life when his father had found him coupling with his sister on the floor by the fireplace.

Elizabeth led them to the last room on the left.

Søren’s childhood bedroom.

She opened the door and let the state of the room speak for itself.

“Mon Dieu…” Kingsley breathed, and covered his mouth.

In this room, an eleven-year-old Marcus Stearns had fallen asleep one night and woken up inside his own sister.

In that bed, he’d lost his virginity in an act of rape and incest.

And now someone had set that bed on fire and burned it to the floor.

On the wall, written in ashes, were the words Love Thy Sister.

“Should Kingsley…?” Elizabeth whispered.

“Kingsley knows. He’s one of two people I’ve told.”

Wincing internally, Kingsley glanced at Elizabeth’s face. Did Søren just let it slip that he had another confidant? Like her brother, Elizabeth was dangerously intelligent. Kingsley prayed she’d assumed Søren meant his own confessor. If she learned her priest-brother had seduced a girl in his congregation…the whole world would burn for it.

Elizabeth nodded. Søren only stared at the words on the wall.

“I didn’t call the police,” she continued. “I didn’t want to explain to them about us, what that meant. But I have alarms on the doors. I always arm them at night. I even have cameras on the front of the house, the driveway. No one came up. Should I call the police? I will if you say so.”

Søren slowly shook his head. “No. You shouldn’t. This is beyond them.”

“Then what—”

“Get out.” Søren faced her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Get out and take the boys with you, far away. Europe. Asia. Australia. Go abroad and stay on the move. Leave now.”

“What’s going on? Why did you come today? I found the bed like this just this morning. I sent the boys to a friend’s. Been trying to decide what to do all day.”

Søren looked back at that pile of ash where his bed had once stood, and didn’t speak.

Kingsley answered for him. “I received a photograph in the mail, taken of the two of us in our school days. It was postmarked from here. No other identifying marks. Merely a school photo, but threatening nonetheless.”

Elizabeth pulled away from the door and walked down the hallway a few steps before turning back around.